The Believing Brain

Michael Shermer, “The Believing Brain: How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce them as Truths” Henry Holt & Co., 2011, 344 pp

Michael Shermer's presents a comprehensive theory based on evolution on how beliefs are formed in this book that I recommend for everyone. Shermer presents a convincing case that 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.

Shermer demonstrates why science is the best tool ever devised to determine whether or not a belief matches reality. Shermer is a skeptic: He simply does not believe a knowledge claim until sufficient evidence is presented to reject the null hypothesis (that a knowledge claim is not true until proven otherwise).

My Notes:

Pg. 2: What we want to believe based on emotions and what we should believe based on evidence do not always coincide. Shermer is a skeptic not because he does not want to believe, but because he wants to know. How can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true and what is actually true? The answer is science. (Not all agree; a 2009 poll revealed that more people believe in angels and the devil than believe in the theory of evolution.)

Pg. 36: The Enlightenment ideal of Homo rationalis has us sitting down before a table of facts, weighing them in the balance pro and con, and then employing logic and reason to determine which set of facts best supports this or that theory. This is not at all how we form beliefs. What happens is that the facts of the world are filtered by our brains through the colored lenses of worldviews, paradigms, theories, hypotheses, conjectures, hunches, biases, and prejudices we have accumulated through living. We then sort through the facts and select those that confirm what we already believe and ignore or rationalize away those that contradict our beliefs.

Pg. 60: Evolution has created a default in us to assume that all patterns are real; that is, assume that all rustles in the grass are dangerous predators and not the wind. This is the basis for the evolution of all forms of patternicity, including superstition and magical thinking. This is not just a theory to explain why people believe weird things. It is a theory to explain why people believe things. This is nothing more than association learning, and all animals do it.

Pg. 164: Worldwide, there are about 10,000 distinct religions, each one of which may be further subdivided and classified. Christians, for example, may be apportioned among about 34,000 different denominations. Eighty-four percent of the world’s population belongs to some form of organized religion. Christians dominate at around 2 billion adherents (with Catholics accounting for half of these), Muslims come in at a little more than a billion, Hindus at around 850 million, Buddhist at almost 400 million.

Pg. 168: Your culture may dictate which god to believe in and which religion to adhere to, but the belief in a supernatural agent who operates in the world as an indispensable part of a social group is universal to all cultures because it is hardwired in the brain, a conclusion enhanced by studies on identical twins separated at birth and raised in different environments.’

Pg. 186: Religious faith and belief in God have adaptive evolutionary explanations. Religion is a social institution that evolved to reinforce group cohesion and moral behavior. It is an integral mechanism of human culture to encourage altruism, reciprocal altruism, and indirect altruism, and to reveal the level of commitment to cooperate and reciprocate among members of a social community. Believing in God provides an explanation for our universe, our world, and ourselves; it explains where we came from, why we are here, and where we are going. God is also the ultimate enforcer of the rules, the final arbiter of moral dilemmas, and the pinnacle object of commitment.

Pg. 241: In order for there to be social harmony society needs to have in place a system that both encourages generosity and punishes free riding. There are two such systems in the modern world—religion and government—and both arose about five thousand to seven thousand years ago to meet the needs of social control and political harmony when small bands and tribes of hunter-gatherers, fishermen, and herders coalesced into much larger chiefdoms and states of agriculturalists, craftsmen, and tradesmen. When populations became too large for informal means of social control (such as gossip and shunning), religion and government evolved as social watchdogs and enforcers of the rules.

Pg. 280: Patternicity ensures that we will seek and find patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise. Agenticity drives us to infuse those patterns with meaning and intentional agents to explain why things happen as the do. The thesis of this book is that beliefs come first, the explanations for the beliefs follow. Only through science can we determine which patterns are true and which are false.