The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer - Part 1

The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 148

  May 28, 2017 

Book 45 - The Believing Brain - From Ghosts and God
to Politics and Conspiracies - How We Construct Beliefs
and Reinforce them as Truths
Michael Shermer (2011)
 Part 1 - pages 1-
Reading Time - 1 hour

Another book that is not on my reading list but that looked intriguing. This book seemed like a natural follow-up to the Nonsense book by Jamie Holmes. The premise of this current book is that beliefs come first and explanations follow later. Beliefs form for a variety of reasons in a variety of environments. Our perceptions about reality are dependent on the beliefs that we hold about it. We look around us and find patterns and then infuse them with meaning based on our beliefs. Even more so... we look for and find evidence to confirm our beliefs. The tricky thing is... we form models of the world and think that they are the absolute truth but... there could be other models that explain the world equally well.

The author is a self-acknowledged Skeptic... and doesn't believe in otherworldly forces. No angels, no ghosts, no God, no aliens. Which makes me wonder... based on his own arguments... if he doesn't believe in otherworldly forces then naturally he won't look for evidence of them... he won't be able to seeing them. It's kind of a circular argument for him... but I'll see what else he has to say.

He does tell an interesting story about some researchers who pretended that they had had an auditory hallucination (heard voices). They were admitted to psych wards where they acted perfectly normally. The psych ward doctors interpreted their normal behaviours as evidence of crazyness because the doctors believed that the patients were crazy. What you believe is what you see...

He gives three personal stories at the start of the book - one of a guy who heard a voice from the Source, one of a Dr. Collins who went from atheist to theist, and one for the author himself, how in his teens he converted to Christianity and then left it. I don't really think that his story is a great example of a believer becoming a non-believer. Someone who is a believer for a few years doesn't have the depth of belief as someone who has been a believer since childhood. I have to admit the author is annoying me and I've been stuck on reading the next section for a couple of weeks now... we'll see if this blog can get me going again. I'm hoping it gets a bit more general... we'll see.