CFI-NYC | Michael Shermer: The Believing Brain

thank you for coming tonight Michael the door the executive director at the Center for inquiry in New York City I have the profound pleasure of introducing tonight's speaker Michael Shermer Michael Shermer is the founding publisher of skeptic magazine executive director of the skeptic Society and a monthly columnist for Scientific American he's authored more than a dozen books including why people believe in weird things the science of good and evil why Darwin matters and the mind of the market tonight he will discuss his latest work the believing brain from ghosts and gods to politics and conspiracies how we construct beliefs and reinforced them as truths Michael Shermer received his bachelor's degree in psychology from Pepperdine University his master's in experimental psychology from California State University Fullerton and did his doctorate work in the history of science at Claremont Graduate University without further ado ladies and gentlemen I give you Michael Shermer [Applause] hey everybody how we doing it's raining outside gosh so I was a few minutes late couple hours ago I had to walk from the NBC Studios back to my hotel it was like a hundred or 99 or whatever and it's humid I'm from Southern California I used to this kind of heat I mean I was sweating like Anthony Weiner in a press conference I mean it was really bad okay sorry so even Thank You page thank you Michael thank the New York skeptics and the Center for inquiry you should join them right after you subscribe to skeptic magazine seriously these are all membership supported organizations there's no big top-down huge grant givers and sugar daddies and things like that we really are a bottom-up self-organized emergent movement sort of like the Tea Partiers except we're right anyway so and but that's how it happens you know it's just people just make it happen it's it's up to all you there's no there's no magic to it pretty much every city I go to there's you know there's a skeptics in the pub and a atheist drinking club and a meetup group of humanists and so forth that's that's just no one designed that organized that it just happened a spontaneous order so but anyway so my first book was why people believe weird things and so this book is really about why people believe things . . i was just gonna call it that in fact white people believe things . but the publisher didn't think that was such a clever title so the believe me brain is what we ended up with and but i am interested in the sort of the whole big picture starting with the weird stuff which I now claim as a subset of things weird things are just a subset of things so since this is a reading I have to I'm obliged to read at least two paragraphs at the beginning and two at the end not really but so you know I just gave you a sample for what the with the reading is like and just introduced this subject this way from the prologue which is called I want to believe which is which is appropriate is on this afternoon when I was channel surfing back to the hotel the x-files was on at the Oh perfect the 1990s uber conspiracy theory television series the x-files was a decade defining and culture reflecting moshpit of UFOs extraterrestrial psychics demons monsters mutants shapeshifters serial killers paranormal phenomenon urban legends turned real corporate cabal's and government cover-ups and leakages that included a deep throat like cigarette smoking man character played by Roenick Lee by the real-life skeptic William B Davis Gillian Anderson skeptical FBI agent Dana Scully played off David Duchovny's believing character Fox Mulder who slogans became posterized pop-culture catchphrases I want to believe and the truth is out there as the show's narrative competin I'm sorry is the show's creator producer Chris Carter developed the series narrative arc Scully and Mulder came to symbolise skeptics and believers in a psychological tug of war between reality and fantasy fact and fiction story and legend so popular was the x-files that was parodied in a 1997 episode of The Simpsons entitled the Springfield files in which Homer has an alien encounter in the woods after imbibing 10 bottles of red tic beer alien abductions often involve adult beverages for some strange reason the producers ingeniously employed Leonard Nimoy to voice the intro as he once did for his post Spock run on the television mystery series in search of a 1970s non fiction version of the x-files Nimoy the following tale of alien encounters is true and by true I mean false it's all lies but they're entertaining lies and in the end isn't that the real truth the answer is No wellnot squared the postmodernist belief and the relativism of truth coupled with the clicker culture of mass media in which attention spans are measured in new york minutes leaves us with a bewildering array of truth claims packaged in infotainment units it must be true I I saw it on television the movies the internet The Twilight Zone the Outer Limits that's incredible The Sixth Sense poltergeist loose change like Geist the movie mysteries magic myths and monsters the up cult and the supernatural conspiracies and cabal's the face on Mars and aliens on earth Bigfoot in Loch Ness ESP and psi UFOs and et is OBEs and NDEs JFK RFK and MLK altered states and hypnotic regression remote viewing and astral projection Ouija boards and tarot cards astrology in palm reading acupuncture and chiropractic repressed memories and false memories talking to the dead and listening to your inner child it's all in obfuscating amalgam of theory and conjecture reality and fantasy nonfiction and science fiction cue the dramatic music darkened the backdrop cast a shaft of light across the hosts face trust no one the truth is out there I want to believe well I believe the truth is out there but that it is rarely obvious and almost never foolproof what I want to believe based on emotions and what I should believe based on evidence do not always coincide I'm a skeptic not because I do not want to believe but because I want to know how can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true in what is actually true the answer is science so this is a science book and I began the first chapter well the third chapter actually there's a several narrative stories about different belief journeys including my own and then I began with a thought experiment imagine you're a hominid on the plains of Africa three and a half million years ago your name is Lucy thank you beginning that there are some audiences in America don't get the reference you know the little hominid Australian see yeah okay like in the Gary Larson cartoon with the two australopith the seasons in the cave at the cave party and he and the guys going not feeler see so you're humming in the plains of Africa three and a half million years ago in here a rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator or is it just the wind well if you think it's a dangerous predator and it turns out it's just the wind you've made a cognitive error you've made a type 1 error false positive you thought the pattern a is connected to B is true when in fact it's not but that's a low-cost error to make relative to the other kind of error you hear a rustle in the grass and you assume that it's just the wind and turns out it's a dangerous predator congratulations your lunch you've just won a Darwin Award for taking yourself out of the gene pool early before reproducing therefore I argue there was a natural selection for us to make more type 1 false positive errors than type 2 false negative errors that is we tend to believe things are true that we hear and see that is we err on the side of assuming the patterns we find are real and that there's a probably a good natural selection argument for this anyway then I have a long section showing the mathematics of this I employ Hamilton's rule Hamilton's rule William Hamilton worked out along with Robert rivers and a few others why we would be nice to other people that is altruism the problem of cooperation in evolution why would we do this I mean wouldn't it be better if we were just nasty selfish horny monsters and just took care of ourselves and nobody else no actually if you're a social species it's it helps to it's good to help your your kin and kind because they are your genetic relations and therefore the cost you put out is paid off by the benefit of helping others and then you can expand that with reciprocal altruism and a few other social evolution tools that shows why we would be nice to either even those who are not our immediate kin in kind anyway long story short it's a cost-benefit ratio formula that's been worked out mathematically and that I apply to why we would make more of one kind of error than the other kind of error the kind of error that's low cost it doesn't take much does it cost too much to just assume everything is real usually those things don't take you out of the gene pool just picture people reading their astrology column or something like that most of the time it's you know it doesn't get you killed but it's it is certainly a superstition or a form of magical thinking and therefore I claim we evolved as propensity to believe weird things because we have to believe all sorts of things that turn out to be true and we don't have a good baloney detection module in our brain to help us always tell the difference between the true patterns and the false patterns to remember science is relatively new only a few centuries old that's what it's designed to do to tell the difference between true and false patterns our brains are not really well designed at that so I call this pattern isset