the believing brain review

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. In addition, as evolved social creatures, we have brains that are attuned to trying to discern the intentions of others—and we look for patterns, there, too, and then try to infuse them with human intention and meaning, or what Mr. Shermer calls “agenticity.” Patterns in life are variously ascribed to the work of ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers and federal conspirators. Mr. Shermer marshals an impressive array of evidence from game theory, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. It infuses patterns with meaning, and imagines intention and agency in inanimate objects and chance occurrences. “Even belief that the government can impose top-down measures to rescue the economy is a form of agenticity,” the author says. Instead of developing into science, this doubtless degenerated into superstition in the hands of emerging priestly castes or for other reasons, but it does not suggest a ‘god gene’ of the kind supposed for history’s young religions with their monarchical deities. As the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, author of Why People Believe Weird Things, and a columnist for Scientific American, Shermer is perhaps the country’s best-known skeptic. Since early man had only a split second to make such decisions, Mr. Shermer says, we are descendants of ancestors whose “default position is to assume that all patterns are real; that is, assume that all rustles in the grass are dangerous predators and not the wind.”. 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. The brain is a belief engine. 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. The more basic question is how we form all our beliefs, whether false or true. The first part of the book is a mixture of psychology and trendy neuroscience research that presents the evidence for Mr. Shermer’s central claim: that, instead of shaping belief around painstakingly gathered, soberly judged evidence, people most often decide upon their beliefs first, and then use an impressive range of cognitive tricks to bend whatever evidence they do discover into support for those pre-decided acts of faith. You are rushing to the airport when a tree falls and blocks the road, causing you to miss your flight. But as much as Dr. Shermer declares that there is no mind, only the brain, most of his descriptions do not explain why these processes take place. An emotional leap of faith beyond reason is often required for us to make decisions or just to get through the day. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power. Surprised when the interior of the mothership turns out to closely resemble a General Motors motorhome, Mr. Shermer consents to lying down. If there really was a lion and they didn’t run away, they were in trouble. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. If you aren’t, you will likely see it as an incredibly fortunate fluke. 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.) But could God also be in our frontal lobes? But. Our ancestors did well to wonder whether rustling in the grass indicated a predator, even if it was just the breeze. I don’t believe in ghosts, says a friend, but there is definitely something to homeopathy; or God does not run evolution, but the government should run the economy. 'The Believing Brain is 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' - Professor Bruce Hood, Bristol University … 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. Box 338 | Altadena, CA, 91001 | 1-626-794-3119, Skeptic: Viewing the World with a Rational Eye. 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.”. This describes many of those who strive to blame most climate change on man-made carbon dioxide emissions. —Sam Harris, author of the New York Times bestsellers The Moral Landscape, Letter to a Christian Nation, and The End of Faith. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. influencers in the know since 1933. A timely, reasoned reflection on the nature of belief, offering a level-headed corrective to the divisiveness of extreme... by “An emotional leap of faith beyond reason is often required,” writes the author. Some of the content is repetitious for those of us who have read Shermer’s previous books and heard him speak, but the value of the new book is that it incorporates new research and it puts everything together in a handy package with a new focus. Take climate change. Shermer, however, has a particular interest in the latter, and much of his absorbing and comprehensive book addresses the wide spread human inclination to believe in gods, ghosts, aliens, conspiracies and the importance of coincidences. In the book, he brilliantly lays out what modern cognitive research has to tell us about his subject—namely, that our brains are “belief engines” that naturally “look for and find patterns” and then infuse them with meaning. Galileo used an early telescope to observe 4 moons around Jupiter. He also recounts, apparently not for the first time, his own supposed alien-abduction experience. Even pigeons are superstitious. —Professor Bruce Hood, Chair of Developmental Psychology, Bristol University and author of Supersense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable. Categories: Our brains, he says, have evolved to find meaningful patterns around us. “As a back-of-the-envelope calculation within an order-of-magnitude accuracy, we can safely say that over the past ten thousand years of history humans have created about ten thousand different religions and about one thousand gods,” Mr. Shermer writes. This stimulating book summarizes what is likely to prove the right view of how our brains secrete religious and superstitious belief. This has been caused partly by the frequent experience of having friends who share my view on one issue but then suddenly reveal a view on another issue that is anathema to me. He includes a pithy quotation from Richard Feynman that I had not seen before: If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. Categories: Problems arise when thinking like this is unconstrained, he says. 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). Skeptic magazine founding publisher Shermer (The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics, 2007, etc.) Skeptic magazine founding publisher Shermer (The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics, 2007, etc.) Readers who have enjoyed Mr. Shermer’s earlier books, such as Why People Believe Weird Things, will relish the pages devoted to puncturing many of the conspiratorial beliefs that lurk in our popular culture, from those about UFO cover-ups to the 9/11-was-an-inside-job lunacy. How do we tell the difference between noise and data? It finds meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data. 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. 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. Drawing on evolution, cognitive science, and neuroscience, Shermer considers not only supernatural beliefs but political and economic ones as well. The existence of atheists is partial evidence against 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. It’s not a peculiarity of the uneducated or the fanatical. Powerful support for Shermer’s analysis emerges from accounts he gives of highly respected scientists who hold religious beliefs, such as US geneticist Francis Collins. BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | And if we all do it, then how do we know that our own rational rejections of conspiracy theories are not themselves infected with beliefs so strong that they are, in effect, conspiracy theories, too? Like me, Mr. Shermer is an economic conservative and a social liberal, so he encounters this dissonance a lot. 