I am a little late on getting this out. Between travel and sickness I had no energy. But here it is:
The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths
Shermer’s
book is good, but somewhat disturbing.
He relates how as a young man he decided to follow Jesus. He became part of an evangelical church and
set about witnessing to those around him.
But after some experiences that he did not understand and as he delved
deeper into the academic world he gave up 
on the church, Jesus and God. He came to believe that Christianity was just
another religion that was no more or less valuable than any other. He became an ardent skeptic willingly
debating with Christians and others the existence of God. He went so far as to found the Skeptic
Society. This book he sets about to
provide an understanding of how we come to believe in God and other
things. The focus is on beliefs and how
our brain comes to believe and then keep those beliefs.
The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths
1. Opening Thoughts
2. Table of Contents
3. Further
Reviews and Summaries
4. Quotes from the Book
Opening Thoughts
Shermer’s
book is good, but somewhat disturbing.
He relates how as a young man he decided to follow Jesus. He became part of an evangelical church and
set about witnessing to those around him.
But after some experiences that he did not understand and as he delved
deeper into the academic world he gave up
on the church, Jesus and God. He came to believe that Christianity was just
another religion that was no more or less valuable than any other. He became an ardent skeptic willingly
debating with Christians and others the existence of God. He went so far as to found the Skeptic
Society. This book he sets about to
provide an understanding of how we come to believe in God and other
things. The focus is on beliefs and how
our brain comes to believe and then keep those beliefs.
If you are interested in how the brain works, and I think you should be,
then this book is helpful. As we examine
our lives we realize that beliefs form the primary operating system for what we
say, do and think. Understanding how
beliefs are formed and reinforced helps us become more aware of those things
that are driving us. Beliefs are not and
cannot simply be a list. Beliefs are
weaved together into stories that become part of our story. These stories become the foundation for how
we then react to the world around us.
The book becomes a bit wordy as descriptions and antidotal information
start to outweigh the actual truths being presented.
Table
of Contents
Prologue:
I Want to Believe p. 1
Part I Journeys
of Belief
1 Mr.
D'Arpino's Dilemma p. 11
2 Dr.
Collins's Conversion p. 26
3 A
Skeptic's Journey p. 37
Part II The
Biology of Belief
4 Patternicity p.
59
5 Agenticity p.
87
6 The
Believing Neuron p. 111
Part
III Belief in Things Unseen
7 Belief
in the Afterlife p. 141
8 Belief
in God p. 164
9 Belief
in Aliens p. 188
10 Belief
in Conspiracies p. 207
Part IV Belief
in Things Seen
11 Policts of Belief p. 231
12 Confirmations of Belief p. 256
13 Gepgraphies of Belief p. 280
14 Cosmologies of Belief p. 304
Further Reviews and
Summaries
Read a fuller book report: Read
Now
Michael Shermer's TED Talk Click to View
Quotes from the Book
The following are some excerpts from the book:
In the cortex of our brains there
is a neural network that neuroscientists call the left-hemisphere interpreter.
It is, in a manner of speaking, the brain’s storytelling apparatus that
reconstructs events into a logical sequence and weaves them together into a
meaningful story that makes sense. The process is especially potent when it
comes to biography and autobiography: once you know how a life turns out it is
easy to go back and reconstruct how one arrived at that particular destination
and not some other, and how this journey becomes almost inevitable once the
initial conditions and final outcomes are established.
Our brains are belief engines,
evolved pattern-recognition machines that connect the dots and create meaning
out of the patterns that we think we see in nature.