II the tendency to find meaningful patterns and both meaningful and meaningless noise but not just the face of Jesus in a tortilla or the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich and those sorts of things that are rather amusing when I'm interested in is why would the brain see those sorts of things in the first place and the answer is because we have to find meaningful patterns and so those are just a subset of the important patterns so if you think about science is a pattern detection device finding new patterns is good that's how you win Nobel prizes that's how musicians design new musical styles that's how artists design new artistic styles they find new patterns that no one else has seen so I also have a long discussion about creativity and madness and pattern isset II so we tend sceptics tend to make fun of people who see these weird things and and why do they don't see the world clearly like us scientists do well in fact it's good to have an open mind and see new patterns the rub is finding the balance between being so open-minded be open-minded enough that you can see the new patterns but not so open-minded that your brains fall out and you think every pattern is real so in the book I make a nice contrast between Richard Feynman and John Nash Richard Feynman wins the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in quantum electrodynamics he describes both mathematically and visually the interaction subatomic particles as they sort of come in and they collide and interact and then they go back out again and these various visual diagrams are called Fineman diagrams they're so effective that they're still used today decades after half a century after he first designed these as as visual patterns describing these mathematical relationships and so popular refinement diagrams that he even painted them on the side of his 1976 dodge cargo van which still exists we we have we're in the process of restoring it I've got it at a friend's house in South Pasadena and a parking garage so that it doesn't get even more faded than it already is so if ever you come down Lane you want to see fineman's van it's the coolest thing and as the story goes Simon himself was driving up Lake Avenue from Colorado you know where the Rose Parade is there in Pasadena and at a red light somebody stops and says why do you have Fineman diagrams on your van he said because I'm fine Minh I tell you that that would be a cool thing by contrast John Nash won the Nobel Prize in mathematics for his description of game theory that as how players interact in a game it could be a prisoner's dilemma game any kind of exchange competitive game that is so important it has implications for foreign policy for cold war strategy for sports for gambling for any kind of game of contest we you're probably familiar with Nash equilibrium in which players in a game reach some kind of equilibrium strategy these could be corporations competing in an industry or nations competing with nuclear weapons or it could be athletes competing for the best doping products as I wrote an article in Scientific American about why athletes don't fit because they've basically reached a Nash equilibrium in which so many of them were doping it wasn't enough to dope to just to try to win it was you had to dope just to even compete and so you get this cascading collapse of the whole system of rules and everybody has to do it or else they can't even compete that's a Nash equilibrium in the wrong direction any case but you may recall from the film A Beautiful Mind that John Nash also saw patterns that were not real people that didn't exist or cabal's government cover-ups and aliens and and sorts and all sorts of things like that and if you see enough patterns like that you're actually given a label it's called paranoid schizophrenia and and that's so that seemed too many patterns there's there has to be a balance there in the film by the way his his hallucinations are mostly visual but in reality they were mostly auditory but to make a movie you have to make visual anyway so and then I discuss why that would be where did this what does this happen in the brain well we have a lot of quite a bit of interesting research on this from neuroscience it appears to happen more in the right hemisphere than in the left hemisphere if you give split brain patients set him before a screen and you design the experiments such that one image appears you know on the left eye gets translated the right hemisphere and vice versa in you you show them scrambled letters or scrambled faces or just random dot patterns first of all the human brain is really bad at looking at random dot patterns and seeing randomness almost everybody most of the times these patterns were just not good at chaos and randomness we just don't get it and and for good reasons there's nothing adaptive about finding randomness it's adapted to find patterns anyway so this appears happen more on the right hemisphere than the left hemisphere that appears to be related to dopamine there's a series of interesting experiments by Peter Berger and Christine Moore where you give subjects l-dopa l dopa increases amount of dopamine in your brains used for Parkinson's patients but they get permission to give this to subjects and and then they show on those random dot patterns and scrambled faces and words and so on and those that get the dopamine see more patterns as real than those that don't get the dopamine interestingly skeptics seem to be more affected by the dopamine than believers when I say skeptics and believers I mean you first give them a paper pencil test about what they believe in the whole litany of stuff I read from my prologue ESP and psi and UFOs and aliens and ghosts and Bigfoot you name it there are some people that believe everything they've ever heard Jesse Ventura and Jesse Ventura has never met a conspiracy he didn't believe that is having your pattern filter wide open right not that's not good anyway so and then there are people that are super skeptical you know hyper skeptics and and they don't believe anything so so here's my explanation for why the dopamine would increase the pattern isset II process so if you're already way up here you believe practically everything anyway you don't have far to go that's right but if you're skeptic you're way down here you can you can see some room for for growth of pattern ascending right so those are the kinds of different factors people that score high in internal locus of control versus external locus of control tend to see more patterns that tend to see fewer random patterns is meaningful that is if if you believe that you aren't more in control of your environment you're less likely to see random patterns is meaningful if you tend to be tend to believe that the world sort of controls your life and that's called external locus of control you're more likely to see random patterns as real we know if you put subjects in environments in which they feel unstable or uncertain or anxious people that are about to jump out of a plane with a parachute perfect sample for this and they've done this experiment so people that are just about to jump out of a plane they show them these random patterns they're much more likely to see meaningful patterns in the dots than those who are just sitting on the ground there's a whole series of these sorts of things we know this from the study of the Trobriand Islanders by the anthropologist malinovski and his famous book science and magic in the 1930s that the whenever they went fishing that the further out to sea they went and the more precarious and uncertain the catch was and the whole process fishing that was dangerous at deep-sea fishing the more superstitious magical talismans and and behaviors they had the closer to shore the safer it was the fewer superstitions they had you have to look no further than Yankee Stadium to see this at work in baseball players who are very superstitious when they're batting the same people are not very superstitious when they're fielding fielder's tend to be very successful 90 95 percent is pretty typical batters fail 7 out of 10 times if you fail 7 out of 10 times you can still make the Hall of Fame that's how hard it is to hit a baseball so they are loaded with all kinds of superstitious behaviors so we know it's related to control anxiety dopamine right brain so on so this this whole process of patterning is built into our brains now let's return to our thought experiment you're humming in the plains of Africa three and a half million years ago you hear rustle in the grass what's the difference between just the wind and a dangerous predator well the wind is an inanimate force a dangerous predator is an intentional agent so I call this agent isset II the tendency to infuse patterns of with intentional agents it's not just the wind it's it's a thing a being that intends an agent that intends something and tends to eat me and that's probably not good so it's probably good to assume not only if the pattern is real but it actually intends action that could influence me right so I call that agent isset E and and this is I think is the basis for animism the animistic belief that everything is alive the trees the rocks the clouds and so forth polytheism monotheism ghosts gods demons angels aliens even right extraterrestrials they're always portrayed as like this you know super force coming down to rescue us from nuclear war global warming thank you take your pick these are all forms of you know agents that we infuse into the patterns we think we see now and we do even more than that I think animals actually do this they don't have theory of mind like we have