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. 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. Home » The Believing Brain review. That’s all there is to it. "The Believing Brain is 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. Could these findings about psychopathological conservative political beliefs possibly be the result of the researchers’ confirmation bias? In Mr. Shermer’s view, the brain is a belief engine, predisposed to see patterns where none exist and to attribute them to knowing agents rather than to chance—the better to make sense of the world. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. As a ‘belief engine’, the brain is always seeking to find meaning in the information that pours into it. 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. Review. (In case you don’t know, that was an experiment demonstrating inattentional blindness: a gorilla walks through a group of people playing basketball and we don’t see him because our attention is fixed on counting the number of times the players in white shirts passed the ball.) People believe that they know way more than they actually do. In 1983, competing in the Race Across America bicycle challenge, he rode 1,259 miles in 83 hours without sleep and became delirious with exhaustion. RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2011. The author cites a 2009 poll in which more Americans admitted to a belief in angels and devils than in the theory of evolution. Maybe both are right. Of course, they reply that it also describes those who strive to blame most climate change on the sun. It remains, sadly, an uncommon combination. Retrieve credentials. Passionate investment in beliefs can lead to intolerance and conflict, as history tragically attests. 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. Ronald Bailey reviews. In The Believing Brain, he has written a wonderfully lucid, accessible, and wide-ranging account of the boundary between justified and unjustified belief. The animism that preceded these religions, and which survives today in some traditional societies such as those of New Guinea and the Kalahari Desert, is fully explained by Shermer’s agenticity concept. Michael Shermer’s book Why People Believe Weird Things has become a classic. Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our... by Other colleagues who did look were similarly dismissive; one tested the telescope in a series of experiments and said it worked fine for terrestrial viewing, but when pointed at the sky it somehow deceived the viewer. It is entirely possible to be deluded and live your whole life through happily. 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. I say “we” because, after reading Mr. Shermer’s book and others like it, my uneasy conclusion is that we all do this, even when we think we do not. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders. —Dr. 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. Our brains tend to seek out information that confirms our beliefs, ignoring information that contradicts them. The brain thus becomes invested in the beliefs, and reinforces them by looking for supporting evidence while blinding itself to anything contrary. - Dr. Leonard Mlodinow, physicist and author of The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. A timely, reasoned reflection on the nature of belief, offering a level-headed corrective to the divisiveness of extreme partisanship. “Michael Shermer has long been one of our most committed champions of scientific thinking in the face of popular delusion. Collins began as a sceptic, then changed his mind and became “born again”. He is an able skewerer of sloppy thinking. The best book I have read on the human tendency of forming, believing and defending irrational beliefs. The behavior is not much different than in the case of a baseball player who forgets to shave one morning, hits a home run a few hours later and then makes it a policy never to shave on game days. Then, having formed a belief, each of us tends to seek out evidence that confirms it, thus reinforcing the belief. We believe before we reason. 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. RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011. Shermer knows all the science, he tells great stories, he is funny, and he is fearless, delving into hot-button topics like 9-11 Truthers, life after death, capitalism, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, and the existence of God. In this book Michael Shermer lucidly describes why and how we are hard wired to ‘want to believe’. Thunderstorms are caused by natural processes of electricity in clouds, not by a god throwing thunderbolts. This is a must read for everyone who wonders why religious and political beliefs are so rigid and polarized--or why the other side is always wrong, but somehow doesn't see it. Categories. The Believing Brain is bestselling author Michael Shermer's comprehensive and provocative theory on how beliefs are born, formed, reinforced, challenged, changed, and extinguished. RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998. He dubs this concept “beliefdependent realism”, though it is far from a new idea: philosophers of science have long argued that our theories, or beliefs, are the lenses through which we see the world, making it difficult for us to access an objective reality. The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies by Michael Shermer "The Believing Brain" is a fantastic and ambitious book that explains the nature of beliefs. our most deeply held beliefs are immune to attack by direct educational tools, especially for those who are not ready to hear contradictory evidence. I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know. 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.”. Rules often contradict each other. Seeing through a telescope, it seems, is believing of the best kind. He has built a professional career out of casting a rationalist’s eye over some of the wackiest beliefs that humanity has to offer. Shermer seeks to answer the question of why “so many people believe in what most scientists would consider to be the unbelievable?” While admitting that scientists often believe in unproven hypotheses—e.g., the origin of our universe and what might have preceded the Big Bang—the author holds firmly to the “built-in self-correcting machinery” that is inherent in the scientific method: e.g., double-bind controlled experiments which are replicable, testing results against the null hypothesis, etc. Pre-publication book reviews and features keeping readers and industry The Believing Brain by Founding Publisher Michael Shermer, 9781250008800, available at Book Depository with free delivery worldwide. The author cites a 2009 poll in which more Americans admitted to a belief in angels and devils than in the theory of evolution. As “ lazy ”: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all around! 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Are serious, this is so much about the experience with his team-mates to find your Number. Miss the true ones that are essential to survival, by Michael ’.

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