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Many people chase after goals that seem to them important and promising—getting into the right college, getting the dream job, moving to a big house. But what do you really need to be happy? To have a sense of fulfillment and joy? And why is it important?
Listen back to KUT’s Views and Brews recorded live at The Cactus Cafe in Austin, Texas as Rebecca McInroy, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke, of Two Guys on Your Head, ask: What characterizes well-being?
KUT’s Rebecca McInroy along with Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about why it’s so important to diversify your interests. What is unhealthy about a one track mind? And why is it important to step outside our brain’s comfort zone?
Listen back to a Views and Brews discussion, recorded live at The Cactus Cafe in Austin, Texas, about “The Psychology of Risk and Reinvention” with Two Guys on Your Head. Join KUT’s Rebecca Mcinroy along with Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke to explore when and why we take risks, and what goes into the process of remaking yourself at any age or stage of life.
Join KUT’s Rebecca McInroy along with professors Art Markman and Bob Duke as they talk about the psychology of social activism, the effectiveness of deterrence, and the health consequences of negative emotions.
Views and Brews is free and open to the public, hope to see you at the Cactus soon!
In this live taping of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke join KUT’s Rebecca McInroy for “The Psychology of Uncertainty”. How can we make sense of tragedy, and how can we prepare ourselves emotionally and psychologically for the unpredictable?
Recorded at the Cactus Cafe Tuesday, October 10th, 2017.
Join Rebecca McInroy along with Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke as they talk about how we make sense of randomness in our lives, why we have a hard time processing statistics, and why our brains like to connect the dots.
Teaming up with the Elisabet Ney Museum, KUT & Views & Brew‘s Rebecca McInroy and Dr. Art Markman & Dr. Bob Duke of Two Guys On Your Head consider the eternal question posed by Ney’s husband in 1890 “Are We Conscious Automata?” What can psychology teach us about notions of determinism vs. free will? Is there such a thing as a rational being?
Have you ever been in a situation that you just can’t see your way out of? Have you ever been stuck on a path you did not want to follow? In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about how we can practice gaining experiences that can help us imagine different possibilities for a future we never knew we wanted, to get out of a present we’re not happy with.
In this special live Views & Brews edition of Two Guys On Your Head, KUT’s Rebecca McInroy joins Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke in a discussion about the psychology of choice and decision making.
We discuss some healthy, productive strategies that can help us best deal with the jerks in our life in this episode of Two Guys on Your Head with Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke.
A talk about why it can be so hard to live with mental illness, as a sufferer and as a caregiver with Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke.
Our world these days is heavily laden with a constant flow of information moving through our minds. It’s unavoidable. How do we determine what of that steady information stream we will choose to believe? Once we’ve made that choice, what if we later find out that the information was false? How do we shed false beliefs? It’s a very biologically expensive thing to demand from our brains to change our beliefs.
On this week’s show, the good doctors, Art Markman and Bob Duke, discuss with Rebecca and analyze the process of belief formation and why our false beliefs are so persistently insistent that we reconsider them. In short form, our beliefs inherently require a certain amount of faith in the validity of the evidence that we recognize as support for those beliefs. An idea creates an imprint in our minds of the thought patterns that we use to justify our commitment to accepting a belief as true or false, whatever the case may be.
If we learn information later that challenges the validity of our belief, or if we downright learn that the belief was, in fact, false, we are then required to use our biological energy to create a new thought pattern imprint over the old one. It’s energy expensive.
The easiest way to view the world and the variety of differing beliefs or opinions in it is to identify ourselves with the people who share our beliefs. We tend to divide the world into two categories – 1) the people who share our beliefs, and 2) the idiots. While this may conserve energy, which it does (and we are instinctively programmed to conserve our energy,) the more energy expensive option of considering and learning to appreciate differing beliefs or opinions is more socially appropriate. You’ll have more friends if you are open to accepting differing beliefs, essentially.
Our current and rapidly developing technology-loaded existence can be very isolating. Society, these days, doesn’t require much confrontation with differing beliefs that will challenge our own, so we have to manually inject such exposure into our lives. In the non-stop stream of constant information flowing, try examining something outside your usual path. If you identify as a Democrat, watch Fox News. If you’re a Republican, watch the Colbert Report. You might find something interesting.
When we feel guilt and shame after we’ve done something we know is wrong our heart may pound and we may feel sad, we might want to cry. Physiologically our response to both shame and guilt is the same, but cognitively the way we interpret these two emotions has consequences we may not realize.
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke deconstruct the various dimensions of these two emotions
If we feel shameful after we’ve done something wrong we may want to hide away. We may feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with us and therefore atoning for our bad behavior is not possible.
Moreover, when we don’t feel we don’t have control over our actions and that rather it is our circumstance that “made us do it” we are more likely to repeat our transgression.
Guilt, on the other hand, can be a productive emotion in that when we feel we’ve done something wrong we can make up for it by confessing, apologizing or dealing with the behavior. It is the behavior that is bad but we are not bad people.
Yet there are still fundamental questions about the way we interpret the world through these two lenses.
The 18th century politician and philosopher Edmund Burke stated: “Guilt was never a rational thing; it distorts all the faculties of the human mind, it perverts them, it leaves a man no longer in the free use of his reason, it puts him into confusion.”
Coming up in a Views and Brews this fall we’ll continue to tackle the topic of guilt and shame with Two Guys on Your Head Live. We’ll ask: is there a difference in the way we interpret shame we can hide vs. shame we cannot hide? What happens when we feel guilty but cannot atone? How does shame and guilt relate to morality, reason and the way we process behavior daily?
Oh, the woes of modern life in a metropolitan city center. What’s going on in our brains when we encounter that familiar feeling of intense frustration while driving in traffic that we comically refer to as ROAD RAGE? The Two Guys on Your Head will break it down in this week’s episode of the show.