theory of mind but they do make an assumption like that at least something like that that it's not just an inanimate force it's something that intends me harm they don't have language they can't call it something their cortex is too small that think about it but they still act in response to and I think that's the basis of these beliefs that we hold and then we do even more than that we do mind-read we do project I don't mean ESP right like we know is not true but but that actually we project ourselves into somebody else's head and imagine what they're thinking and and then we do more than that we're self-aware we're aware that other people are self-aware and I know that you know that I'm self-aware and I know that you know that I know that you are so yeah and this sort of meta thing so we do all this complex stuff we're able to project ourselves out there we also have a body schema in our in our mind oh by the way I should when I use the word mind on using it metaphorically there is no mind there's just brain and the mind is just a word to describe what the brain does that's it it's just one of these fuzzy words that people like Deepak love to use in describing that this is out there somewhere it isn't and as I told teapot you know I'm right which of course he doesn't believe because when your brain gets damaged stroke injury dementia senility and especially Alzheimer's as the brain dies the person disappears the memories are going the the personality who they were is gone and you can see it fade very slowly my step-mom had this for about three or four years I could just watch her week by week and month by month just disappear so as I asked Deepak a couple of months ago when we debated at Chapman University you can watch this online I asked him where is aunt millie's mind when her brain dies from Alzheimer's say where's that Milly's month and by god he had an answer you wondering what it is the matrix I said Wow okay where do I get that besides you know Netflix I mean is there like yes so anyway this is a whole nother story that I do discuss in the bleeding brain that is there's no such thing as the paranormal or the supernatural either these are also just fuzzy words we use to describe something we don't understand and eventually we will either understand it it just becomes part of the natural world or it just disappears because it doesn't really exist then we quit thinking about it or quit experimenting with it because nobody could find any evidence for it so for example even if Deepak is right on he has this theory about quantum consciousness he and Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose they they really glom onto Roger Penrose because he's a world-class Oxford physicist he's the guy that co-authored with Stephen Hawking the whole theory about black holes and entire universe is a black hole you know so he's a big name and they have this idea that inside your neurons in your brain are these little microtubules it's like they're like scaffolding that holds your cells together actually all cells have them but but neurons also have them and they claim that inside these these microtubules you can get a collapse of the wavefunction okay this is a quantum physics concept that has something to do with entanglement and spooky action at a distance as Einstein called it where you know you you do something to one little subatomic particle over here and it affects it over on the other side of the room and the experimenter could be on the other side of the city it could be on the other side of the galaxy and it will have an instantaneous effect they're entangled somehow okay anyway this is weird quantum physics stuff that no one understands and because Fineman said no one understands it I take his word for it because he's a lot smarter than me and I don't know anything about quantum physics any case so their theory is that let's say you're thinking certain thoughts like I'm looking at the back of a playing card or one of those Zener cards with the wavy lines or the circle or the triangle or the plus sign whatever and I'm thinking about that thought and you're supposed to read my thoughts the ESP so now as I'm thinking about it my neurons start a fire in a certain pattern and they get to get kind of a little sequence of pattern going and that causes these subatomic particles in the microtubules my neurons to collapse in a certain pattern and and it leaves my skull because these things happen across the ether whatever and they go into your skull and that causes your neurons to fire in the same pattern my neurons are firing and then you read my mind okay that's the theory I don't believe it for a second I don't think there's anything that even needs to be explained because no one actually can read people's minds under controlled conditions or they can't successfully and repeat repeatedly read the back of playing cards or anything like that nevertheless let's just for the thought experiment say it's true they can do it and that's the explanation well that would no longer be the paranormal that would not be sire ESP that would just be quantum physics or and neuroscience or quantum consciousness as Deepak calls it would just become a branch of physics and neuroscience it would just become part of the natural world so let's dispense with all that language mine paranormal pseudo whatever just forget all that it's it's either it's science or it's nothing it's just part of the natural world or it's nothing okay so anyway I was talking about how we're able to project ourselves elsewhere like this sense of rete mind-reading and so on we do many other things too that I find incredibly interesting that is we're also able to sense presences in the room with us now this happens under lots of different conditions and my previous books I've written about going to Michael Persinger his lab and Laurentian University in Sudbury Canada and putting the God helmet on you can watch this on YouTube and that people that do this have an out-of-body experience and they see aliens or whatever angels the experience a sense presence in the room you're in a like a sensory deprivation room and one of these big easy chairs and it's quiet and dark and me bombard your temporal lobes with these solenoids with electromagnetic fields temporal lobe is just right with with with being stimulated to produce angelic voices the sense of God any anything like this there's lots of examples of this now epileptic patients that get open brain surgery where they cut the corpus callosum to stop the spread of the seizures from one hemisphere to the other amazingly enough these neuroscientists get their permission to wake them up in the middle of the surgery and poke around and ask them what's going on yeah this is a remarkable they agree to do it which is great good for science and so that's how we're one one way to map the brain you just poke around with electrode and say now what's happening now what's happening so for example there was a an epileptic patient in 2002 who had this done temporal lobe little spot there where she immediately floated out of her body she had an out-of-body experience and then and they were ratcheted the electricity up and she floated way up and then they brought it back down she floated back down and they touched around and her arm goes up her leg goes up and so forth so they were able to map all this of course she's just lying there nothing's actually happening this is all in her head she's talking about right so we can reproduce these things through this helmet through electrical stimulation there's a guy named James whinnery who works in the United States Air Force maybe retired now he used to accelerate pilots till they black out part of their training and a significant percentage of winner ease pilots had a de body experiences when they were in the process of blacking out so this is epoxy oxygen deprivation to the cortex as the blood gets squeezed to the center of your body in the center of your brain then your cortex just begins to shut down the visual cortex on the back just shuts down may have something to do with this shutting down in this particular way maybe that creates a tunneling effect or maybe a spiraling effect and white light at the end of the tunnel all those things in other words there's lots of different ways we can physically replicate these are drug free and legal by the way you could do it through sleep deprivation to is a really good one and and so as I began to research this I discovered that in fact it's not it's not just these artificial conditions in fact Lindbergh talked about having a sense presence in the cabin of the spirit of st. Louis as he flew to Paris this was only 36 hours of sleep deprivation this is nothing every graduate students done that any reports in this book you know talking to them and they were talking back to him and and Himalayan climbers k2 climbers at high altitude they often talk about the sense that somebody is on the rope next to me talking to me especially when they're alone this mainly happens when you're alone now okay that's high high altitude so that might be oxygen deprivation and reinhold messner talks about this in his accounts he summited Everest I think seven times of that oxygen this guy has a lot of experiences to write about but also happens to Arctic explorers and solo sailors sailors are at sea level when they're alone they they hallucinate that there's somebody else right there with them and they talked to the imaginary friend and the friend talks back this is remarkable the Iditarod dog sled mushers they often talk about sense presences there's somebody right there on the what you call it the sled or on the side of