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The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths Paperback – Illustrated, August 7, 2012
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The Believing Brain is bestselling author Michael Shermer's comprehensive and provocative theory on how beliefs are born, formed, reinforced, challenged, changed, and extinguished
Synthesizing thirty years of research, psychologist and science historian Michael Shermer upends the traditional thinking about how humans form beliefs about the world. Simply put, beliefs come first and explanations for beliefs follow. The brain, Shermer argues, is a belief engine. Using sensory data that flow in through the senses, the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning, forming beliefs. Once beliefs are formed the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, accelerating the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive-feedback loop.
In The Believing Brain, Shermer provides countless real-world examples of how this process operates, from politics, economics, and religion to conspiracy theories, the supernatural, and the paranormal. And ultimately, he demonstrates why science is the best tool ever devised to determine whether or not our beliefs match reality.
Review
“Michael Shermer has long been one of our most committed champions of scientific thinking in the face of popular delusion. In The Believing Brain, he has written a wonderfully lucid, accessible, and wide-ranging account of the boundary between justified and unjustified belief. We have all fallen more deeply in his debt.” ―Sam Harris, author of the New York Times bestsellers The Moral Landscape, Letter to a Christian Nation, and The End of Faith.
“The physicist Richard Feynman once said that the easiest person to fool is yourself, and as a result he argued that as a scientist one has to be especially careful to try and find out not only what is right about one's theories, but what might also be wrong with them. If we all followed this maxim of skepticism in everyday life, the world would probably be a better place. But we don't. In this book Michael Shermer lucidly describes why and how we are hard wired to 'want to believe'. With a narrative that gently flows from the personal to the profound, Shermer shares what he has learned after spending a lifetime pondering the relationship between beliefs and reality, and how to be prepared to tell the difference between the two.” ―Lawrence M. Krauss, Foundation Professor and Director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University and author of The Physics of Star Trek, Quantum Man and A Universe from Nothing
“Michael Shermer has long been one of the world's deepest thinkers when it comes to explaining where our beliefs come from, and he brings it all together in this important, engaging, and ambitious book. 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. This is an entertaining and thoughtful exploration of the beliefs that shape our lives.” ―Paul Bloom, author of How Pleasure Works
“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. 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.” ―Dr. Leonard Mlodinow, physicist and author of The Drunkard's Walk and The Grand Design (with Stephen Hawking)
“We might think that we learn how the world works, because we take the time to observe and understand it. Shermer says that's just not so. We just believe things, and then make our world fit our perceptions. Believe me; you don't have to take my word for it. Just try clearing some space in your own Believing Brain.” ―Bill Nye, the Science Guy ©, Executive Director of The Planetary Society
“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, Chair of Developmental Psychology, Bristol University and author of Supersense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable
About the Author
- Print length385 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateAugust 7, 2012
- Dimensions5.55 x 1.65 x 8.2 inches
- ISBN-101250008808
- ISBN-13978-1250008800
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- Publisher : St. Martin's Griffin (August 7, 2012)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 385 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1250008808
- ISBN-13 : 978-1250008800
- Item Weight : 12.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.55 x 1.65 x 8.2 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #220,214 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #415 in Medical Cognitive Psychology
- #724 in Cognitive Psychology (Books)
- #1,161 in Biology (Books)
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About the author

Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the host of the Science Salon Podcast, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University where he teaches Skepticism 101. For 18 years he was a monthly columnist for Scientific American. He is the author of New York Times bestsellers Why People Believe Weird Things and The Believing Brain, Why Darwin Matters, The Science of Good and Evil, The Moral Arc, and Heavens on Earth. His new book is Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist.
