Two Minds Blog

We've had lots of conversation in our household lately on the question of whether to open schools for in-person learning this fall. Even if you don't have children or grandchildren affected, this is a broad question of public health: Not only  should we personally go back?  but also  should anyone be allowed to go back given the current state of the pandemic?  or even should anyone be allowed to keep their kids at home? (e.g., based on hypothesized risks to mental health or learning).   These are difficult questions because they involve competing goals such as education versus health, parents' work demands versus children's support needs, and also because they must be made with limited information and under time constraints. These two features make real-world decisions particularly difficult, as I described in a recent post about naturalistic decision-making . Another framework that may be helpful as we think about whether to re-open school buildings ...

Survey methods are the most widespread tools of behavioral science, and I have advocated for more use of daily surveys to study people's experiences in the context of their everyday lives. A central premise of Two Minds Theory is that Intuitive-level thinking is what actually produces behavior, so if we want to understand behavior we need to sample people's experiences at the Intuitive level.  My argument has been that real-time, real-world surveys provide information closer to the occurrence of actual health behaviors, which tend to unfold on a day-by-day basis in routine contexts. And on the Two Minds Theory website I have published a list of tools that can be used for daily electronic surveys. Yet surveys are based in language, and I have also argued that any type of conscious thought using language is a product of the Narrative system. Because surveys are really people's reports of their thoughts or feelings, can surveys really tell us anything useful about the In...

These past 3 months, most Americans have been waiting: Waiting to see family and friends, waiting for the stores to re-stock their shelves, waiting to get back to work, waiting to see whether or not we develop symptoms during a 2-week quarantine. These experiences of waiting highlight a key difference between the Narrative and Intuitive minds, the property that in Two Minds Theory we call "temporal immediacy." Things that are happening right now are experienced by the Intuitive mind. Things that will happen in the future exist only in the Narrative mind. The difference is as simple as that. The temporal-immediacy difference between our two minds shapes our everyday experiences in many ways. For example, when we are waiting for something good to happen, time seems to stretch out indefinitely. Immediacy means that we actually experience  a positive event if it happens now (the Intuitive system), but we can only anticipate  it in the future via the Narrative system. "I'...

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...