This process of explaining the
mind through the neural activity of the brain makes me a monist. Monists
believe that there is just one substance in our head—brain. Dualists, by
contrast, believe that there are two substances—brain and mind. This is a very
old problem in philosophy dating back to the seventeenth century when the
French philosopher René Descartes put it on the intellectual landscape, with
soul the preferred term of the time (as in “body and soul” instead of “brain
and mind”). Broadly speaking, monists assert that body and soul are the same,
and that the death of the body—particularly the disintegration of DNA and
neurons that store the informational patterns of our bodies, our memories, and
our personalities —spells the end of the soul. Dualists contend that body and
soul are separate entities, and that the soul continues beyond the existence of
the body. Monism is counterintuitive. Dualism is intuitive. It just seems like
there is something else inside of us, and our thoughts really do feel like they
are floating around up there in our skulls separate from whatever it is our
brains are doing.
Liberal democracy is not just
the least bad political system compared to all others (pace Winston Churchill);
it is the best system yet devised for giving people a chance to be heard, an
opportunity to participate, and a voice to speak truth to power. Market
capitalism is the greatest generator of wealth in the history of the world and
it has worked everywhere that it has been tried. Combine the two and
Idealpolitik may become Realpolitik. * * * A
final note on belief and truth: To many of my liberal and atheist friends and
colleagues, an explanation for religious beliefs such as what I have presented
in this book is tantamount to discounting both its internal validity and its
external reality. Many of my conservative and theist friends and colleagues
take it this way as well and therefore bristle at the thought that explaining a
belief explains it away. This is not necessarily so. Explaining why someone
believes in democracy does not explain away democracy; explaining why someone
who holds liberal or conservative values within a democracy does not explain
away those values. In principle, the formation and reinforcement of political,
economic, or social beliefs is no different from religious beliefs.
The Confirmation Bias: The Mother of All Cognitive Biases
Throughout this book I have referenced the confirmation bias in various
contexts. Here I would like to examine it in detail, as it is the mother of all
the cognitive biases, giving birth in one form or another to most of the other
heuristics. Example: as a fiscal conservative and social liberal I can find
common ground whether I am talking to a Republican or a Democrat.
Hindsight Bias In a type of time-reversal confirmation bias, the
hindsight bias is the tendency to reconstruct the past to fit with present
knowledge. Once an event has occurred, we look back and reconstruct how it
happened, why it had to happen that way and not some other way, and why we
should have seen it coming all along.
Self-Justification Bias This heuristic is related to the
hindsight bias. The self-justification bias is the tendency to rationalize
decisions after the fact to convince ourselves that what we did was the best
thing we could have done. Once we make a decision about something in our lives
we carefully screen subsequent data and filter out all contradictory
information related to that decision, leaving only evidence in support of the
choice we
Attribution Bias Our beliefs are very much grounded in how we
attribute the causal explanations for them, and this leads to a fundamental
attribution bias, or the tendency to attribute different causes for our own
beliefs and actions than that of others. There are several types of attribution
bias.
Sunk-Cost Bias Leo Tolstoy, one of the deepest thinkers on the
human condition in the history of literature, made this observation on the
power of deeply held and complexly entwined beliefs: “I know that most men,
including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom
accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them
to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to
colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have
woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.” Upton Sinclair said
it more succinctly: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when
his job depends on not understanding it.” These observations are examples of
the sunk-cost bias, or the tendency to believe in something because of the cost
sunk
We tend to prefer existing social, economic, and political
arrangements over proposed alternatives, even sometimes at the expense of
individual and collective self-interest. Other examples abound.
Endowment Effect The psychology underlying the status quo bias
is what economist Richard Thaler calls the endowment effect, or the tendency to
value what we own more than what we do not own
Framing Effects How beliefs are framed often determines how they
are assessed, and this is called the framing effect, or the tendency to draw
different conclusions based on how data are presented. Framing effects are
especially noticeable in financial decisions and economic
Anchoring Bias Lacking some objective standard to evaluate
beliefs and decisions—which is usually not available—we grasp for any standard
on hand, no matter how seemingly subjective. Such standards are called anchors,
and this creates the anchoring effect, or the tendency to rely too heavily on a
past reference or on one piece of information when making decisions
Availability Heuristic Have you ever noticed how many red lights
you encounter while driving when you are late for an appointment? Me, too. How
does the universe know that I left late? It doesn’t, of course, but the fact
that most of us notice more red lights when we are running late is an example
of the availability heuristic, or the tendency to assign probabilities of
potential outcomes based
Representative Bias Related to the availability bias is the
representative bias, which, as described by its discoverers, psychologists Amos
Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, means: “an event is judged probable to the extent
that it represents the essential features of its parent population or
generating process.” And, more generally, “when faced with the difficult task
of judging probability or frequency, people employ a limited number of
heuristics which reduce these judgments to simpler ones.”