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Shermer spends quite a bit of time talking about the underlying mechanisms of the brain, which is very helpful for people who haven't kept up with neurophysiology, but I can't help feeling that unless the reader accepts the central premise, these sections don't add to the persuasiveness of his argument. Far more revealing - yet somewhat hastily covered - was the discovery that believing requires very little neural effort while critically evaluating information requires significantly more. In this tiny nugget lies perhaps the critical reason why so many people believe in gods and goblins and gouls and ghosts and all the rest of the magic-mind realm: it's much easier to believe than to think something through. That's why people who grow up in India believe in Shiva and Kali and Krishna and Ram, why people who grow up in Tennessee believe in Jesus, and why people who grow up in Arabia believe in Muhammed: it's simply the easiest mental option given the environment.
Also, Shermer doesn't really spend time showing how our brains are wired up for certain types of thought but not others. This lack of 360 thinking (because there were no environmental pressures to cause such thinking to be positively selected for over the eons) means we perpetually make simple logical blunders. For example, the statement "All birds have wings; crows have wings; therefore crows are birds" is generally accepted at first glance by most people. Yet it's a complete mistake (to see why, just substitute the word "bees" or "bats" in place of "crows" in the sentence). We make this type of mistake continually when we interact with the world around us. Coupled to what Shermer calls "agenticity" (the inference of some active agent behind a phenomenon, which results from the fact we're social animals and need to be attuned to what the other members of the group are feeling and thinking) we then make elimentary mistakes such as thinking that thunder is the outward sign of a deity's displeasure, or that rain is somehow signalling sadness. The powerful nature of such errors is still with us: just think of a horror movie in which thunder signals danger, or a romance movie in which rain invariably accompanies the post-breakup solitary walk.
Like many well-meaning people, Shermer tries to accommmodate religion, arguing that it's benign if it's something that helps people make it through life. Unfortunately religion (which is, formally, the organization of superstitions into a codex) may help some people "make it through life" but it's generally at the expense of others. Shermer signally fails to understand that religions are necessarily regressive because their core premise is that their holy book/rock scratchings/oral tales are supposedly "from the mouth of god(s)" and therefore infallible. Consequently the notions of discovery and progress are antithetical to religion. This is why, for example, the Catholic church systematically destroyed scientific advances by burning Giordano Bruno and threatening Galileo with instruments of torture. It's why contemporary Islam has more in common with stone-age societies than with any modern civilization. Oil-rich kingdoms may buy the products of advanced civilizations but they are incapable of creating anything for themselves because they are trapped in a pre-scientific mentality that is utterly unconducive to any kind of real-world accomplishments. Seen more clearly, religion is not merely a harmless psychological crutch: it's a profoundly divisive, restrictive, and discouragingly infantile cognitive error. It is an impediment to true civilization and to civilized behavior. Dawkins is far more accurate in his summation of religion than Shermer, who perhaps has insufficient exposure to the real impact of religious impulse across history and around the globe today. Shermer also makes the mistake of thinking that perhaps religion has adaptive benefits in terms of group cohesion, but there are two major flaws with this notion. The first is that group selection is impossible; the second is that for every "happy congregation" there's a Jonestown, a Waco, and of course the ever-popular Taliban.
The other things missing from Shermer's informative and entertaining book are (i) a discussion of how the human brain isn't wired up to perform consistency checking (e.g. if I believe A and I believe B, are they mutually consistent or mutually contradictory?) and (ii) how all superstitions and religions fail utterly to tell us anything meaningful about the real world. To elaborate: while all religions have their creation myths and their mummy gods and daddy gods, not a single one has ever revealed any underlying truth about the universe. No religion ever imparted knowledge of DNA or cosmology or chemistry or physics or anything else. They are all impoverished products of banal minds, repetitive in the extreme and entirely predictable. Once you've seen a representative sample of a few, you've seen them all. Only the clothes, rituals, and degree of violence may be slightly different. If there really was some kind of magical creature imparting wisdom to our species (which is quite funny to think about - imagine a person trying to teach a worm morality or quantum physics) then why, over all the millenia and over all the many different kinds of religion, has there never been a single example of a valid revelation? Oh, I forgot: "god moves in mysterious ways."