the trail and this sort of thing my own friends in Race Across America they go hours days without sleep that day often report seeing people on the side of the road I had these great hallucinations when I was racing race across America the clusters and mailboxes in the Midwest they become people that are like waving to you too sometimes people do come out wave to you so you can never be sure if they were mailboxes or people so you always wave back just in case and of course I've written many times about my own alien abduction experience after 83 hours without sleep riding from Santa Monica Pier to Nebraska without stopping and and I want to see if I could go the whole 3,000 miles ten days without any sleep at all because the record was 11 days was in 1983 I read about this kid at UCLA he went 11 days of that sleep he's playing like pinball games and stuff like that I can do it anyway I couldn't do it and nobody can do it it turns out there's lots of people have tried in this race since then it turns out you just can't be that physically tired and go without the sleep so I've been ever blessed you can have some really great drug free legal hallucinations all the product of just well we don't really know what there's a lot of different theories about this but this is a new area of neuroscience that having to do with stress perhaps sleep deprivation exhaustion hunger there's a whole variety of these extreme environments that produce these really strange effects okay the point of all this is that to explain why we believe in God God's the afterlife all these things belief in things unseen is part of it's not that they're not true some things might be true some that's a separate question that I deal with elsewhere in the book it just fascinated at this point why people believe those things at all and that just becomes part of neuroscience there's an explanation I also deal with conspiracies as a type of agent isset II I think they're the idea that there's an intentional agent somebody or some group of people pulling the strings so we are fascinated by this you may have noticed that 9/11 truthers are still around the birthers are hanging in there although as I said two weeks ago the one week we saw the death of the birthers and the birth of the debtors after bin Laden was killed in and and so why is it that well okay first of all detecting a distinction between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory the theory is just the theory about what the conspiracy might be so that that is what we're assessing when we say you're just a conspiracy theorist it's become sort of pejorative it's a way of making fun of somebody but in fact you can have conspiracy theorists theories because there are really conspiracy so I acknowledged at the beginning Lincoln was assassinated by conspiracy you might want to see Robert Redford's new film the conspiracists quite nicely portrays in fact how those things actually really go in other words the conspiracy theory usually thinks of conspiracies as these well-oiled machines in which everybody's at the right place at the right time and everything just sort of falls into place perfectly now the reason we think that is because of something called the hindsight bias so the hindsight bias is where with 20/20 hindsight you just look back and find a plausible perfect causal chain from where you are now to the beginning wherever you want to start the sequence everybody does this we we all think of where we are in our lives now and we look back I know how I got here this happened this happened and this happen and these things are all true but of course with hindsight you you know the causal pattern already so it makes perfect sense when you're back at the beginning of it it makes no sense at all and but this is this is why all autobiography well when I when I write my autobiography it's gonna be the unauthorized autobiography I'm not fooling around here Steven right joke anyway so it they're all authorized a lot about all history is authorized because of the hindsight bias it's all Whiggish history all of it it's you can't get around the problem and so when we look at something like the memo of August 9 2011 two thousand one when Condoleezza Rice gets this piece of Intel that says Osama bin Laden will attack on US soil Wow incredible after the fact that becomes salient and important how could she have missed that I mean that's incredible we should have seen this coming who was not doing their job somebody should be fired inside that's the hindsight bias right but if you actually look back there's you know ten thousand pieces of intelligence in the lab than the year before 9/11 and which are the right ones to follow which of the ones that are actually gonna explain what happened you don't know until it happens and then you look back and you pick them same thing with Pearl Harbor you know memos about the Japanese gonna attack Pearl Harbor yeah they're there along with hundreds of others that they're gonna attack here there and everywhere only when it happened it happened anyway the point of that is that the conspiracy theories always make perfect sense after it happens and everything happens at a logical sequence the way conspiracies actually happen are like what happened with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo that started World War two World War one right so this is a great story I talk about it in length because it's how things usually go this was a real conspiracy these Serbian nationalists who wanted independence from the austro-hungarian Empire plotted to assassinate the the Archduke Franz Ferdinand as he was coming to Sarajevo to give a speech and it was all plotted out they went to different homes and they gave their secret password they asked a question a certain way and then the weapon was given to them and so on even that didn't completely work out not everybody got the right weapon at the right time anyway they got enough then they were all plotted along the parade route ready to go and anyway one guy chickened out another guy got sort of moved by the throng of crowds and he couldn't do it and then the third guy threw the hanger nade and it bounced off the trunk of the Franz Ferdinand's car and rolled underneath the car behind him and blew up and injured those people and he sped off and and then you went gave a speech anyway you know thanks a lot people of Sarajevo I come here in peace and you try to assassinate me like you know why don't you just go home so he says okay I'm done with my speech let's go to the hospital and check out how our comrades are doing they were injured in the explosion and they go right back down the parade route where there was one last assassin this guy who had been despondent and he went and got a sandwich at the deli he's sitting there on the curb like oh this was a failure and here he comes like thank you very much boom that's how conspiracies usually go so the idea that 9/11 was an inside job you know well-oiled by the Bush administration by the way you know how we know no 9/11 was not orchestrated by the Bush administration because it worked so so I actually have a like a little conspiracy detection kit in the book about you know these are the 10 things you should ask yourself before the more people that have to be involved the less likely it is to be true the more components that all have to come together just the right time the less likely it is to be true the the grander the conspiracy theory about what was supposed to happen if you scale it up to like world domination probably not true that those sorts of things you can just ask yourself and does it really is that really the way the world works no we know how it works if people again can't keep their mouth shut so the more people as she gordon Liddy said you know threatt know it was Mark Twain three people keep a secret of two of her dead right it was G gordon Liddy who told me when I was on his radio show once the two problems of conspiracy theories is incompetence and and leakage people or government bureaucrats or incompetent idiots and people can't keep their mouth shut so forget it these things are look what happens whenever anybody leaves the State Department after they form their own consulting business in Washington DC and charge huge amounts of money to corporations to give them inside information but anyway that's what they do and then they go and they write a book and they go on TV and they go on the lecture circuit and they they tell all of what all the dirt they saw of what happened that's how it really works since 9/11 not one person has come forward to say you know what I saw these people planning it was a weird thing they were in there and midnight and they were sneaking around in the World Trade Center but I don't know what I saw not one story like that has come out that's how we know there's not an inside job besides I think that it worked and then I talked a little bit about politics and think about the confirmation bias and the all the different cognitive biases in the context of the larger thesis of the book that beliefs come first and then the reasons for belief come after the fact so if you're a Republican for example you probably listen to conservative talk radio and you read The Wall Street Journal and you filter everything through that and and if you're liberal you listen to progressive talk radio well I guess nobody listens to Tucker even you listen to NPR and then you read the New York Times or whatever you filter everything through that now of course nobody says I'm a Republican because my parents were my peer group they're all Republicans so you know I just go along with heard nobody thinks that