Two Minds Blog

Our church secretary changes her sign with funny messages each week. This was the one we saw on January 5th, and I thought that it neatly summed up the dilemma of new year's resolutions. Resolutions are a topic of great interest for health behavior change researchers like me. They are fascinating because everyone makes them, despite the fact that everyone also knows they are going to break them! One could see this as a triumph of hope over experience. But our self-awareness about the problem suggests that it's more than that. Instead, it is a classic example of the intention-behavior gap highlighted in Two Minds Theory. Famous psychologists have been interested in this problem. Stanley Schacter studied self-change efforts among smokers , and concluded that people are actually more successful than we might think in improving their health behaviors. It just seems to take them a long time and multiple attempts. James Prochaska, famous for developing the stages of change , ...

Two Minds Theory suggests that Intuitive-level variables have a strong effect on people’s  everyday experiences and behaviors (and in fact, that  only  the Intuitive system is involved in producing behavior).  Because the Intuitive system operates outside of conscious awareness, TMT also suggests that people  aren’t aware of all the things that affect their immediate experiences and behaviors. We tested these  key  propositions in  a  study  just published  in the January/February issue of the  Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care , in which we used  daily surveys and ambulatory sensor measures (Fitbit Alta HR devices) to predict everyday ups and downs in the experience of fatigue among people living with HIV.  Fatigue is one of the most common symptoms reported by people with HIV, and it can seriously impair people’s ability to  accomplish everyday tasks. We asked people to complete a validated...

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...