One final small criticism is that Shermer is very USA-centric. His examples of political and moral "positions" only make sense in a very limited American context. He automatically assumes what exists in the USA is generally found elsewhere, which is wildly untrue. His next book might benefit from time spent in equitorial Africa, the Scandinavian countries, the Amazon and somewhere like VietNam or Laos. And his penultimate chapter (on the origins of the universe) misses the key point which is simply this: religious people say "how did the universe get here if it wasn't made by god?" and then sit back as if this was some sort of actual logical argument. In reality, of course, it's totally empty because if you say, "OK, god made the universe" then the very next question is "so where did god come from?" To which religious people say something like "god always existed." Although this position demonstrates an infantile inability to reason at even the most basic level, the conclusion is evident: invoking "god" solves no problem whatsoever. It's merely a pointless regression, like the question of what was underneath the turtle that Atlas stood on while supporting the Earth on his shoulder. In his desire not to offend religious people, Shermer simply omits the conclusion altogether, preferring to meander off into multiverse theory which doesn't actually accomplish much more than another regression anyway.
Anyhow, aside from these minor criticisms, for anyone looking to understand why the vast majority of people believe in things for which there never has been the slightest shred of evidence, Shermer's book is an excellent primer and a useful compliment to the works of Richard Dawkins, who takes it as a priori that only an idiot would be a believer. Shermer shows, valuably, why intelligence and belief are two different things (back to the inability to do consistency checking) and therefore how American scientists, for example, can believe in magical creatures for which there is zero evidence yet at the same time continue to make contributions towards genuine real-world problems.
"The Believing Brain" is a fantastic and ambitious book that explains the nature of beliefs. Mr. Shermer provides his theory of belief and with great expertise and skill provides compelling arguments and practical examples in explaining how the process of belief works. He applies his theory to a wide range of types of beliefs and does so with mastery. This excellent 400 page-book is composed of the following four parts: Part I. Journeys of Belief, Part II. The Biology of Belief, Part III. Belief in Things Unseen, and Part IV. Belief in Things Seen.
Positives:
1. A fascinating topic in the hands of a master of his craft.
2. Well-written, well-researched, engaging and accessible book. Bravo!
3. Great, logical format. Good use of illustrations.
4. Great use of popular culture to convey sophisticated concepts in an accessible manner.
5. Establishes his theory early on and then proceeds like a great architect building his masterpiece.
6. Great quotes from many great minds, including some of his own, "What I want to believe based on emotions and what I should believe based on evidence do not always coincide. I'm a skeptic not because I do not want to believe but because I want to know".
7. Answers the question of "Why we believe" to complete satisfaction.
8. A thorough explanation on what the brain is.
9. The first of four parts of this book starts off with three distinctly different routes to belief, including his own revealing journey to beliefs.
10. The concept of patternicity defined. A great take at why our brains evolved to assume that all patterns are real.
11. Insightful and thought-provoking, consider the following "The problem we face is that superstition and belief in magic are millions of years old, whereas science, with its methods of controlling for intervening variables to circumvent false positives, is only a few hundred years old".
12. Where would we be without evolution? Great use of science from the best scientific minds.
13. The concept of agenticity defined and how patternicity and agenticity form the cognitive basis for various "spiritualisms".
14. The evidence that brain and mind are one is now overwhelming. Great examples in support of the aforementioned assertion.
15. Great tidbits of knowledge throughout, "what people remember happening rarely corresponds to what actually happened".
16. Provides four great explanations for the sensed-presence effect found in the brain. With plenty of fascinating examples.