nobody says that what we say is well I have all these reason I have my 12 reasons why I vote Republican or Democrat why I believe in free markets or fair markets you know why I have this attitude or that attitude about gays or abortion or whatever but but my claim is that the beliefs all come first through a whole series of social political psychological personal where you happen to be born who your parents were where you were raised what schools you went to those things I'll shape our beliefs even for scientists that is that nobody comes to the table and just scatters the data out there he was I think I'll see which is the best hypothesis to explain it no because to even become a scientist you have to go to graduate school and go to graduate school you have to be accepted into some program in which a professor will allow you to let the work in his lab this professor is not unbiased he has his own pet theories and hypotheses his world view his paradigm that he's working in along with the community of his colleagues so you're already sort of pushed along in that by the time you become a scientist you're way down the path you already believe all sorts of things before you know you know hardly any of what the data is you're just sort of sucked into it and then and then you look for the data to fit it okay so we have the same problem in science that everybody else has the difference is is that if you don't look for your disconfirming data against your theory somebody else will advance their career by debunking your silly theory in a published forum with great Glee and that's what makes science different it's a competitive enterprise and so then I kind of wrap up the book talking about how science works and and and then politically how democracy works I think in many ways a democracy is like an experiment mmm and in fact it's not an accident that the founders called the American process an experiment it's the American experiment in democracy what did they mean by this well first of all these guys all had training in the Natural Sciences Jefferson Thomas franklin these guys were all what we would call scientist they didn't even use that word back then but natural philosophy they understood the importance of understanding the laws of nature and that there must be social laws of nature this is sort of the basis of natural rights theory our rights come from nature this sort of thing right so they're looking for this and and in a way election is like an experiment let's throw the bums out and try something new we'll bring to them some new bums and we'll try a new tax system we'll try a different series of laws whatever and we'll see how it goes we'll collect the data and run it and see what happens in fact this is what political scientists often do is look at the tax rates in one state or county versus the tax rates in another state or county and then look what the outcome differences are that's kind of an experiment right so they the hope we have for getting beyond the the trap of being stuck in our beliefs is science that scientists are any better than anybody else or special or even well-trained even though they are trained to be skeptics that in fact that the process itself is the one Savior or that we have just like a democracy it's that the point is that we don't know how to govern this is our founding fathers we don't know how to govern nobody does so we have to set up a system that allows for constant change and feedback and Andry tweaking the system and Sciences like that we don't know what the truth is nobody does we just have provisional truth is the small team and that we're gonna just do the best we can and keep running the experiments right so then I kind of wrap it up and just say that you know science begins with very opposite of the way the brain were expected where you know the hominid on the plains of Africa the default rule is just believe everything is true in science the default rule is the null hypothesis none of its true all your ideas are crazy idea isn't probably wrong now the burden of proof is on you to prove me wrong reject the null hypothesis show us your data so I use these simple examples that because most the average person understands this some level because they've heard things like that a drug got approval because it passed clinical trials well what does that mean it means that we assume that your drug doesn't do anything and by the way and homeopathy it works great it does nothing but we assume the null hypothesis your drug doesn't do anything now you got to go run those experiments through those epidemiological studies at the control group the experimental group you the subjects are blinded we have to blind the subject because the confirmation by spasibo effect expectation bias and so on they may change their behavior who I'm getting the cancer drive cool I think I'll change my diet I'll sleep more I'll exercise extra special really okay that so now we don't know if it's the drug or these other things right so we have to blind an experimenter if he knows which condition of the subject is in he's likely to record the data incorrectly this has been proven so as to be double-blind and so on all these things are there for a reason because of our believing brain that the fact that we have all those cognitive biases they're all built in there and can't get around them other than they have some system of checks and balances and so that's the best hope we have for the world democracy for us individually science thank you [Applause] mm oh you have to read the last burger anyway that's okay we'll just do Q&A now if anybody would like to come to the let's talk thanks very much you talk a lot about why we believe how do we change a deeply held belief once you believe something very strongly how do you write well it has to come about by changing initially changing the like social circle surrounding the person like so in the book I have a chapter about my own belief transition from being a evangelical Christian at Pepperdine University where I was surrounded by other Christians and even though I began to read other philosophers and scientists and so on the doubts are all kept in check by your surrounding social circle and in that worldview it's logically consistent it's internally coherent at all it all makes sense and then when you leave that world that circle it all changes so this is one of the big problems we face like we get a lot of letter I get a lot of letters from people who live like in the Midwest and and they live in a little town and everybody they know goes to church and they believe in God and they and they just discover that they don't believe you know they get this year I found skeptic magazine at the book so I couldn't believe it can you mail it to me like a brown wrapper so nobody sees it and I feel sorry for him because you know if I say well you have to give up all those beliefs and believe the science stuff you know if you give a good it gives somebody a choice between that and giving up their friends family social circle everything that's a tough choice to make right so part of the cell is to say look you don't have to give up anything just keep keep whatever you want go for the science and then what will happen is slowly but surely they'll start to drop the superstitions as they see that the site the way science works it doesn't allow this it doesn't allow that and you have to allow people to do it quietly on their own it's very rare that anybody just stands up and goes you know what I was wrong that almost never happens rarely would a politicians ever say you know what that whole conservative thing forget it I'm switching parties right I mean who's the last person who did that Lieberman I guess right I mean it's so big it makes headline news that almost never happens so you have to sort of make it possible for people to do that without losing anything and and then there's a whole series I recommend for example Robert chil Downey's book influence so he has like the seven most important things you could do to influence somebody's beliefs now he's mostly it's dealing with like marketing products stuff like that he's a social psychologist who specializes and like marketing and advertising but really the experimental psychologists are just way behind all the marketing guys they already know what these principles are how to shift people from this to that so there's there's some really really simple tried-and-true things you know of reciprocity and giving somebody something then they feel they have to give it to you back there's ways to do this with ideas hi dr. Sherman first of all you're awesome second of all Deepak Chopra and by the way Dean Houston they don't realize it but you and Sam Harris embarrass them at the night wounded thank you so here's my question I believe this really is to brain activity very much relieved to hear your thoughts on there have been reports people have written books about young people having experiences seeing both sides of the afterlife there's a book called 23 minutes in hell by a guy who as the title says thinks he saw hell in graphic detail there's people reports of people seeing what they think is heaven in heaven the book that you referenced on one of your Facebook post heaven is for real so what generates these beliefs you know what are your thoughts on the scientists right well most of my talk did deal with what generates the beliefs that is the brain is capable of producing these sorts of incredible elaborate illusions and hallucinations of a person person or as people that describe being in this little sensory deprivation room with the helmet on of going to hell and describing what it was like of