Two Minds Blog

The logic of wearing masks to prevent coronavirus infection is confusing. Despite some equivocal early results , a recent study found that facemasks reduce transmission of the virus even when the masks are not completely effective in preventing droplets from passing through them, as long as the percentage of people wearing facemasks in public settings is in the 50-60% range. The trick to understanding these recommendations is that the type of cloth mask that most people are wearing has relatively limited benefits for the person wearing the mask. The benefit is really for other people in the room, and may be most helpful early in the course of infection when the mask-wearer is not yet showing any symptoms: Although people seem to be most contagious in the 1-3 days after symptoms begin, a substantial number of cases were spread by people who didn't yet know they had the virus . Mask-wearing is no substitute for having people who are sick stay at home, but presymptomatic transmission...

Francisco Goya, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.”  Los Caprichos , print #43. “You’ll feel better after a good night’s sleep.” “I’m sleepwalking through life today.” “Let me sleep on it and get back to you.” “I‘m sorry, I must have slept through that part.” These and other sayings highlight the positive and negative roles of sleep in our everyday lives. On one hand sleep is a behavior — you can observe someone doing it, count the amount of time that it lasts, and ask people to rate the quality of their sleep. On the other hand, it’s a biological process with its own heart and breathing patterns, in which you can even quantify the amplitude of brainwaves at different stages. Sleep also provides our most common experience with an altered state of consciousness, in dreams that are generally experienced as outside of conscious control yet often vivid and compelling. Because the conscious, Narrative mind is shut down, many people experience sleep as “non-productive” or even d...

The commonly accepted model of adolescents’ and young adults’ (AYA) thinking goes like this: Adolescents don't always think clearly because their brains aren't fully developed yet. Brain development goes on through the early teens, especially in the prefrontal cortex (PFC: the part of the brain right behind the eyes), which is responsible for executive control of behavior. Because they don't have good control over their behavior yet, AYA are prone to doing risky or foolish things, which can result in negative consequences. As long as they don't mess up too badly, they will eventually outgrow the risk-taking phase and become normal, healthy, risk-averse adults. Is this model familiar? A major line of research with AYA does show that the brain continues to generate new synapses in the PFC region well into young adulthood, for instance to age 24 or later. Based on an understanding of the PFC as the seat of executive control functions in the brain, this neurologi...

How do people make decisions in times of significant stress and uncertainty, when risks are unknown, benefits are hard to specify, and time pressure forces snap judgments? This is the type of situation we face every day in the time of the coronavirus pandemic, when even going to the store or taking a walk outdoors can feel like an activity that has unknown risks. Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) is a modern theory of behavior that aims to explain how people make effective decisions even under conditions of uncertainty, and this approach has significant intersections with Two Minds Theory (TMT). It’s important to begin our analysis by noting that NDM was not an influence in TMT’s development. Points of agreement between the theories are therefore evidence for a common understanding of the human mind, rather than a sign that TMT was derived from NDM. The primary developer of NDM, Dr. Gary Klein , describes his theory as a way to explain how people make decisions with high stak...

The coronavirus pandemic might have several interesting side effects, including a rise in tele-work or distance education , and a noted decrease in greenhouse gas emissions . One that hasn't received much attention so far is its effect on the pre-existing U.S. opioid epidemic . Many possible effects of COVID-19 on patients with opioid use disorders are negative ones. But colleagues in opioid treatment programs have noticed a marked increase in the number of people seeing help for opioid use disorders since the coronavirus pandemic began. There could be several reasons for this shift. First, it may be more difficult for people to get opioids during social distancing and with stay-at-home orders in effect. The largest single source of opioids in the U.S. is still prescription medication , and non-urgent medical care is limited at the moment. Telehealth visits are often available, but perhaps patients find it more difficult to ask their healthcare providers for opioids when ...

This week I'd like to acknowledge a previously unrecognized source for Two Minds Theory, psychologist Dr. Jonathan Haidt. Dr. Haidt didn't make it into the reference list for our original article on TMT, but he contributed important ideas and I'd like to give credit where it's due. I first heard his ideas during a 2016 keynote address at the American Psychological Association meeting, which was about the contribution of people’s moral frameworks to their political views. I plan to blog about that a different time. But today, I’d like to explore some specific ideas from Dr. Haidt’s book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion , that seem related to how people are feeling during the coronavirus epidemic. Dr. Haidt argues that two specific moral values, caring for others and personal freedom, are particularly beloved by American liberals. (People who care only about personal freedom, even when there are greater risks that other p...

A major problem in studying the Intuitive System is that we don't have conscious access to the things that go on in this layer of the mind. When a research participant reports what he or she is thinking about, we have argued, they are generally providing the output of their Narrative System. Narratives are filtered through language, and incorporate beliefs, intentions, and cognitive maps of the world that may not accurately reflect what's truly happening at the immediate level of perception, experience, and behavior -- a set of processes that we call collectively the Intuitive System. Indeed, as I described in one of last year's blog posts, the very structure of the brain systems involved in creating narratives tends toward abstraction, generalization, and summarizing, all of which necessarily obscure details about a person's immediate experience. The primacy of narratives in every commonly used measure of people's experiences is a significant methodological cha...