17. The mind in its proper context.
18. In order to understand beliefs you must understand neurons.
19. Dopamine...the belief drug. A lot of interesting facts.
20. Great explanation on why dualism is intuitive and monism counterintuitive.
21. The theory of mind and agenticity.
22. Enlightening look at why belief comes quickly and naturally while skepticism is slow and unnatural.
23. The afterlife chapter is one of my favorite chapters of this book...worth the price of admission.
24. Six solid reasons why people believe there is life after death.
25. The case for the existence of the afterlife around four lines of evidence and the thorough debunking that follows.
26. Compelling explanations for Near-Death Experiences (NDEs).
27. Ditto for Out-of-Body Experiences (OBEs).
28. A compelling explanation of, why do so many people believe in God?
29. Three lines of evidence that supernatural beliefs are hardwired into our brains. Great stuff.
30. The compelling evidence that humans created gods and not vice versa.
31. Great explanation on the difference between agnosticism versus atheism.
32. Mr. Shermer's last law, an interesting take. I will not spoil it here.
33. Interesting tidbits on Einstein who is always fascinating.
34. The supernatural in proper context.
35. Science as the best tool ever in devising how the world works.
36. Interesting chapter on aliens.
37. Conspiracy theories and what characteristics indicate they are likely untrue.
38. Fascinating look at the 9/11 "conspiracy".
39. How conspiracies actually work.
40. Mr. Shermer even delves in the world of politics. Liberals versus conservatives.
41. A realistic visions of human nature and why it would help understand one another.
42. A dozen essentials to liberty and freedom. Democracy a different perspective.
43. Interesting look at how our brains convince us that we are always right.
44. Explanation of a series of biases: confirmation bias, hindsight bias, self-justification bias, attribution bias, sunk-coast bias, status-quo bias, anchoring bias, representative bias, inattentional blindness bias, and more...
45. Why science is the ultimate bias-detection machine.
46. Awesome belief history on exploration: Columbus, Galileo, Bacon...
47. Astronomy...beliefs and historical debates.
48. Good use of previous knowledge of biases to help understand data.
49. Red shifts and other astronomical hypotheses explained, and the photograph that changed the universe.
50. The greatest unsolved mystery.
51. Links worked great!
52. An intellectual treat from cover to cover!
Negatives:
1. Having to buy extra copies to share with close friends.
2. Having to wait for Mr. Shermer's next book.
In summary, this may be Michael Shermer's greatest book. This book feels like a labor of love in which Mr. Shermer is able to match his accumulation of prodigious knowledge and his lucid thoughts in total harmony. This book not only met my high expectations it exceeded it, I couldn't put it down. Thought-provoking, enlightening and a joy to read. I can't recommend this book enough, kudos to Mr. Shermer for a great accomplishment.
Further suggestions: " Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 " by Michio Kaku, " SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable " by Bruce M. Hood, " Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique " by Michael S. Gazzaniga, " Hardwired Behavior: What Neuroscience Reveals about Morality " by Laurence Tancredi, " Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality " by Patricia S. Churchland, " The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature " by Steven Pinker and " The Brain and the Meaning of Life " by Paul Thagard.
Top reviews from other countries
Shermers allzu plausible Thesen sind ernüchternd: Glaube ist nicht nur so alt wie die Menschheit selbst, sondern aufs Elementarste in unserer Natur verwurzelt, wie immer er sich im Alltag auch äußern mag. Nicht Fakten und Argumente prägen wirklich unsere Weltanschauung, sondern dienen letztlich nur der Rechtfertigung von Überzeugungen, die schon längst da sind. Und schließlich ist durchaus etwas daran, dass Genie und Wahnsinn manchmal nah beieinander liegen, wo doch beides oft in selben Grundlagen wurzelt und bisweilen Charaktere hervorbringt, die brillant-innovativ und abergläubisch zugleich sind.
