Two Minds Blog

  The development of Two Minds Theory was strongly influenced by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman's work on how people think. Kahneman's work in economics received the Nobel prize for Prospect Theory, an account of how people make decisions when they have limited information available to them. After that award was made, it became common to see lists of cognitive biases , which are common errors in the way that people process information. (I have argued that many of these can be more  parsimoniously explained by immediacy , the difference between how people think when they are asked about their own experiences right now versus how they think when asked for predictions of the future or recollections of the past). Kahneman might not disagree too much: He is probably best known for his book Thinking: Fast and Slow , where he described the difference between "System 1" (what I call the Intuitive mind) and "System 2" (what I call the Narrative mind). Kahneman...

Feeling down? Here's a handy trick: Stick a pencil between your teeth. Push it all the way to the back of your mouth, so that it pushes against your cheeks. Make sure that you are holding the pen in place with your teeth, not just your lips. Now hold that position for a minute. See if your attitude toward things that you are thinking about becomes more positive. In a famous study , psychologists Fritz Strack, Leonard Martin, and Sabine Stepper found exactly that: students who held a pencil in their mouths this way rated cartoon drawings to be funnier than those who read the same cartoons without the pencil. The explanation is that holding a pencil in your teeth this way forces your lips back into a "Duchenne smile," which is considered a "true" or non-forced smile. Holding the pencil with your lips doesn't have the same mood benefit, because it approximates a forced smile instead of a genuine one! Another line of research on facial expressions has found tha...

I wrote a previous post about creativity , which focused on the back-and-forth exchange of intuitive thinking and more structured narrative thinking. What I didn't talk much about was the experience  of creative activity, which can be one of the most rewarding sensations. The feeling of creativity was the research focus of another notable psychologist who died in 2021, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi . (Despite being a famous psychologist, Dr. Csikszentmihalyi has a name that's famously hard to pronounce. Try it like this: Me-HIGH, CHICK-sent-me-high). He described the very pleasant feeling of losing yourself in creative work with the memorable term flow . Flow can be defined as a state of total absorption and pleasant concentration.  Besides positive mood, one key characteristic of this state is that people lose track of the passage of time. A lack of time awareness is one important clue that the Intuitive mind is strongly engaged during these creative states, even if some logical, p...