Two Minds Blog

Did you know that you can subscribe to the Two Minds Blog? Just click on the button with 3 horizontal bars at the upper right, enter your email address, and click the "get email notifications" button. Then you will get an email whenever a new blog entry is posted. You can also copy this address  https://twomindstheory.blogspot.com, and post it into your favorite news reader program -- anything that accepts an RSS feed. OK, enough procrastinating ... on to today's topic: I wrote my dissertation on procrastination (yes, I got it done on time). In that study we worked with college students who identified themselves as procrastinators in doing their schoolwork. Procrastinators are an interesting example of the intention-behavior gap: They experience negative consequences like bad grades as a result of their own behavior, they are well aware that their own behavior is getting in their way, and yet they continue to waste time instead of studying. Many people becom...

Do you ever imagine yourself in some extreme situation and wonder how you will react? Most of us will never find ourselves at the scene of a crime. Many people trained in CPR are never called on to actually use it. Being lost in the wilderness is, these days, quite rare. But a friend recently related an interesting story about an experience where he was in some danger of drowning, and it has a useful lesson about how people tend to react in a crisis, including health crises. There are two important pieces of background information from my friend’s childhood: First, he never learned how to swim. Second, he had very bad asthma as a child. The two may have been related to one another: Children with asthma in the 1970s had fewer treatment options, and therefore much more often had the experience of not being able to breathe. They were also routinely advised not to do anything too strenuous (like swimming), for fear of provoking an uncontrolled asthma attack. When an attack did occur, ...

“Willpower” means exerting conscious effort to perform (or avoid) a particular behavior. The concept of “willpower” is an older one more linked to moral frameworks than to scientific ones, but it fits with most people’s experiential reality of behavior change – they want to change (or at least wish they wanted to change), and they have difficulty doing so. But from the perspective of Two Minds Theory, willpower is a construct that may not actually exist. One recent line of study has found substantial correlations between willpower and blood glucose: Researchers Matthew Gailliot and Roy Baumeister started from the experientially derived premise that willpower seems to be a limited resource (similar to attention , as described in our previous blog post). A limited resource, they argued, implies an energy source that gets used up, is higher or lower at various points in time, and can be replenished in some way. They thought that glucose would be a logical candidate as the body's ...

MIT Roboticist Rodney Brooks described the development of autonomous robots in his paper " fast, cheap, and out of control ." According to Brooks, when engineers first set out to design robots that could move independently through a built environment, they assumed that they would need to program every feature of that environment into a pre-set map representing the complex external environment inside the robot’s software. The problem was that they could never get this approach to work. It took up too much room in the robot’s limited memory, and too much time for the robot to access map data on the fly. Its processor would still be sifting through information while its wheels ran it off the top of a stairwell or into a wall. The robotics team was ultimately successful with a much simpler approach: They gave the robot sensors and some simple rules for how to react to its environment. This is exactly how the well-known Roomba vacuum cleaner works: It sets off in a particul...

Creativity has been defined as the intersection of novelty with appropriateness . The concept of “novelty” is relative: Things that are purely new  often seem strange or out-of-place. For example, why would a chemist suddenly begin talking about snakes? But the chemist Kekule did just that, describing the ring structure of carbon atoms in the benzene molecule as “a snake biting its own tail.” Kekule said that this image came to him in a dream , as the solution to a problem that he had long been pondering. He knew from empirical research exactly how many carbon atoms and how many hydrogen atoms the molecule needed to contain, but he hadn’t previously been able to explain how they fit together. The “snake biting its tail” image provided an elegant solution to his problem. Novelty may not be something one can consciously develop — just try sitting down with a blank piece of paper and making a deliberate effort to "be creative." Truly innovative ideas more often seem to em...

Opioid use is an extremely a difficult problem to overcome. During work on a pilot project from 2017-2019 to increase the availability of medication-assisted treatment (MAT) for opioid use disorders in rural areas of Colorado, we heard patients say things like "I don't have the willpower to resist opioids," or "I wish I were a stronger person." These statements reflect people's desire to change while also conveying the difficulty of changing opioid use. People often say that they don't choose  to use opioids, rather they feel that they must  use them in order to maintain daily functioning. The moral model of substance use treatment ("just say no to drugs") misses this important piece of the experience for people who are already using. And given that about three-quarters of people in our MAT project started their pattern of use with prescription  pain medication, they may not have felt they had a choice originally either -- they use opioids...

In his landmark book Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), psychologist B. F. Skinner argued that the concepts of free will and responsibility for one’s own actions had outlived their usefulness. Instead, he suggested that human behavior could be explained entirely by the intersection of environmental contingencies, instinctive reactions, and learned responses. Together, instincts and conditioned responses made up a “behavioral repertoire” of pool of all possible responses for that individual at that point in time. Two Minds Theory incorporates this perspective in suggesting that the Intuitive System produces behavior, not the Narrative System. The Narrative System has been historically associated with ideas of “freedom and dignity” based on rational choice. Furthermore, TMT posits that the Intuitive System can be “trained,” adding potential responses to the behavioral repertoire and making some responses more likely than others by way of deliberate practice. Skinner articulated...