—Professor Bruce Hood, Chair of Developmental Psychology, Bristol University and author of Supersense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable. Skeptic magazine founding publisher Shermer (The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics, 2007, etc.) When I read that, Dana Ullman came to mind. One of the book’s most enjoyable discussions concerns the politics of belief. People believe weird things because of our evolved need to believe nonweird things. Shermer provides a handy list of 10 characteristics of a conspiracy theory that indicate that it is likely to be false; for instance, the more people who would have to have been involved in a cover-up, and the longer the alleged cover-up has lasted, the less likely that no one would have spilled the beans by now. A common risk with this kind of book is that the author comes across as overly smug and superior; just look at how the duke of debunkers, Richard Dawkins, is sometimes perceived, even by his fans. I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know. Both explain belief-formation in general, not just religious or supernaturalistic belief. God, they say, is in the details. The Believing Brain is bestselling author Michael Shermer's comprehensive and provocative theory on how beliefs are born, formed, reinforced, challenged, changed, and extinguished. Is it the wind or a lion? That’s all there is to it. ), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping. He includes a pithy quotation from Richard Feynman that I had not seen before: If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. Belief in God is hardwired into our brains through patternicity and agenticity. Thunderstorms are caused by natural processes of electricity in clouds, not by a god throwing thunderbolts. A tour de force integrating neuroscience and the social sciences to explain how irrational beliefs are formed and reinforced, while leaving us confident our ideas are valid. Categories: That’s the insightful message of The Believing Brain, by Michael Shermer, the founder of Skeptic magazine. PSYCHOLOGY, by His answer is science. ‧ If we all followed this maxim of skepticism in everyday life, the world would probably be a better place. By requiring replicable data and peer review, science, he says, is the only process of knowledge-gathering that can go beyond our individual lenses of belief. Nonetheless, the author fully recognizes the importance of belief in our lives. A pigeon rain dance. Shermer gives chilling examples of how dangerous belief can be when it is maintained against all evidence; this is especially true in pseudoscience, exemplified by the death of a ten-year-old girl who suffocated during the cruel ‘attachment therapy’ once briefly popular in the United States in the late 1990s. A fascinating account of the origins of all manner of beliefs, replete with cutting edge evidence from the best scientific research, packed with nuggets of truths and then for good measure, studded with real world examples to deliver to the reader a very personable, engaging, and ultimately convincing set of explanations for why we believe. There is so much about the brain and its complex workings that we do not understand. This is a result of wide-open pattern detection filters and to the assumption that there must be a conscious agent behind everything. He gives the names ‘patternicity’ and ‘agenticity’ to the brain’s pattern-seeking and agency-attributing propensities, respectively. Could these findings about psychopathological conservative political beliefs possibly be the result of the researchers’ confirmation bias? Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2! Conspiracy theories are usually bunk when they are too complex, require too many people to be involved, ratchet up from small events to grand effects, assign portentous meanings to innocuous events, express strong suspicion of either governments or companies, attribute too much power to individuals or generate no further evidence as time goes by. Now he has a new book out: The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies: How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. On waking a couple of hours later, he is able to joke about the experience with his team-mates. Of course, they reply that it also describes those who strive to blame most climate change on the sun. Magazine Subscribers (How to Find Your Reader Number). In The Believing Brain, he has written a wonderfully lucid, accessible, and wide-ranging account of the boundary between justified and unjustified belief. There was a time, when I was younger, when I was confident that I knew how to tell a barmy belief from a rational deduction. If there really was a lion and they didn’t run away, they were in trouble. He applies his theory to a wide … Even pigeons are superstitious. As for his own political bias, Mr. Shermer says that he’s “a fiscally conservative civil libertarian.” He is a fan of old-style liberalism, as in liberality of outlook, and cites The Science of Liberty author Timothy Ferris’s splendid formulation: “Liberalism and science are methods, not ideologies.” The “scientific solution to the political problem of oppressive governments,” Mr. Shermer says, “is the tried-and-true method of spreading liberal democracy and market capitalism through the open exchange of information, products, and services across porous economic borders.”