Two Minds Blog

A colleague sent me this video from the UK's Royal Society, about overcoming bias in the review process for scientific grants:  https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/publications/2015/unconscious-bias/ . I particularly like the depiction of bias as Alice falling down the rabbit hole, although I'm not sure the Mad Hatter is the best representative for rational thought! The video's main argument is that bias is primarily a function of the Intuitive Mind, which uses fast-and-cheap heuristics to make snap judgments about the world. Unfortunately, Intuitive-level heuristics sometimes lead us astray, for example resulting in fewer successful applications by minority scientists, or from people who didn't attend the top tier of schools in their own education. The video suggests that the Narrative Mind can provide an antidote to this kind of flawed thinking, which is also Daniel Kahneman's primary message in the book that popularized the idea of two mental systems, Thinkin...

With Aimee Techau In a new review article , my colleague Aimee Techau looks at the effect that chronic inflammation might have on people’s ability to follow through with treatment for substance use disorders. Many people who start treatment for substance use disorders drop out in the first few months — in our recent research as many as 70%! Dropping out doesn’t necessarily mean that people relapsed, but it certainly suggests they aren’t getting the full benefit of treatment. In a number of studies, predicting treatment failures of this kind has proven difficult. Aimee’s new paper suggests a biological marker — inflammation — that might help to explain why some patients drop out, and that might therefore be useful in predicting or even preventing this problem. Inflammation is a problem that’s common to many chronic diseases . It’s part of the body’s basic response to infection and helps the immune system do its work. But inflammation also can result from long-term illness or psychologic...