Two Minds Blog

I'm a collaborator on a new article in which we looked at patients' adherence to a different kind of treatment than in my usual medication studies -- continuous glucose monitoring technology, or CGM. The lead investigator on this project, Dr. Laurel Messer, is a former CU Nursing PhD student who has previously published with me on Two Minds Theory. CGM devices are used by people with diabetes -- in this case, children and adolescents with type I diabetes -- to monitor ups and downs of their blood sugar in real time. Patients can use the information to more effectively time doses of insulin in order to keep their blood sugar in the desired range more of the time. The real-time sensor data generated by CGM devices is ideal for studying questions about how Intuitive-level thinking might affect self-management behavior and health outcomes in the context of everyday life. In this study, which used Two Minds Theory as a conceptual framework , 88 adolescents and young adults (rangi...

Two Minds Theory, like other modern understandings of cognition and behavior, suggests that human beings are not wholly rational. I have written previously about the challenges of a scientific theory that argues people do not naturally use reason in their decision-making, and also about the ways in which a scientific community can help us to circumvent some of these challenges. Recently I wrote about how science alone can't help us in the struggle to make good policy decisions. And yet, despite all the evidence that classical Western rationality is a poor model for human behavior, I love science . How can this position be logically consistent? Is there an alternative between pure relativism and believing that people using reason have access to a single ultimate form of truth? Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now  tackles the challenge of non-rationality head-on. The book is meant as a defense of the liberal Enlightenment tradition, which was founded on the idea that people cou...