Using sensory data that flow in through the senses, the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning, forming beliefs. (I sucked up every words in certain parts). Any believer may find this book pretty damning to his beliefs. You get a hit (a reinforcement) and your brain gets a hit of dopamine. We fall in love because our children need us! First we decide to believe, then the evidence collected tends to support what we believe. show more The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths: Shermer, Founding Publisher Michael: Amazon.nl How? The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power. The Believing Brain is divided into four parts. In The Believing Brain skeptic leader Michael Shermer gives a highly readable, well researched explanation as to why people are drawn to believe things that aren’t (and are) true. Refresh and try again. This book definitely did not dissapoint. I don't think it's that he convinced me, i think it's that i already held those beliefs going into it, and as the book proclaims repeatedly, i as a human being pay special attention to arguments that support what i already believe. Agenticity is the story we overlay on the patterns. Every human is a decendence of a creature who mastered the pattern recognition. Error rating book. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. Further, it is instructive to know that such hormone-induced neural pathways are exclusive to monogamous pair-bonded species as an evolutionary adaptation for the long-term care of helpless infants. This book has changed so much in me. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.”, “We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with percepts. No brain, no mind. The Believing Brain - by Michael Shermer Everyone gets something different out of a book. We often have the b. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. First we decide to believe, then the evidence collected tends to support what we believe. I have to admit at the beginning that I have a significantly pro-skeptic bias. In one study, for example, they compared twenty self-professed believers in ghosts, gods, spirits, and conspiracies to twenty self-professed skeptics of such claims. Come check out what I'm reading on my GoodReads page! Try Prime Hello, Sign in Account & Lists Sign in Account & Lists Orders Try Prime Basket. JFK, RFK, and MLK Jr.—alphabet conspiracies. Simply put, beliefs come first and explanations for beliefs follow. Shermer starts off with anecdotes and then goes into the very specific. I really liked this book and I agreed with most everything in it, and that made me rather uncomfortable just because of what the book is about. Trust no one. The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies by Michael Shermer, If you have read Shermer's book or topics such as: scientific skepticism, cosmology, neuroscience, cognitive biases... a large part of this one certainly feels familiar. “The following tale of alien encounters is true. He insists on science when we talk of god but embraces the teat of libertarian capitalism because it warms him, I guess. —ISAAC ASIMOV, THE RELATIVITY OF WRONG, 1989”, “Even unrelated members of a clan who exhibit such positive attributes trigger in our brains a moral pattern: (A) Og was nice to me, so (B) I should be nice to Og; and (C) if I help Og, (D) Og will return the favor. Welcome back. The first process I call patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data. But, to be honest, some parts of it were so mundane and I couldn't understand them very well and, hence, the 4 stars rating. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. 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.” When I took breaks of just 1 or 2 weeks, I had to start all over again because I couldn't really retain all that information for too long. New year! In another experiment, real and scrambled words were flashed. ESP and psi. Bigfoot and Loch Ness. What he nails, he nails. [PDF] The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct 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. May 24th 2011 All The postmodernist belief in the”, “Of all the chemical transmitter substances sloshing around in your brain, it appears that dopamine may be the most directly related to the neural correlates of belief. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of, Published This book has been on my Kindle for ages and in December 2020 I finally got round to reading it. These are the pages where the author describes belief as stemming from what he calls patternicity and agenticity. The opinions here are mine only. This is an excellent, comprehensive examination of the things we believe, and why. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”22”, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. These are the pages where the author describes belief as stemming from what he calls patternicity and agenticity. Dopamine, in fact, is critical in association learning and the reward system of the brain that Skinner discovered through his process of operant conditioning, whereby any behavior that is reinforced tends to be repeated. 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