Two Minds Blog

Two Minds Theory (TMT) might seem hard to swallow if you think that it threatens the idea that humans have free will. Philosopher Daniel Dennett calls this the “zombie problem.” If I think hard enough, I can probably convince myself that your actions are 100% the result of your genetics and past history, with no room for any decision-making on your part. In other words, it seems at least plausible to believe that you are a “philosophical zombie” without free will to determine your own actions. It takes some effort, but I can convince myself that you have no free will. But I find (as most people do) that no amount of effort can make me believe  I don’t have free will either! Because TMT posits that our thoughts do not determine our actions, TMT might seem like a victory for materialism (the idea that all observable phenomena have a physical cause) and determinism (the idea that everything that occurs is part of an unending chain of causation in which anything that happens depe...

This week I'm sharing an article from our CU College of Nursing press office, recognizing two students doing research that's connected to Two Minds Theory:  http://www.ucdenver.edu/academics/colleges/nursing/about-us/news/Pages/2019/Poster-presentation-covers-it-all.aspx Two of my students won awards for their poster presentations at the College's research symposium, one for a study of trauma and chronic pain in patients with opioid use disorders, and the other for a study of Intuitive-level variables that predict medication adherence in patients with HIV. Both are topics that I have posted about previously on the blog (HIV treatment adherence here ; opioid use disorders  here and here ), and each is the focus of ongoing research at the college. The college posted copies of Linda Driscoll Powers's poster on chronic pain and trauma in patients with opioid use  (2nd place winner), and Nasser Al-Salmi's poster on predictors of HIV medication adherence (3rd place w...

A growing number of tech companies now sell devices that are marketed as mindfulness aids, ranging from heart rate monitors to breathing apps to sensors that measure brainwaves or electrical conductance of skin (GSR). These devices all operate under the assumption that they are measuring physiological indicators corresponding to the mental state of relaxation or awareness known as mindfulness. Mindfulness is a concept with many possible meanings; in a  previous blog we gave our working definition of mindfulness as a combination of attention plus non-judgment. Considering the physiology of mindfulness adds another layer, which people sometimes describe as a state of deep relaxation, calm alertness, or being "centered" in one's own mind. There is good evidence that meditation can produce a distinct physiological state characterized by slower breathing and heart rate, a smooth EEG wave function in the brain, and an improved immune response. This meditative state see...

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...