Two Minds Blog

With Dr. Scott Harpin Scholarly writing is one of the great challenges of academic life, often summarized as “publish or perish.” Yet many of us in this business feel that we are perishing. Despite writing’s importance, the typical faculty feeling about it is something like this: “Writing is a backburner thing: I simply do not have enough time to make it happen.” Writing is a behavior that’s hard to change despite the existence of real-world consequences. In the worst-case scenario failure to write means that a faculty members don’t get tenure and lose their jobs, but the less-severe consequences include bad annual reviews, lack of recognition for their work, and a personal sense of shame or failure. Even those who are  successful  at writing by objective measures (publication counts, citation indices) almost always go through periods of writers’ block, anxiety about writing, and self-recrimination for failing to write. Writing is a key to success in academia. Why is it so h...

After a year of living in pandemic conditions, many people have experienced at least some level of traumatic events . These can include things like isolation and disruption of social support networks; unemployment and financial strains; living with continual threats to health and safety; negotiating differing levels of risk tolerance with others in a highly politicized environment; witnessing the illness or actual death of people in your social network including family members; and being unable to respond in typical ways or participate in typical grieving rituals because of the pandemic. Additional stressors include frequently changing health policy and community rules, the desire to maintain aspects of "normal" life (e.g., holidays, vacations) despite pandemic-related changes, the additional cost or difficulty associated with doing so, and the indefinite and uncertain nature of the changes that have occurred in everyday living. Layered on all of these things is a climate of ...

My youngest child moves up from elementary school to middle school this year, which means that I’m ending my 7-year tenure as a PTA parent coordinator for her school’s science fair. People love to hate the science fair. Some of the most common critiques are that: (a) the events are unnecessarily competitive and therefore a source of stress for children, (b) that the assignment highlights resource gaps because affluent families can provide more support to their children’s projects at home, or worse buy their kids a high-quality project (!), and (c) that many of the experiments are cookie-cutter projects taken from books and aren’t actually all that interesting. Many aspects of these are true, and in fact the same critiques could be leveled at the last professional poster session that I attended: there’s competition that can make junior scientists feel bad about their work, the rich schools have better projects and more of them, and a lot of the scientific findings are pretty predictab...

  What's the appeal of digital badges? I used to think that only a crazy person would be motivated to exercise just to move some electrons around on their smartphone screen. My phone would notify me that a new challenge was available each month, and I would routinely ignore it. I felt no pain or consternation about this -- in fact, I never gave it a second thought, or never notice the challenge at all. But for the past few months it seems that I'm among those who increase their activity level just because their iPhone tells them to (my latest badges shown above). Why does this seemingly stupid behavior-change strategy work, and why did it start working for me when it didn't help me before? First, it's important to know that rewards do motivate behavior. In a previous post on behaviorism I provided some background on how this works by training the Intuitive Mind. Two Minds Theory posits that the final stage before a behavior is produced by the Intuitive Mind (after proc...

  If you're trying to make a change in areas of your life like diet or exercise, you might come across the idea of "stages of change" that everyone passes through in trying to change their behavior. The stages of change were one of three original components in psychologist James Prochaska's (1983) transtheoretical model of psychotherapy (TTM), although many people have heard about the stages without ever knowing the TTM. The stages of change construct has by now been widely accepted in fields that are increasingly far from psychology, including medical case management, nursing, medicine, and healthcare business administration. Although the stages of change are among the most widely known and cited explanations of health behavior, this success arrived at exactly the same time that the TTM was being questioned and increasingly disputed  in the scientific literature.  An interesting case study of the rise and fall of the stages of change can be seen in the connection b...

Some news reports  have suggested that smartwatches or other wearable devices can detect signs of COVID-19 infection before it becomes symptomatic. If true, this could be a game-changer for managing the pandemic: People who know they are infected could begin to quarantine even before they develop symptoms, and thereby reduce community spread of the virus. Positive findings have been reported with multiple devices, including the Apple Watch , Fitbit  (also here ) or  Garmin wrist trackers, and the Oura Health smart ring .  Primarily these studies have looked for changes in people's heart rate, although some of the analyses also include activity data and sleep patterns. A noted challenge of this and other chronic-disease-detection studies is that heart rate, activity, and sleep can be quite variable within individuals over time, even under normal conditions. Think about the last time you took a trip on an airplane across time zones, for instance -- a certain level of...

You might have heard the remarkable story of Daniel Kish , the blind man who can ride a bicycle using a technique that he calls "flash sonar." Kish's method involves a series of verbal clicks that bounce back and tell him the location of objects in his path. The technique is also known as human echolocation, and it works just the same as the sonar that bats use to fly through the woods in the dark. Some people navigate using only the natural reverberations of sound off of objects around them, while others, like Kish, actively generate sounds that they can then interpret as they are reflected back. This method is surprisingly accurate, enabling expert practitioners to perceive not only the size and distance of objects, but also their shape and texture. It can be completely smooth and intuitive, as in the case of another famous echolocator, "bat man" Brian Borowski who as a child learned to ride a bicycle despite being blind since birth. One of the most intere...