Two Minds Blog

  Who are you? Most people answer that question first by stating their name. Once we have done that, we might talk about our occupation, our other important social roles (husband, father, son), our personality, or our values. Sometimes we will pick a group membership that also conveys something about our likely values and beliefs (I'm Lutheran, I teach at a college of nursing). We might state our race or ethnicity, our gender, or our age. Psychologist Carl Rogers said that all of these things make up our "self-image," our mental picture of who we are. If our self-image matches up with who we want  to be, then we have what Rogers first described as "self-esteem." If not, then we probably feel bad, and maybe we come to hide who we "really are" from others. My daughter is a high school senior who was asked to create a podcast for her English class on a topic related to identity. Another psychologist, Erik Erikson , suggested that questions of identity ar...

  Synesthesia is the mental experience of perceiving one type of sense data in terms of another. For example, people might see specific colors when they hear specific sounds ( sound-to-color synesthesia ); associate colors with particular words, letters, or numbers ( grapheme-color synesthesia ); or experience specific tastes when they hear certain words or sounds ( lexical-gustatory synesthesia ). As many as 35 different types of synesthesia have been identified, and individual people might experience just one of them or more than one. The rate of synesthesia in the general population (i.e., people who aren't specifically trying to create the experience with drugs or other methods, but just have it happen to them naturally) is about 1 in 2,000 people , so it's rare but not highly unusual. Famous people who have reported spontaneous synesthesia include the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, the composer Olivier Messiaen, and the physicist Richard Feynman. Nabokov described his synesth...

With Laura McGladrey; adapted from presentations for CU Nursing Doctor of Nursing Practice students and the AACN Business Officers of Nursing Schools (BONUS) annual meeting in April 2022. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Surgeon General's office released a first-ever report on workplace mental health and well-being . But many workplaces feel a long way from mentally healthy right now, as both employees and employers continue to struggle with changes ranging from infectious disease, to equity and inclusion, to remote work. In this blog, we will look at ways in which both employees and employers may be struggling with the lingering effects of trauma, and what kinds of small steps organizational leaders could take to help us all get back on track. Stress and the Intuitive Mind Stress is pernicious. It affects us in ways we might not even recognize, coloring our perceptions and our reactions to events. This is partly because stress tends to push our thinking out of the Na...

  Two Minds Theory  (TMT) talks about two different mental systems that all people have, the Intuitive mind and the Narrative mind. These are based in contemporary understandings of neurobiology that were popularized by psychologist Daniel Kahneman, first in his Nobel prize acceptance speech and later in the book Thinking, Fast and Slow . The Narrative mind is logical, sequential, and language-based; it also has some pretty severe limitations on how fast it can work or how many things it can attend to at once. The Narrative mind is also abstract, cold, and disembodied -- these can be good things in some contexts like a legal proceeding , but many people find them alienating in daily life. The Intuitive mind is fast, great at multitasking, often insightful or creative, and expert at tasks that it has performed many times. On the negative side of the ledger, the Intuitive mind is also prone to biases, stereotypes, and dumb mistakes , and because it exists mostly outside of lan...

With Mustafa Ozkaynak, PhD CU Nursing Associate Professor Mustafa Ozkaynak has received a new grant from the National Institutes of Health to study nurses’ decision-making under conditions of fatigue. Paul is a co-investigator on this project. The study has some cool technical aspects: Besides self-reported measures of fatigue we’re going to use EHR audit logs to see how clinicians interact with the electronic health record when fatigued versus not. But more fundamentally, the study can tell us interesting things about how people who are tired relate to the world. There’s a lot of data showing that people do poorly when fatigued on tasks that require lots of conscious focus and attention. This has been studied extensively in aviation, for example, and is the reason that crews and pilots have mandatory hours of rest time between flights. Clinicians who are fatigued make more medical errors , communicate less effectively with colleagues, and are less able to relate to others . In th...

One of this summer's most interesting news stories came out of Google, where an engineer working on a computer program that could understand and speak English  became convinced that his creation was alive. The program is called LaMDA, which stands for "Language Model for Dialogue Applications." Here's what the company says about this technology. Engineer Blake Lemoine didn't feel that the company was taking his claims of sentience seriously, so he decided to go public with the information. Google subsequently dismissed him for violating its company policy on confidentiality. If you grew up on 80s films like Short Circuit  (pictured above), this plot seems pretty familiar: An artificial intelligence (AI) becomes sentient, an evil corporation tries to hide, exploit, or destroy it for their own gain, and a plucky hero helps the AI to resist. In the transcript linked below, Lemoine's collaborator directly compares LaMDA to the robot from Short Circuit , Johnny F...