Two Minds Blog

This year's blog posts included a few one-off topics like the idea that orchestra conductors communicate with musicians by way of the Intuitive mind; a post on medieval understandings of psychology that was published on my 50th birthday in a nod to my own "middle ages"; and a look at the role of social connections in forming our identities  that was done as a podcast interview by my daughter the high school senior. But there were also some consistent themes across this year's postings on the Two Minds Blog: Theory Development: the Neuroscience of Stress and Trauma. The blog had more applications of Two Minds Theory than new theoretical developments this year, but many of the neuroscience-oriented posts were centered around stress and trauma. Many public reports this year drew attention to long-term mental health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, ranging from increased  anxiety among adolescents , to  PTSD reactions  from stressors experienced in 2020...

When I learned about brain physiology in the early 1990s, we were taught that people can't grow new neurons (brain cells), and that neurons stop growing new connections around age 25, both of which make new learning harder for adults. Popular wisdom says the same: You can't teach an old dog new tricks. Now that I have passed the 50-year mark myself, I'm glad to report this was a false conclusion. My daughter had an elementary school classmate with epilepsy, who needed to have half of his brain removed. One approach in these cases is to sever the corpus callosum, a thick set of neural fibers that connects the left and right hemispheres, which gives people two semi-autonomous brains. But this boy’s seizures were so bad that the usual approach didn’t do the trick, and his doctors were worried that he would die without a more radical approach. So in about the 5 th grade he had another operation in which his left hemisphere was completely removed. Physicians told him that he mig...

With Laurel Messer PhD, Assistant Professor at the Barbara Davis Center for Juvenile Diabetes We all want to be effective decision-makers, but success in this area depends on having an accurate understanding of the decision we are facing. This concept is sometimes known by the term "situational awareness." The UK construction industry defines situational awareness as  " being aware of what is happening around you in terms of where you are, where you are supposed to be, and whether anyone or anything around you is a threat to your health and safety ." For pilots , situational awareness has been described as an "integrated understanding of factors that will contribute to the safe flying of the aircraft under normal or non-normal conditions."  Situational awareness has been discussed in fields as diverse as air traffic control, manufacturing, refinery operations, and nuclear power safety.   And the term situational awareness has been used in the nursing liter...