August 8, 2017--The Believing Brain

Some of us the other morning were talking about the speech Donald Trump gave last week at a campaign-style rally in West Virginia.

He trotted out his best red-meat one-liners, including how everything going wrong in America is Hillary Clinton's fault. He also took undeserved credit for the run-up of the stock market. Then, he didn't fail to mention that he won the election by "the biggest" margin in American history. This in spite of the fact that Hillary received about 3.0 million more popular votes than he. And he didn't stifle the "lock-her-up" chants. It was like September 2016 all over again.

Ed wondered, "How can he get 20, 30 thousand people to turn out for this silliness?"

"And," Rona said, "to be able to get away with the lie that he won in a landslide?"

I said, and by doing so stirred the pot, "In the spirit of fairness, how does Bernie Sanders still attract tens of thousands to his rallies where his very-educated followers let him get away with proposing policies like free colleges tuition even though anyone having taken Economics 101 knows his numbers don't add up?"

"I'm not fond of the comparison," Ed said, "But I get your point." He is politically progressive but not an ideologue.

"I am coming to conclude," I said, "that it's all about belief. How people are substantially hardwired to believe. To believe myths and religious teaching, ideologies, the supernatural, the paranormal, conspiracy theories, fake news, and even flying saucers."

Ed said, "I've heard you opine about that late night radio talkshow you listen to, Coast to Coast, which is amazingly on more than 600 stations, where guest frequently talk about being abducted by space aliens."

"Again," I pushed, "it's not just the less well educated who have strong beliefs not based on facts or evidence. That's why it's interesting to read about how cognitive scientists, including neurologists, are coming to conclude that all humans have a built-in propensity to believe things that are not verifiable."

Rona said, "You're not talking about those who think there are anatomical differences in the brains of liberals and conservatives?"

"Not this time," I said, "I had done some reading about that last year but, though it was in its own way engaging, especially to liberals because it made us seem by nature smarter than conservatives, ultimately it wasn't persuasive. But I recently read Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain, and that marshaled a lot of credible evidence that is both biological and cultural."

"Sounds interesting," Ed said, "I should take a look at it."

"You can borrow my copy," I said, "But in the meantime, when I get home I'll send you a blurb about it and then you can decide if you want to read it."

When I got home I sent Ed the following from Shermer--

We form our beliefs for a variety of subjective, personal, 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 follow. [My italics]  

Then from a review--

Dr. Shermer also provides the neuroscience behind our beliefs. The brain is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through our senses the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning. The first process Dr. Shermer calls patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data. The second process he calls agenticity: the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency. 

We can't help believing. Our brains evolved to connect the dots of our world into meaningful patterns that explain why things happen. 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. Round and round the process goes in a positive feedback loop of belief confirmation. Dr. Shermer outlines the various cognitive tools our brains engage to reinforce our beliefs as truths and to insure that we are always right. [Italics added]

The next time I saw Ed he asked if he could borrow the book.