Two Minds Blog

This week I'm pleased to announce the first publication from a study that I've been working on for several years, with my colleague Dr. Deb Sandella from the RIM Institute in Denver. The paper itself is worth a look, even though I'm going to summarize it below. It has some of the coolest figures I have ever published, from brainwave data that we collected during the study! In this study we recruited nursing students who wanted to talk about difficult experiences -- it could be any kind of stressor past or present, although a high percentage of our participants did have past trauma of some kind. Many also talked about family or relationship issues, and the challenges of the nursing role that they were learning. We met in my office, where Dr. Deb used her Regenerating Images in Memory approach to help the students generate images and access difficult memories, and then to re-integrate these into their sense of self (the method is described in more detail in our paper, and ...

This blog has been a little scary recently: Since January I have written about political  disinformation , combatting vaccine misinformation , managing overwhelming stress, the harmful effects of social media , and the risk of a worldwide AI takeover . That's a lot! For a bit of relief, I recently finished Dr. Athena Aktipis's book A Field Guide to the Apocalypse: A Mostly Serious Guide to Surviving Our Wild Times . Aktipis argues that  although there are many potentially civilization-ending threats in our world today, there is also good reason to believe that humans will survive them. Her fundamental argument is that people have faced civilization-ending threats many times before, and the ones who survived those events were those who had the evolutionarily favored traits that enabled them to get through them! Apocalypticism (a sense that the world as people know it is coming to an end) was prevalent 2000 years ago in the near east, but also earlier in Mesopotamian civilizati...