course the problem is how do we how do we confirm this is that actually having to go because you know I was thinking maybe I didn't want to go but on the other hand most of my good friends will be there and and so since there's no way to test it then we have to come around it from the side and just say well okay what could produce those sorts of things and of course not everybody tells the same story about what they see in heaven or hell except for the problem of cultural contamination like decades ago aliens looked like all sorts of different colors and shapes and sizes and now they all look pretty much the same it's kind of reduced to the greens and the Grays who are apparently living in New Mexico fighting it out underground or something but before that you know the Swedish aliens were like tall and blond hair and you know they all look obviously geographically determined what happened was is that pop culture established what the aliens look like when NBC did that film in 1980 but the Betty and Barney Hill abduction story and that and the artist constructed the aliens for the TV show and ever since then that's what gets portrayed in pop culture so people have that burnin in their memories so when they have the hallucination that's what the aliens look like if you live 500 years ago you wouldn't be seeing aliens at all you'd be seeing demons incubi and succubi so with that that's the process of producing it can't be tested obviously short of going there finding aliens or something like that so then we're left with the neuroscience explaining it and it's pretty obvious now with the research we have that lots and lots of people a significant percentage probably maybe even two digits percentage figure have some kind of anomalous psychological experience in their life a deja vu many people report that like maybe even two-thirds but but but actually scientifically you know really getting down to it maybe a third of all people had some weird anomalous experience like that so it's common I have an epistemic thanks for coming tonight um couple question have you studied cargo cults much are you if you have can you talk about them a little bit I haven't read that much bottom clip on it I read about it but you know do you find that there are a lot of similarities to them between them and then between cargo cults and Christianity why do you think they had what do you think it appreciate they did and where I was beliefs reformed yes the question is not cargo cults which are these which is phenomenon after the Second World War in which some of these South Pacific Islanders had constructed faux runways and faux airport towers to get the planes to return with the cargo which they saw which because it was real it really happened and so but they had a misunderstanding of causality but the interesting part is how this then gets repeated and replicated and it's a nice example of the watching in real time the construction of a myth or a religion something like that so I do talk about that I think other interesting examples of things similar to that would be resurrection myths a pretty common virgin birth myths are pretty common flood myths are pretty common and you can diffuse the claim by Christians to uniqueness by pointing out that there are plenty of these central core stories about the resurrection the virgin birth and so on that predate the Christian story even though the noachian flood story the Old Testament story the epic of gilgamesh is a flood story that predates by many centuries that's how you can just kind of come at it from an anthropological perspective which is really what kind of did me in one of the things that did me in as a believer was actually just studying other people's beliefs from an anthropological or social psychological perspective it really makes you realize these guys all believed just like me and they all think they're right - what are the chances that I got it right well most people if you push them they'll go well yeah actually I do think I'm the right one but you know just a smattering smithereen of humility you have to realize that these things are socially constructed so although I can't prove there's no God technically I think we can make a really good case I do in my god chapter a really good case that religions and belief in God are completely constructed by us by our brains by our cultures I think that's a reasonable argument to make against the theistic claims first of all doctor sure we're just great lecture in general um so I'm only eighteen so forgive the naivety of my question I'm just gonna pose a standard philosophical inquiry to you and see wait responses I mean you mentioned earlier in the lecture that the mind basically for all intents and purposes doesn't exist like you seem to embrace some kind of identity theory that mental states are just identically reducible to correlate neural States so what do you think where your views on like phenomenal feelings like aside from the behavioral dispositions that pain may induce or the behavior that precedes pain what do you think of the actual mental phenomenal quality of pain or happiness for that matter do you think that these phenomenal states prove the existence of some mental reality that's not just empirical that's a pretty damn good question for an eighteen year old I'm impressed Wow well okay so this is a huge problem in philosophy of mind take entire college courses that spend 30 weeks on this or whatever nutso I can't answer it simply but in my i'ma monist so most people are doulas were natural-born duelists as they say we just naturally think there's two things there's body and mind there's corporeal and Inka poriyal there's you know body and soul whatever that's why we can watch movies like Freaky Friday and get the humor of Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis switching bodies but what could possibly be switching because your brain mostly just runs your body it's all integrated you have entire maps of your body in your brain how could you possibly switch them I mean if you think about it being a brain donor eaten or recipient this is the one organ donation where you want to be the donor not the recipient cuz that's where you're located and so I come back to the claim the very simple observation that when neurons die all of that phenomenon is gone pain pleasure greenness everything is gone it's gone and until somebody can show me where it is without the brain like it's actually stored in the matrix somewhere a Deepak use the analogy of hardware software you know you have two computer hardware you put okay but you know when you buy the Microsoft Office you get a box with disks and and these disks are the software is stored in there physically you still need some substrate a media some physical medium to hold the software the the program is it were the DNA still requires the molecules it doesn't exist without it and so I claim that all the things you just described still require neurons firing and without that there's nothing so to me that all the phenomenon and all the words you used which are correct that those are what philosophers of science of mine use those are still just fuzzy words to describe something we just really don't understand so I mean I'm this comes back to my behavioral roots I was a behavioral sent that psychology psychologist quit using all that language this is a Skinner's point quit using those words they don't help us at all it's like saying well god did it or a miracle happened like my favorite Sidney Harris cartoon you know with the two mathematicians at the chalkboard and he writes in the middle of the long equations and then a miracle happens he says I think you need to be more explicit here in step two that's the problem with all those words they're just fuzzy words that say and then something weird happens I feel I felt pain or I experienced love that is completely unhelpful it doesn't tell us anything we have to get down to the neuro okay oxytocin Wow boy do I feel strong attachment to this other person when I get a hit of oxytocin now we're getting somewhere we're getting there okay do you welcome he's way area yeah I heard that and I haven't talked to him in years but I heard that from somebody else I thought oh okay yeah I think he's out there on some of that so I don't I don't completely buy his theory is you know bombarding the temporal lobes of the electromagnetic fields because where does that happen in the real world and in any case those things are right pressed up against your skull so they're pretty close there's nothing like that I mean cell phone towers and you know earth well he thinks like earthquake faults may generate these things which would explain Southern California where I'm from and why people have these weird but they're contaminated by performance-enhancing drugs for minds anyway sorry yeah that was it okay the difference between those folks and this book and I sure as I said you know the first book was about weird things about all things so and how we believe was really slightly miss named it should have been why people believe in God because that's what that's about although back then we didn't have I mean back then ten years ago I mean neuroscience is flying you know there's so much research that you have to keep writing to stay up with it so this is more the modern stuff but again I'm going for the much bigger picture here of moving away from the stuff that skeptic magazine deals with the weird things to everything politics economics cultural attitudes your your beliefs about gays and abortion and all these things are there all the same process of finding patterns but I've only just touched on stuff in the