Two Minds Blog

  This week I'm looking at another concrete tool in the behavior-change armamentarium, social support . I have written previously about the Narrative mind's strong focus on social cues , and indeed perhaps the Narrative system evolved specifically to help us coordinate our behavior with groups of other humans. As a behavior-change strategy, social support can be used in several different ways. Instrumental Social Support . The most basic form of social support is instrumental, the type of help that a neighbor gives in loaning you a tool or that a friend provides in bringing you a meal. This type of concrete support can be helpful for diet change -- e.g., here are some fresh vegetables from my garden -- or exercise -- e.g., you can borrow my tent for your camping trip. Although instrumental support is particularly powerful because someone is actually doing something for you or giving you resources that you don't have, it is also usually short-term (I probably don't want

I wrote previously about Colorado’s regulatory experiment with legalized psilocybin (also known as magic mushrooms), which began on January 1, 2023 although some implementation details are still being worked out. The state-level legalization of this drug (which is still illegal at the Federal level) has led to some high-profile new research at the University of Colorado. The focus of investigation is "treatment-resistant depression," which simply means depressive symptoms that haven't been effectively resolved with other existing forms of treatment. That's a significant problem because even with the best available algorithms to try multiple antidepressant medications, one after the other, 10% of people never achieve symptom remission. And, importantly, another two-thirds drop out of treatment somewhere along the way. Untreated depression is therefore still a major problem, and many mental health professionals are excited about the possibility of a new treatment th

I wrote last summer  about artificial intelligence tools that are increasingly able to approximate human speech in free-form conversations. These tools then burst onto the public stage with the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT  at the end of November last year. As you probably know by now, the acronym "GPT" stands for "generative pre-trained transformer," which highlights the three most important aspects of this technology: (1) it generates novel responses that aren't based on an a specific algorithm or decision rule, but instead rely on pattern recognition; (2) it has been pre-trained  by consuming massive amounts of writing from the Internet -- much more than a human could read in several lifetimes; and (3) it transforms  those prior writing samples using a trial-and-error process that predicts the next phrase in a sequence until it has come up with a response that seems intelligible to humans. ChatGPT works much like the auto-complete feature in your email or