Rationality & the Reflective Mind #6

More from Keith Stanovich's Rationality & the Reflective Mind follows.

Stanovich links different kinds of mental pathology with Type 1 (the autonomous mind) and Type 2 processing.

“Cognitive neuroscientists have uncovered cases of mental pathology that are characterized by inadequate behavioral regulation from the emotion subsystems in the autonomous mind-- for example [ ] patients with damage in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. These individuals have severe difficulties in real-life decision-making but do not display the impairments in sustained attention and executive control that are characteristic of individuals with damage in dorsolateral frontal regions.”

Behavioral regulation can go wrong in two ways. First, signals shaping behavior from the autonomous mind are too pervasive and are not overridden by Type 2 processing. Second, automatic regulation of goals by the autonomous mind is lacking, and Type 2 processing is faced with too many possibilities. The latter is called the Dr. Spock problem (p. 116-7).