Two Minds Blog

Any mention of  psychedelic drugs probably conjures up images of Timothy Leary  (Richard Nixon's "most dangerous man in America"), the 1969 Woodstock festival, and the Grateful Dead . There is, however, a tradition of non-recreational use for these medications starting around the turn of the 20th century. As early as 1874, psychologist William James argued for the use of nitrous oxide (aka laughing gas) as a mind-expanding drug, which he believed could help people access great truths of religion and philosophy. Drugs like mescaline and peyote had of course been used much earlier in religious ceremonies for exactly that purpose. But legitimate scientific research on psilocybin at Harvard University in the 1960s intersected with the growing New Age movement to create a cultural phenomenon tied to psychedelic drug use, and tainted the reputation of this kind of medication for years to come. In 1963 the Harvard faculty involved in psychedelic research were either fired ...

Although mindfulness is widely recognized in both the professional and popular literature, the state of the science in mindfulness research is still preliminary.  The good news so far is that mindfulness-based interventions work in the treatment of psychological disorders. A 2018 meta-analysis looked at 143 randomized controlled trials (RCTs), which are the gold standard research approach for testing interventions. The authors included any intervention that had mindfulness as a core component, such as Jon Kabat-Zinn's mindfulness-based stress reduction ( MBSR ) which has been studied since the 1970s, as well as mindfulness-based cognitive therapy ( MBCT ) which is a more recent adaptation of mindfulness techniques to fit within cognitive-behavioral therapy approaches. The treatments in this review generally involved individual or group work with a psychotherapist or coach, and lasted for multiple sessions. The authors excluded treatments that were based on mindfulness or other Eas...

I heard an excellent talk this fall by Dr. Andrew Hoffman about his book " The Engaged Scholar ." The book's basic thesis is that society offers academics like me a certain level of independence, and endows us with a certain level of credibility and respect. In return, society has a right to expect useful information from its scholars -- not just academic jargon and peer-reviewed papers for a small audience of experts, but actual knowledge with real-world applications. That's what I hope I am doing in this bi-weekly blog: Opening a window in the ivory tower to send some bits of psychological knowledge out into the world. I agree with Dr. Hoffman that this is an obligation for scholars. It's also fun and interesting for me, and I hope for anyone reading it as well. As I have noted previously, applying concepts from Two Minds Theory to real-world issues also allows me to test and refine the ideas, and I hope my academically oriented work is better for that as well. ...

In his classic set of lectures on The Varieties of Religious Experience (1901/1982), psychologist William James anticipated the now-common distinction that many people make between “religion” and “spirituality.” James used the term religion, but the meaning of this in his lectures is clearly what we would these days consider individual spiritual belief or experience as opposed to formal religious practice: “religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men [sic] in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” (p. 31). James said that his scope of inquiry in the book was “psychological, not religious institutions, but rather religious feelings and religious impulses” (p. 3) - a strongly psychological, experiential, and personal view of what “religion” (or again what we today would probably call “spirituality”) entails. When we begin t...

 I didn't want to let 2021 pass by without noting another major loss in the world of psychology, Dr. Aaron Beck, who passed away in October of this year at the age of 100. The bow tie in the picture above was one of Dr. Beck's defining visual characteristics! He was known as one of the fathers of Cognitive Therapy (along with Albert Ellis, who developed similar methods independently of Beck around the same time in the 1960s), which later became the core of the cognitive-behavioral approach that dominates modern psychotherapy.  Beck's Cognitive Therapy has a few defining characteristics that differentiate it from other strands of CBT within psychology: First, it relies on the idea that your thoughts determine your behavior , although in this model the term "thoughts" is sometimes loosely defined to include things like perceptions and attitudes as well as conscious narratives that can be expressed in words. Second, Beck proposed a " negative cognitive triad ...

My students often propose studies with the following type of rationale: People who sleep poorly often feel depressed, and depressed people don’t sleep well, and when people aren’t sleeping well they have a number of other problems like pain, and difficulty exercising, and gaining weight. Therefore, I want to study the complex relationships between sleep, mood, pain, exercise, and weight gain.  The problem with this kind of question is that it doesn't propose any kind of causal path between one concept and another, leading to a lot of chicken-and-egg problems. The concepts may indeed be related, but the theoretical model that the researcher wants to test with his or her study is an undifferentiated mess. A research question that says "are there complex inter-relationships between A, B, and C?" can almost always be answered simply with "yes." In life, almost everything is related to everything else, and human behavior in particular is the product of many weak forc...

There's a 1999 article titled " converting the unconverted " by psychologist Punam Keller, which demonstrates that health behavior change strategies based on fear don't work. For instance, someone with high blood pressure who is told about the risk of heart disease is actually less  likely to take their medication the more strongly the potential health risks of untreated hypertension are emphasized. This is because fear creates cognitive dissonance , which naturally motivates people to resolve the perceived conflict between facts and behavior. The easiest way to do that is often to mentally discount the facts . The more a new fact provokes fear, the stronger the motivation someone will have to ignore it. An example of bad public health policy based on fear involves putting horrible pictures on cigarette packs . This strategy is used in many countries around the world, and involves photos of diseased lungs, blackened teeth, tracheotomy tubes, etc. to emphasize the heal...