. He quotes Upton Sinclair: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it. When his support crew finally intervened to make him stop and get some rest, he became convinced that they were aliens forcing him into a mother craft—the interior of the UFO, it turned out, looked “remarkably like a GMC motor home.” A good long nap cured him of his delusion. Skeptic magazine founding publisher Shermer (The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics, 2007, etc.) Mr. Shermer calls this “belief-dependent reality.” The well-worn phrase “seeing is believing” has it backward: Our believing dictates what we’re seeing. Believe me; you don’t have to take my word for it. That experience gives one useful definition of a sceptic, as Mr. Shermer understands the term: one who is aware of the fallibility of intuitions, and willing to take steps to minimise them. Sure. Case Studies (36) Dating (Men) (59) Dating (Women) (40) Influence & Persuasion (19) Leadership (7) Power Theory (47) Psychological Analyses (14) … But those are the easy cases. Mr. Shermer also delves into the neuroscience of “the believing brain.” For example, he cites research suggesting that people with high levels of the feel-good neurochemical dopamine “are more likely to find significance in coincidences and pick out meaning and patterns where there are none.” Even for folks with normal chemical levels, there’s a neurological upside to pattern-finding: When we come across information that confirms what we already believe, we get a rewarding jolt of dopamine. Belief and the Brain: The science behind what we believe and why, by Emanuel Maidenberg Ph.D. The first story is about a man whom you will have never heard of but who had a profound and life-changing experience in the wee hours of the morning many decades ago that still haunts him to this day and drives him to search for ultimate meaning in the cosmos. “An emotional leap of faith beyond reason is often required,” writes the author. Conspiracy theories abound, from Holocaust denial to 9/11 Truthers to the spread of AIDS. We rely on a feeling of conviction, but that feeling can be uncoupled from good reasons and good evidence. In The Believing Brain skeptic leader Michael Shermer gives a highly readable, well researched explanation as to why people are drawn to believe things that aren’t (and are) true. Yet belief-dependent reality is not fixed, and the views that frame our individual versions of the world can change. A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking. He demonstrates how our brains selectively assess data in an attempt to confirm the conclusions we’ve already reached. Once an evangelical Christian, he lost his faith largely as a result of his college studies of psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Here is Mr. Shermer’s final diagnostic of a wrong conspiracy theory: “The conspiracy theorist defends the conspiracy theory tenaciously to the point of refusing to consider alternative explanations for the events in question, rejecting all disconfirming evidence for his theory and blatantly seeking only confirmatory evidence to support what he has already determined to be the truth.”. “People believe weird things because of our evolved need to believe non-weird things.”. As a ‘belief engine’, the brain is always seeking to find meaning in the information that pours into it. THE BELIEVING BRAIN FROM GHOSTS AND GODS TO POLITICS AND CONSPIRACIES--HOW WE CONSTRUCT BELIEFS AND REINFORCE THEM AS TRUTHS by Michael Shermer ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2011 Skeptic magazine founding publisher Shermer (The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics, 2007, etc.) “Michael Shermer has long been one of our most committed champions of scientific thinking in the face of popular delusion. 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths by Michael Shermer 6,973 ratings, 3.93 average rating, 472 reviews Mr. Shermer found himself vilified, often in CAPITAL LETTERS, as a patsy of the sinister Zionist cabal that deliberately destroyed the twin towers and blew a hole in the Pentagon while secretly killing off the passengers of the flights that disappeared, just to make the thing look more plausible. In fact, neuroimaging studies have shown that, at the level of the brain, belief in a virgin birth or a UFO is no different than belief that two plus two equals four or that Barack Obama is president of the US. We do not like to admit we are wrong. As science advances, the things we once thought of as supernatural acquire natural explanations. Harriet Hall on May 31, 2011. But why do people believe they see patterns—whether “evidence” of angels, conspiracy theories, or UFOs—where none exist? You are rushing to the airport when a tree falls and blocks the road, causing you to miss your flight. ... Review quote "Michael Shermer has long been one of our most committed champions of scientific thinking in the face of popular delusion. PSYCHOLOGY. The author cites a 2009 poll in which more Americans admitted to a belief in angels and devils than in the theory of evolution. The