The Believing Brain

From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies - How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

By: Michael Shermer

Narrated by: Michael Shermer

Length: 13 hrs and 34 mins

Publisher's summary

In this, his magnum opus, the world’s best known skeptic and critical thinker, Dr. Michael Shermer—founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and perennial monthly columnist (“Skeptic”) for Scientific American—presents his comprehensive theory on how beliefs are born, formed, nourished, reinforced, challenged, changed, and extinguished. This book synthesizes Dr. Shermer’s 30 years of research to answer the question of how and why we believe what we do in all aspects of our lives, from our suspicions and superstitions to our politics, economics, and social beliefs.

In this book Dr. Shermer is interested in more than just why people believe weird things, or why people believe this or that claim, but in why people believe anything at all. His thesis is straightforward: We form our beliefs for a variety of subjective, personal, emotional, and psychological reasons in the context of environments created by family, friends, colleagues, culture, and society at large; after forming our beliefs, we then defend, justify, and rationalize them with a host of intellectual reasons, cogent arguments, and rational explanations. Beliefs come first, explanations for beliefs follow.

Dr. Shermer also explains the neuroscience behind our beliefs. The brain 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. These meaningful patterns become beliefs. Once beliefs are formed, the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which adds an emotional boost of further confidence in the beliefs and thereby accelerates the process of reinforcing them—and round and round the process goes in a positive feedback loop of belief confirmation. Dr. Shermer outlines the numerous cognitive tools our brains engage to reinforce our beliefs as truths and to insure that we are always right.

©2011 Michael Shermer (P)2011 Michael Shermer

Critic reviews

“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, author of Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science)

“ 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, author of The Drunkard’s Walk and The Grand Design with Stephen Hawking)

Average

This book leads you to believe that you will dive deep into the brian, how it acts and how you learn. But in reality it teaches you crazy things that people once believed and why they believed it.
"Science is the way to understanding life," is the moral of this book. If you already know that this book may be a waste of your attention.

Very thorough treatment - well reasoned

Longtime listener of the Science Salon podcast, I almost feel like Michael Shermer is an old friend, certainly a familiar voice. Here, he very systematically and thoroughly develops the argument for how a "Believing Brain" leads us humans to attempt to substantiate those beliefs, too often wrongly. As others, such as Karl Popper have said, humans develop beliefs or theories, if you like, then defend them. To use sound and reasonable judgement to defend or fail to defend those beliefs leads to progress. Unfortunately, we are very susceptible to failures to reason soundly. This leads to getting stuck in beliefs that must be defended with false premises or other fallacies. I recommend Shermer's Believing Brain for all who want to better understand false beliefs and how we get stuck in them.
The genre of this book could be Psychology, Philosophy, and Self Help.

Balanced & comprehensive within its scope

I expected this to be somewhat of a diatribe against having a belief in God.

I was impressed by the high degree of professional integrity. He constrained his personal biases primarily to anecdotal and incidental comments. Instead, he employed an abundance of scientific studies regarding how our brains function to deceive us and then deceive us about much we have been deceived.

This book is a worthy read regardless of your personal beliefs about God. If you actually use your brain to think about anything, then you would benefit from this material.

The ending was best

Unlike The Moral Arc, Shermer gave this a strong ending. Arc went into his "feelings" and "beliefs" about libertarianism at the end, rather than a "purely" scientific realm. Trying to "prove" libertarianism is somewhat farfetched after all the books I've read on both sides. It's not like there is any consensus as there is in the scientific community for Global Warming... I was more excited about science in Believing Brain at the end. Overall it was a good learning experience. RTC

Insightful and informative

Michael Shermer provides a detailed look at why the brain believes and how we rationalize those beliefs. He articulates the evolutionary causes and provides a compelling argument for why religious beliefs, conspiracy theories, alien encounters, and any percieved paranormal or supernatural event are likely the ramifications of our brain's superior pattern processing ability, cognitive biases, and its lack of error detection. Thumbs Up!

Excellent resource for the spiritually curious

Michael Shermer has done the metaphysical Community worldwide a great service by offering this detailed book on Superstition brain science critical thinking and the various pitfalls of dualistic belief

Familiar Territory In A Succinct Presentation

If you've read some of Michael Shermer's other books, mainly How People Believe, then a lot of this book will seem like familiar territory. It even has the same hypothetical thought experiment for patternicity (it's a good thought experiment, so it's well worth repeating). Likewise, if you've read other works on the psychology of belief, again there's familiar territory covered. There's nothing quite revolutionary or revelatory highlighted, just a solid case told in a very enticing way.

It's in its personal approach that I feel the book is successful. While treading dangerously close to the anecdotal, the whole narrative is rife with examples highlighting the theory in action; akin to the approach in the sublime Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me). And by subjecting his own beliefs to the model, it was a nice way of putting his own biases under the spotlight. The result is that the theory put forward is memorable and applicable in real-world cases. The chapter on political beliefs, for example, should serve as a sobering reminder of just how arbitrary much of the political discourse truly is. And the account of Francis Collins will hopefully serve to remind us in the sceptical community that the difference between believer and non-believer has nothing to do with stupidity.

In terms of narration, it was generally good though there are a few moments where Shermer seems to get tongue-twisted and the flow breaks, and a few words are mispronounced. But aside from that, I have no complaints.

exactly

absolutely spot on. great read, outstanding listen. I ended up buying the hardcover this was so great.

Great material. Not-so-great narration.

Michael Shermer is a very smart man. He gives great interviews and speeches --but that doesn't mean he should have narrated his own book. (Just because you CAN read doesn't mean you should do it aloud.)

The production is kind of shoddy too --you can hear pages being turned; he mispronounces a few words and slightly stumbles over others; and then there's the obnoxious use of music that is used to introduce and end chapters.

Aside from those flaws, it's a very informative book. Like I said: Shermer is a VERY smart man and he does a very thorough job of presenting his research and material. I would recommend it.

I Can See Clearly Now....

Great listen. Clear, concise, contemporary and relevant, but doesn't take itself too seriously. It's informative without being preachy. I am changing my list of who I would MOST LIKE TO HAVE LUNCH WITH...Michael Shermer is now on my A-lst.