The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths
- ISBN-10
- 1429972610
- ISBN-13
- 9781429972611
- Category
- Psychology
- Pages
- 400
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2011-05-24
- Publisher
- Macmillan
- Author
- Michael Shermer
Description
The Believing Brain is bestselling author Michael Shermer's comprehensive and provocative theory on how beliefs are born, formed, reinforced, challenged, changed, and extinguished. In this work synthesizing thirty years of research, psychologist, historian of science, and the world's best-known skeptic 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. From sensory data flowing in through the senses, the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning. Our brains connect the dots of our world into meaningful patterns that explain why things happen, and these patterns become beliefs. Once beliefs are formed the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive-feedback loop of belief confirmation. Shermer outlines the numerous cognitive tools our brains engage to reinforce our beliefs as truths. Interlaced with his theory of belief, Shermer provides countless real-world examples of how this process operates, from politics, economics, and religion to conspiracy theories, the supernatural, and the paranormal. Ultimately, he demonstrates why science is the best tool ever devised to determine whether or not a belief matches reality.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2012-06-07
- 464 pages
- Paperback
- Hachette UK
-
- 2012-06-01
- 464 pages
- Paperback
- Robinson Publishing
-
- 2011-05-24
- 385 pages
- Paperback
- Times Books
Similar books
-
Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time
By Michael ShermerCambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964. . 1871. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. 2 vols. London: J. Murray. . [1883]. In Box 106, Darwin archives, Cambridge University Library. Darwin, M., and B. Wowk.
-
Believing: The Neuroscience of Fantasies, Fears, and Convictions
By Michael McGuireCombining personal anecdotes and the latest research, Dr. McGuire takes the novel approach of focusing on the central and critical role of brain systems and the ways in which they interact with the environment to create and maintain beliefs ...
-
Brains, Buddhas, and Believing: The Problem of Intentionality in Classical Buddhist and Cognitive-Scientific Philosophy of Mind
By Dan ArnoldAiming to complicate this story, Dan Arnold confronts a significant obstacle to popular attempts at harmonizing classical Buddhist and modern scientific thought: since most Indian Buddhists held that the mental continuum is uninterrupted by ...
-
How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science
By Michael ShermerA crane, in contrast, is a subprocess or special feature of a design process that can be demonstrated to permit the local speeding up of the basic, slow process of natural selection, and that can be demonstrated to be itself the ...
-
How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God
By Michael ShermerMeanwhile, Yellow Bird, Big Foot's holy man, launched into the Ghost Dance, reminding his men that the shirts they wore would be impenetrable by the soldiers' bullets. The officers ordered the Indians to strip, hoping to reveal hidden ...
-
The Moral Arc: How Science Makes Us Better People
By Michael ShermerIt's a point well made in The Arc of War by the political scientists Jack Levy and William Thompson, who begin by adopting a continuum rather than a categorical style of reasoning: “War is a persistent feature of world politics, ...
-
Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief
By Andrew Newberg, M.D., Eugene G. D'AquiliIn Why God Won't Go Away, Newberg and d'Aquili document their pioneering explorations in the field of neurotheology, an emerging discipline dedicated to understanding the complex relationship between spirituality and the brain.
-
The Republican War on Science
By Chris MooneyAnd in the long run, such evidence could serve as a key device for overturning Roe v. Wade. But despite his own opposition to abortion, Koop felt that prolifers had gone on a fishing expedition. In a letter to Reagan declining to ...
-
Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist
By Christof KochConfessions of a Romantic Reductionist Christof Koch. CONFESSIONS OF A ROMANTIC REDUCTIONIST CHRBTOFKOCH Consciousness Consciousness Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist Christof Koch The. CONSCIOUSNESS Front Cover.
-
Skeptic: Viewing the World with a Rational Eye
By Michael ShermerAnother option involves a multiple universes model of cosmology in which you travel back in time to a different but closely parallel universe to our own, as portrayed in Michael Crichton's novel Timeline, where the characters journey to ...