Im ersten Abschnitt identifiziert Shermer ganz klar verschiedene neurologische Phänomene, die die Grundlage fast jeden (Aber)Glaubens stellen, zuallererst unser genetisches Programm, Muster und Akteure in unserer Umwelt zu erkennen. Evolutionsbiologisch verständlich, bedeutet beides doch im Zweifel eher das Überleben in einer Gefahrensituation, wenn die Bedrohung rechtzeitig erkannt wird. Ebendiese Mustererkennung wird schließlich zur Wurzel irrationalen Aberglaubens, wenn zufällige Korrelationen im Geiste zu Kausalitäten mutieren – von schwarzen Katzen und persönlichen Glücksbringern bis hin zur „alternativen Medizin“ -, während gleichsam der Schluss auf unsichtbare Akteure Götter, Geister und Dämonen hervorbringt. Ebenso ist der Essentialismus, das ist der Glaube an unsichtbare und potentiell übertragbare Eigenschaften von Objekten („Würden Sie die Jacke eines Serienmörders anziehen?“), tief in uns verwurzelt und wahrscheinlich evolutionär zum Schutze vor ansteckenden Keimen entstanden. Nicht zuletzt der Dualismus, der Glaube an einen vom Körper getrennten Geist, ist intuitiv in uns angelegt. So machen zwar letztlich die individuellen Ausprägungen manch einen Unterschied, doch ist letztlich kein Mensch ein rein vernünftiger, sondern jeder grundsätzlich zum Irrationalen prädestiniert. Bei aller Theorie vernachlässigt Shermer auch nicht die exemplarischen Veranschaulichungen – von seinen eigenen Erlebnissen in seiner religiösen Zeit über Halluzinationen beim Extremport bis hin zu spirituellen Erlebnissen persönlicher Bekannter und deren Rezeption.
In einem weiteren Abschnitt wendet Shermer diese Erkenntnisse auf spezifische, weit verbreitete Glaubenssätze an: Gott, Aliens, ein Leben nach dem Tod, politische Überzeugungen. So erfahren wir ganz nebensächlich nicht zuletzt etwas über das mittlerweile gut erforschte Phänomen der Schlafparalyse, dem einst die Vorstellung von Nachtmahren, heute dagegen scheinbare Entführungen durch Außerirdische entspringen, sowie die Frage, was denn eigentlich der neurologische Unterschied zwischen liberalen und konservativen Menschen ist (ein allzu interessantes Lehrstück unterschiedlicher Arten intuitiver Ethik, ohne eine Gruppe von beiden damit kategorisch disqualifizieren zu wollen). Auch klassische Formen von Wahrnehmungstäuschungen kommen zur Sprache.
All dem lässt sich nach Shermer nur mit einem Mittel begegnen: der empirischen Wissenschaft. Wie wissenschaftlicher Fortschritt funktioniert, illustriert er anhand des historischen Wandels unserer Weltbilder – von Galileo Galileis schicksalsgebeutelten Forschungen zum heliozentrischen Weltbild bis zu den Diskussionen der späteren Astronomie über die lange Zeit noch fragliche Existenz anderer Galaxien. Es ist ein interessanter wissenschaftshistorischer Abriss – für meinen Geschmack jedoch einerseits zu ausführlich und andererseits nicht pointiert genug zum ursprünglichen Zweck, der Verdeutlichung wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisgewinns.
Ohne Zweifel ist das Themenfeld, dem das Buch sich widmet, bei weitem zu groß für eine einzige Publikation, gleichsam an Theorien und Forschungen wie nennenswerten Beispielen, sodass ein Buch wie Shermers zwangsläufig unvollständig sein muss. Indes gelingt es durchaus, die zentralen Erkenntnisse moderner Wissenschaft zur Natur des (Aber)Glaubens auf den Punkt zu bringen, nicht ohne dabei Ausblicke auf zahlreiche interessante Beispiele und Nebenphänomene zu geben. In dem Maße, wie jene die Grundfesten von Religion, Politik und vor allem Menschenbild erschüttern, scheint es geradezu unvermeidlich, dieses oder ein vergleichbares Buch zu konsumieren, will man zu wirklichem Verständnis unserer Natur, Geschichte und Gegenwart gelangen.