book I mean we are tribal so I have all think about our evolutionary propensity to be to be tribal to be loyal to your fellow in-group members this includes embracing their ideas that this is why conservatives tend to favor certain moral values that the emphasized patriotism and family and group cohesiveness and a band of brothers kind of thing which then leads to if you don't can consistently believe our central tenets euro a wishy-washy mamby pamby bedwetting flip-flopper you know it has moral VAT and assessment to it you're not just wrong you're an idiot you're evil wrong right so that's all wrapped up in our beliefs that goes way beyond all the other stuff I used to talk about yep lecture you have been talking about you know the process that happen in the brain neuroscience and you know I'm wondering that all can you really relate and the system of belief developed by people and their social environment and I have a second question it's about the end you know the system of building big loved by people for example but the religion is about the fact that you know religion an easy answer to Question and oh can you I mean okay we really how can we really like give an answer to people for the full answer like an easy answer to their equation which means like the friend that the science can answer everything because we're constantly Indiana Moses PowerSearch so kind of all can we really face to that and how can we push people to become critical thinker and to search for evidence instead okay I got it right so well first of all you can you can encourage people to subscribe to skeptic magazine operators are standing by well I mean what we're doing as a movement as I started off the evening a grassroots bottom-up movement we're all just kind of working on this together you do it just through conversations just again start with that null hypothesis just say that's nice prove it wow that's an interesting idea where's your proof for that what's the evidence you know engage in conversation in a friendly respectful way and pull them in toward the critical thinking side so we and lots of other groups have lots of little things you could do we have like the baloney detection kit you know these are like the ten questions you should ask anybody that makes a claim like the baloney detection the conspiracy detection these are the questions you see that so that's what's one way to do it just just by word of mouth does the same way the Tea Partiers you just think of political analogies for how how everybody in politics is after the undecided voter we want to shift them from here to there how do we get them okay you do this you do that tried and true these guys have been at it for you know a century or more professionals so I'm just saying we should do that for science and we are lots of people are so that's the way to do it science can't answer everything well yeah I guess but but it's been left out of so many conversations like morality why can't scientists have a say in the what's right and wrong why can't we study that that should be okay what's wrong with that maybe we won't be able to get the answers but heck the philosophers and theologians banana for you know four thousand years and you know they're okay I think we can do better so let's give it a shot maybe we're wrong whatever but let's try it so you know that understand love things like that let's do it okay no but we got to keep moving sorry all right come up with a better one two different sides we have to be given a lot of arguments all the time and I'm kind of the less skeptical of the two you could say although I'm still an agnostic and I still kind of reject a lot of religions but recently I've been reading a lot of Carl Jung and I'm probably gonna get any more of like Browns but like I was reading him and we get in a lot of arguments my friend and I about kind of the it's true or not and I'm and he says well prove it and I said and I say really well I can't prove it because it's an individual belief and even though I know that that may make it not true in the real world like if it's true to me then that's especially for this case of psychology and spiritual psychology and that's really all that matters to me and I and I really and I guess don't care if I'm being irrational thank you I'm wondering it how you feel how you how do you feel about that yeah that's all right everybody calm down he's doing fine you did great that was a great question it's an important question that I mean that's that's everything what's the difference between what I believe and what you believe and is there some way we can get at it that is the question right so like I make a distinction between when I say what somebody says well do you believe in global warming or do you believe in evolution that's a little bit different isn't it than saying do you believe in in democracy or do you believe in equal rights or do you believe in free will or something like that right I mean at least with like global warming we should be able to answer it at least in principle empirically just collect enough data we should be able to get an answer and on that one I think we do have an answer evolution believe it it it just happened it's like do you believe in gravity well I hope so so but those are different then let's a political beliefs but even there I think we can make a case like I would say that that a liberal democracy or democracy of any kind is really measurably quantitatively better than a dictatorship and you have only to look at pictures at night of North Korea and South Korea and where the border is it's light it's dark just look at the heights of North Koreans and South Koreans South Koreans are like five inches taller than North Koreans look at the average GDP per capita GD GD P is like 1700 for North Koreans about 20,000 for South Koreans some systems really do work absolutely quantitatively better than others and I think we can prove that scientifically and that's also shifting belief in a sort of fuzzy way to a more quantitative way now then then it really gets fuzzy like well do you believe in love or something like that you know well okay I believe in oxytocin well it doesn't sound very romantic so there admit it we get into more fuzzy ground but again why not let science have a crack at it and see how we do and see what happens thank you for like thank you for the good question yes intelligent people has a relatively educated semi-intelligent doctor Orthodox Jew when the grand rabbi was getting ready to die he was brain dead I said what are you gonna say when he goes from brain dead really in the ground running dead and he said I'm not going to answer it's a stupid question because it can't happen I didn't thought my nose that and what it did happen when you say to an agnostic and atheist as I am and you say well f you know God you say even they get upset and you know at some level or afraid and that will see them and lastly when when the hanging oil Drop experiment if you look at his notebooks of the original data and he goes too high too low Beauty yeah I mean this is his religion too and he's experiment so what you're after there is what I what do you everybody is oh I say right I thought you're gonna ask me what I would say to God if and I have it in here I do what I would no I wouldn't use the f-word cuz you know there's a gun I couldn't start being nice by the way on the agnostic be the 17 year old is agnostic I have a long discussion on that too because it's one of these words that bothers atheists you know agnostic you know and then I remember when I was on Colbert the last time he said told me that an agnostic is just an atheist without Balz I thought oh yeah I don't want to be one of those guys so yeah okay these are again these are just labels that we use to shortcut thinking about what people believe I don't like them because I'd rather just describe what I believe do you believe it got no okay then end the story that's different than of course technically saying I can't prove there's a god does that make me a strong atheist or a weak atheist or militant agnostic I don't know and you don't either like the bumper sticker said you know there's a whole series of those jokes okay well here's what I would say if it turns out there's a God so it's not funny it's what I would actually say I think Lord I did the best I could with the tools you granted me you gave me a brain to think skeptically and I used it accordingly you gave me the capacity to reason and I applied it to all claims including that of your existence you gave me a moral sense and I felt the pangs of guilt and the joys of pride for the bad and good things I chose to do I tried to do unto others as I would have them do unto me and although I felt far short fell far short of this ideal far too many times I tried to apply your foundational principle whenever I could whatever the nature of your immortal and infinite spiritual essence actually is as a mortal finite corporeal being I cannot possibly fathom it despite my best efforts and so do with me what you will yeah that's what I'm gonna say thank you though I'm pretty confident I'll never have to say it so I haven't like written it on my palm like Sarah pretty pretty pretty confident yeah I'm pretty I'm right right really super confident I'd be shocked in fact if the turnout there was a guy I would be I'd say it is this is a Penn & Teller thing I mean come on cop I've seen Copperfield do better than this you know right like if there was a resurrection you know they'd read come on I've seen this on stage you want to do a tomb or two or three floor questions okay who's going I'm like you've written previously about correctly