Inattentional Blindness Bias Arguably one of the most powerful
of the cognitive biases that shape our beliefs is captured in the biblical
proverb “There are none so blind as those who will not see.” Psychologists call
this inattentional blindness, or the tendency to miss something obvious and general
while attending to something special and specific. The now-classic experiment
in this bias has subjects watching a one-minute video of two teams of three
players each, one team donning white shirts and the other black shirts, as they
move about one another in a small room tossing two basketballs back and
Our beliefs are buffeted by a host of these and additional
cognitive biases that I will briefly mention here (in alphabetical order):
Authority bias: the tendency to value the opinions of an authority, especially
in the evaluation of something we know little about. Bandwagon effect: the
tendency to hold beliefs that other people in your social group hold because of
the social reinforcement provided. Barnum effect: the tendency to treat vague
and general descriptions of personality as highly accurate and specific.
Believability bias: the tendency to evaluate the strength of an argument based
on the believability of its conclusion. Clustering illusion: the tendency to
see clusters of patterns that, in fact, can be the result of randomness; a form
of patternicity. Confabulation bias: the tendency to conflate memories with
imagination and other people’s accounts as one’s own. Consistency bias: the
tendency to recall one’s past beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors as resembling
present beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors more than they actually do.
Expectation bias / experimenter bias: the tendency for observers and especially
for scientific experimenters to notice, select, and publish data that agree
with their expectations for the outcome of an experiment, and to not notice,
discard, or disbelieve data that appear to conflict with those experimental
expectations. False-consensus effect: the tendency for people to overestimate
the degree to which others agree with their beliefs or that will go along with
them in a behavior. Halo effect: the tendency for people to generalize one
positive trait of a person to all the other traits of that person. Herd bias:
the tendency to adopt the beliefs and follow the behaviors of the majority of
members in a group in order to avoid conflict. Illusion of control: the
tendency for people to believe that they can control or at least influence
outcomes that most people cannot control or influence. Illusory correlation:
the tendency to assume that a causal connection (correlation) exists between
two variables; another form of patternicity. In-group bias: the tendency for
people to value the beliefs and attitudes of those whom they perceive to be
fellow members of their group, and to discount the beliefs and attitudes of
those whom they perceive to be members of a different group. Just-world bias: the
tendency for people to search for things that the victim of an unfortunate
event might have done to deserve it. Negativity bias: the tendency to pay
closer attention and give more weight to negative events, beliefs, and
information than to positive. Normalcy bias: the tendency to discount the
possibility of a disaster that has never happened before. Not-invented-here
bias: the tendency to discount the value of a belief or source of information
that does not come from within. Primacy effect: the tendency to notice,
remember, and assess as more valuable initial events more than subsequent
Projection bias: the tendency to assume that others share the
same or similar beliefs, attitudes, and values, and to overestimate the
probability of others’ behaviors based on our own behaviors. Recency effect:
the tendency to notice, remember, and assess as more valuable recent events
more than earlier events. Rosy retrospection bias: the tendency to remember
past events as being more positive than they actually were. Self-fulfilling
prophecy: the tendency to believe in ideas and to behave in ways that conform
to expectations for beliefs and actions. Stereotyping or generalization bias:
the tendency to assume that a member of a group will have certain
characteristics believed to represent the group without having actual
information about that particular member. Trait-ascription bias: the tendency
for people to assess their own personality, behavior, and beliefs as more
variable and less dogmatic
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