Two Minds Blog

When I'm not reading psychology or history, I gravitate toward sci-fi and fantasy works (as you might have surmised from my March 2026 posts about telepathy and mind uploading). A writer whose work consistently feeds my inner geek is Brandon Sanderson, author of the Mistborn  and Stormlight Archive  series, as well as the Alcatraz versus the Evil Librarians books that my daughter enjoyed in elementary school, and for those of us of a certain age, also the completer of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time . In addition to his excellent novels, Mr. Sanderson has developed quite a large side hustle selling Sanderverse-themed merchandise , hosting his own annual convention , and other ancillary businesses. But something that I have always admired is his willingness to give some of his work away -- early on, in the form of a "free sample" novel for people to discover whether they liked him, and a blog where he would write about his own writing process. More recently, he announced...

Before psychology, and still concurrent with it, the need to help people with their behavior-change endeavors, mental health concerns, and other problems in living was met by the world’s great religions. For many people religions still serve this purpose, often outside the Western scientific view that considers them unfalsifiable and therefore irrelevant. This scientific myopia means that psychology has a limited perspective on behavior-change practices of religious derivation -- since the time of William James's Varieties of Religious Experience , religion hasn't been considered a respectable area of study. (Interestingly, we have better data about non-Western practices like yoga and meditation, which have been studied in ways cut off from their religious origins. It is mainly Christianity that was seen as outside the purview of scientific comment). One traditional practice common to many religions is the pilgrimage , a journey from home to a distant location in order to view...