but the max punk theory or hypothesis where say beliefs and accepted truths and things at the time die out as the generations die very place I was living if you could expand on that in in relationship to religion and why religions been around for so long yet it seems like latest Gallup polls and whatnot it seems like we're in the midst of a takeover almost so as reference to plunk is a Blanc's description of how science changes one funeral at a time or when the old guys die and the new grad students become professors that's how science changes well that's that's a little grossly oversimplified but approximately speaking the older you get the more difficult it is to change your mind simply because behaviorally you're more committed to the idea whether it's a scientific theory or a political belief or whatever so that that is true there is data to show that although people do change their minds in science the thing is that if the whole community starts to shift and you don't go along with it and the reason they're shifting is because there's new data and you're you know steadfastly holding on to the old idea you don't care what that old data says what happens is you just sort of get left out you're not invited to speak at conferences anymore your papers aren't published in journals it isn't a conspiracy against you in some nefarious top-down way it's just that you're not you're not playing the game of science anymore the way it's played you have you have to change your mind if there's new data and everybody else recognizes it and that's what happens and that's a good thing so on that you ask me something else it was Oh religion yeah so religious okay so what happens when like a cult becomes a sect or a religion the critical turning point is when the the leader dies so if there's a secession plan that succeeds then usually you can make the transition and what they do is they go more mainstream they become less weird and and the weirdos leave or whatever because they're not happy or they're out at Houston and then they and then they become a religion if that doesn't happen then the cult just dies and with the with the death of the leader so Marmon is a perfect example of this you know when Joseph Smith died there was a critical point where bring him young took over and and he was a dynamic leader and he made that transition from you know kind of cult their sect this weird they're still a little weird admittedly but but most Mormons you may you know they're super nice people and you know they don't do weird stuff and and so they made that transition geographically by moving to Utah nowhere there was you know no one around but you can always see that you know the the mainstreaming where they got a new revelation from God about polygamy just before the federal government said we're coming in to clean the house if you don't straighten things out yourself oh well God just told us is you know that the polygamy thing was out same thing happened about their treatment of blacks and you know after the civil rights movement it's like you better get your act straight here or else and then God spoke again and said you know what African Americans are actually okay oh okay right so religious follow the trends of culture not vice-versa don't be don't be fooled by Dinesh D'Souza's in these guys that I debated about how if it wasn't for Christianity the abolitionist movement when it wouldn't have succeeded the abolitionists succeeded movement succeeded despite the church right yes Wilberforce was a Christian but he was a liberal Christian who fought mightily against his fellow conservative Christians he had to overcome that not the secularists or anything like that so religion typically follows the trends of culture and so that why did they hang in there well because I think our brains are wired up for you know to see these hidden agents and so on those are gone mehar to imagine that that would ever completely go away but one way to defuse the power of religion is to for somebody else to take over what they do so like in the northern European countries Norway and Sweden the governments do what religions do here feed the poor man the soup kitchens take care of people that need help and so that this is one explanation for why religions are kind of dead in northern Europe is that is that the government does what religions do so because religion you know has it serves a social purpose and if you take the purpose away then there's nothing for it to do and give them tax money by the way give them tax dollars from the government if you really want to kill him seriously separation church and state if I was if I wanted to promote religion I'd separate church and state don't give them a dollar of a government money no tax money then then what they would then what they do is they go out and hustle for it and then they become really good at marketing and and they become relevant to people that you have to get to keep people coming every week you have to give them something they want it's like a like a cup of competition so your marketplace and then they become more relevant or they die out Europe they just get tax dollars and they don't care so they have no motivation so I'm just giving you a formula of how to create your own religion sustain it make a lot of money but you should donate to the skeptic Society instead of your religion but question from evolution neurobiology just perfectly as you know the neocortex sits on top of more primitive brain structures and we evolved with the creatures I prefer to think without neocortical wispy capabilities so the question I have is if you could speak to the dilemma we face as being partly if not wholly a result of emotive based thinking which is evolutionarily quite old and the inability of belief associated with an emotional commitment to be ameliorated through linguistic intervention right well that is really what the book is about is that we form these beliefs for a whole bunch of reasons that are mostly emotionally driven and the research the really good research on this came from behavioural economists and behavioral financial guys that wanted to know what people actually do do when they make decisions so the larger field is decision-making Theory decision research in fact we hardly ever make rational decisions based on the evidence you know we Kahneman and Tversky discovered this that in their classic paper in science they describe the buzzing blurry world that we live in with just data just flowing all over the place you can't possibly process all that data it's impossible so basically everything we decide is based on just a few little data points we take hunches we make guesses we're in we use intuition and we employ all these little rules of thumb these heuristics these little biases that we have that you know usually work pretty well they get us they're good enough to solve the basic problems of life and and we know from people that have damage to their limbic system the amygdala and so forth they have a hard time making any decisions at all they sit there in front of the toothpaste section at the supermarket going oh my god this one's green this one's blue this oh this one costs this that one has this I can't decide you know they're just because you don't make decisions on based on toothpaste you go I like the taste of this winner it's got a pretty blue package you would never say that of course no one ever says that but that's what we do I knew it okay so we'll just take one more question here sorry but I will hang out and talk afterwards and I guess there's a reception afterwards and I'll talk to you guys - where's the non-believing brain come how do you see this is it is it a tree or any level that you have a better brain did you have a brain it has a better prefrontal cortex and a stronger inhibition of some big structures I like to get your sense yes well we don't really know that much about it to be frank an interesting line of research that's being pursued by Sam Harris and others is scanning the brains of skeptics versus believers so I do have a description of a couple of experiments FM fMRI brain scan experiments that have been done with believers and skeptics so we have a little sense of this but it's still we don't really know much about it my general claim is that brains in general are not good at being skeptical again the default rule of thumb is just believe is real if you hear it science is counter intuitive the whole null hypothesis we begin with not believing your your claim but of course as I should have showed with the paper pencil test about who believes what on ESP and so on there's great variation some are naturally by temperament more skeptical and more those are more believers and we're kind of getting a sense of what that might entail culturally neurologically or whatever but this is one of these great new areas to understand the future of skepticism so we can infuse more dopamine or less dopamine and get more skeptic members or something like that more oxytocin so everybody has a good time at our conferences or whatever actually they do that with adult beverages at night but anyway thank you so much for coming I really think [Applause] you

Channel: Center for Inquiry

Views: 95,508

Rating: 4.8069587 out of 5

Keywords: Michael, Shermer, Center, for, Inquiry, NYC, Skeptics, science, reason, belief, brain, neuroscience, religion, nyc skeptics, nyc cfi, cfi, center for inquiry, Skeptics Society, Michael Shermer, michael shermer debate

Id: YqAwfv3HYGo

Length: 79min 37sec (4777 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 15 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/mysticpolitics]

lol, why is it nsfw?