Believing Brain ends with an engaging history of astronomy that illustrates how the scientific method developed as the only reliable way for us to discover true patterns and true agents at work. Shermer takes gleeful potshots at conspiracy theorists, including the 9/11-truthers, giving a detailed refutation of their claim that planted explosives brought down the Twin Towers, and the belief in extrasensory perception demonstrated by the apparent abilities of psychics and other mediums, which have been replicated by magicians. This is a problem. He tells this story in his fascinating new book, The Believing Brain. ‧ If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. His position is as clear as it is simple: “When I call myself a skeptic I simply mean that I take a scientific approach to the evaluation of claims.” But now Shermer is interested not only in why people have irrational beliefs, but “why people believe at all.” Our brains, he says, have evolved to find meaningful patterns around us. He doesn’t give much space to medical topics but he does mention AIDS denial, the vaccine/autism brouhaha, and alternative medicine, which he calls “a form of pseudoscience.”. Takeaway lessons: Michael Shermer is a psychologist, cyclist, one-time fundamentalist Christian, founder of Skeptic magazine and, currently, the author of a monthly column with the same name published in Scientific American. Once beliefs are formed, we seek out confirmatory arguments and evidence to justify them. Leonard Mlodinow, physicist and author of The Drunkard’s Walk and The Grand Design (with Stephen Hawking). The section on conspiracy theories, for instance, memorably exposes the bizarre leaps of logic that adherents often make: “If I cannot explain every single minutia [about the collapse of the twin towers]…that lack of knowledge equates to direct proof that 9/11 was orchestrated by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the CIA.”. Patternicity leads us to see significance in mere ‘noise’ as well as in meaningful data; agenticity makes us ascribe purpose to the source of those meanings. —Bill Nye, the Science Guy, Executive Director of The Planetary Society. Jumping to false conclusions is an outgrowth of pattern recognition, an essential function of our brain that evolved to allow birds as well as mammals to anticipate danger and respond to their environment. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. - Dr. Leonard Mlodinow, physicist and author of Rules often contradict each other. These underlie the diverse reasons why we form particular beliefs from subjective, personal and emotional promptings, in social and historical environments that influence their content. writes entertainingly about the scientific basis of belief. Robert Greene. RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998. Hours later you learn the plane has crashed and all its passengers are presumed dead. In The Believing Brain, he has written a wonderfully lucid, accessible, and wide-ranging account of the boundary between justified and unjustified belief. A timely, reasoned reflection on the nature of belief, offering a level-headed corrective to the divisiveness of extreme partisanship. PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | Daniel Kahneman Book & movie reviews. We’re glad you found a book that interests you. © Copyright 2021 Kirkus Media LLC. In The Believing Brain Shermer argues that they are derived from “patternicity”, our propensity to see patterns in noise, real or imagined; and “agenticity”, our tendency to attribute a mind and intentions to that pattern. Passionate investment in beliefs can lead to intolerance and conflict, as history tragically attests. Shermer deals with the idea that theistic belief is an evolved, hard-wired phenomenon, an idea that is fashionable at present. —Dr. And religious belief had survival value for human groups, encouraging conformity, group cooperation, and altruism. Drawing on evolution, cognitive science, and neuroscience, Shermer considers not only supernatural beliefs but political and economic ones as well. A review of Michael Shermer, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts to Gods to Politics and Conspiracies – How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. Reviews Praise for The Believing Brain “Michael Shermer has long been one of our most committed champions of scientific thinking in the face of popular delusion. Read what people think about The Believing Brain by Michael Shermer, and write your own review. Spotting a significant pattern in the data may have meant an intentional agent was about to pounce. A common question of skeptics and science-based thinkers is “How could anyone believe that?” People do believe some really weird things and even some obviously false things. But it is science itself that Mr. Shermer most heartily embraces. We see patterns even when they are not there (the Virgin Mary on a toasted cheese sandwich), and we interpret events as having been deliberately caused by a conscious agent (the AIDS virus was created in a government lab for genocidal purposes). The other is its readiness to nominate agency—intentional action—as the cause of natural events. 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