The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer - Part 2

The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 149

  May 29, 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 2 - pages 56-110
Reading Time - 1 hour

This section was fairly interesting. The author talks about Patternicity - how our brains are set up to see patterns in things, even if we are wrong. It's a leftover from our days in the savannah when... if we heard a rustle in the tall grass, we needed to quickly make a decision as to what caused the rustle. If it was just the wind... no worries. But if we thought it was the wind and it was a tiger... that's bad. Better to err on the side of caution and interpret the rustle as a tiger. Better to be wrong and safe rather than be wrong and dead! Our brains are set up as believing engines, as recognition machines. We have a tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful things and in meaningless noise. Our default is to assume that all patterns are real. People believe weird things because of an evolved need to believe non-weird things.

Some things can make us more susceptible to superstition though... if we feel we don't have control over our life and if we are in danger... we tend to be more superstitious. We don't like uncertainty, so we will gain it perceptually. Rather than saying "I don't know what caused that".... we will create certainty... "a ghost caused that".

We also tend to ascribe agenticity to things. There is a difference between an inanimate force (like a tornado) and an intentional agent. We tend to infuse patterns with meaning, intention and agency. We figure that a ghost did it... or aliens... or a secret government conspiracy... or God... or whatever. We tend to believe that objects, animals and people contain an essence. Ask a bunch of people if they would accept a heart transplant from a murderer... and... most would say "no". We have a belief that something of the murderer lingers in the heart.