Two Minds Blog

I have been writing this blog for just over a year. My initial commitment to myself was that I would try it for 6 months, and if nobody cared or I ran out of things to say I would drop it. That hasn’t happened — there have been about 350 unique readers in the first year, and  my list of ideas for posts is longer now than when I started. Both of those seem like promising signs. Still, 350 isn’t a lot in the world of the Internet, even for a somewhat specialized academic blog like this one. So if you like an idea that you read in this space, please comment, repost, or otherwise pass it along.  I will keep trying to get the page out to new readers, and I’d appreciate your help. Here is some of what you can look for in this space in 2020: •   More on mindfulness  – previous posts on how mindfulness  can help us to comment the Narrative and the Intuitive Minds, and the use of new sensor technologies to study mindfulness , were each  very popular. In...

In this post I’m returning to another of the classical sources of TMT, Plato’s student Aristotle. Although TMT as a whole is more Platonic than Aristotelian in its separation between Narrative ideas and the Intuitive events of the physical world, the theory includes a strong idea that behavior can be “trained” through practice . In the Nicomachean Ethics   (350 B.C.), a manual for living addressed to his son Nicomachus, Aristotle's writing addressed the idea of training new behaviors as a process of developing virtues . If our behavior is determined entirely by the Intuitive System, as TMT suggests, this means that our actions are not the result of in-the-moment conscious choices that we make. To change our behavior, we instead need to modify our habitual tendencies to respond in one way or another. This fits with the classical idea of virtues: That it doesn’t just matter  what we do  in life, but rather  what kind of people we are. This same idea came up i...

Preet Bharara is the former United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, a Federal prosecutor by profession and the author of the recent book Doing Justice . His book is about how people in the legal system try to make decisions about what is true  in cases where the facts are muddy, and also how they attempt to determine what is right  in assigning punishments proportionate to a person's crimes. These are very serious and consequential decisions, so Bharara and his fellow prosecutors are strongly invested in trying to make them correctly. Their best methods make use of both the Narrative System and the Intuitive System, using the strengths of each one to balance out the weaknesses of the other. An interesting feature of our legal system is that it purports to offer not just opinion or interpretation, but a determination of objective facts. Mistakes can still be made, of course, but the legal system is not offering spin; Bharara's first rule for a prosecu...

My  previous blog post explored a new model of how concepts emerge from people's everyday experiences, based on findings from contemporary neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI) research. Paul Churchland's book  Plato's Camera  argues that the concepts used by the Narrative System are really maps of neural activation patterns, taking sensory data and summarizing them at an abstract level. People's sensory experiences are never exactly the same from one moment to the next, but higher-level neurons in the chain of abstraction come to recognize  new experiences as similar to an existing map. This post will explore how we might be able to use Churchland's new understanding to communicate better with our fellow humans, especially in situations where our narratives are quite different from one another. Let's take an example from politics: I may see a political figure as essentially untrustworthy, not protecting the environment, and putting corporations ah...

We, too, are autonomous vehicles, groping our way forward in a world we only partly understand. - Paul Churchland, Plato's Camera , p. 125 I have written previously about artificial intelligence (AI) as a model for the Intuitive System, which works automatically and based on simple rules. This week's post will argue that the Narrative System uses similar trial-and-error approaches in developing a cognitive representation of the world. This is going to be a two-part blog: The current post will explore how the Narrative System transforms experiences into ideas, to show how a neuroscience-informed perspective helps us make sense of data and experiences of the Narrative System. The following post will examine what this perspective means about how people learn new narratives, and specifically how we can craft better  narratives to more effectively communicate with those who might see the world differently from us. Watch for those  applications in the next post -- just in t...

A couple of years ago my wife, a freelance writer, was conducting a phone interview while I worked in the next room. I overheard her say something that caught my attention: “why do you think that writing helps people, Dr. Pennebaker?” I immediately ran into the room and started scribbling down additional questions that I wanted her to ask. She laughed and then had to explain her husband’s academic-fanboy behavior to her interviewee. James Pennebaker is a fellow psychologist, and the father of expressive writing studies. In this approach, patients are given a blank sheet of paper with a general instruction like “write down your thoughts and feelings about [a particular event].” The idea behind this intervention is that writing about a traumatic experience might provide emotional relief and a chance to work through the event, resulting in a consolidated sense of self and an ability to let go of the things that were written. More detailed instructions for therapeutic writing can be f...

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. I’m excited to announce the publication of a major advance in Two Minds Theory! After the  2018 publication  of TMT, I struggled to explain how the narrative system might have any effect at all on behavior. Based on many people’s experiences it seemed true that it did, but all my efforts to describe how led back to the old idea of the Narrative Mind as “executive control” and the goal of making people’s behavior more Narratively and less Intuitively controlled. This is similar to Kahneman’s idea that we would all be better off if only our “lazy” Na...