(mysterious music)
- [Narrator] For thousands
of years humans have tried
to understand the universe
and our place in it.
Who are we?
Why are we here?
And where are we going?
On this journey of truth
we have held many beliefs
about reality, often times
our understanding of that
truth led us to belief systems
that were not always correct.
But as we continue to ask questions
we began to understand the world more.
We began understanding
the truth and updated this
knowledge about reality, yet
we still hold onto outdated
ideas about reality despite
the world of knowledge.
Sometimes those beliefs have
had real world consequences.
This is the story of belief
and the reasons we believe.
(mysterious music)
Imagine a cave where you and
others like you have spent
your entire life as a prisoner,
with no knowledge of the outside world.
Behind you lies a fire, a fire
which you have never seen.
You have been chained in
such a way that you have only
been able to face foreword,
to observe images on a
wall in front of you.
The images you see on the wall
are shadows from the fire.
You and the others identify these images,
naming these images, not
knowing that these shadows
are just mere reflections
of another reality.
Puppet masters, who stand
in front of the fire to
cast shadows on the wall,
to make you believe that
the shadows you see are the real reality.
This is all you've ever known.
Imagine one day you break
free from these chains
and decide to escape the cave.
(mysterious music)
As you exit the cave your
eyes have a hard time
adjusting to the light from the outside.
Reality seems unreal, unflinching
but as you continue to explore
your eyes slowly adjust and
you start to make out objects
and things come into focus.
You see things for what they really are
and you notice that they all have shadows.
You realize the shadows were not real
but a reflection of the true
reality cast by the sun.
You now have a new
understanding of the truth.
You decide to take this knowledge
and share it with the other prisoners,
to break them free of the
illusion of the shadow.
When returning to the dark
cave your eyes have a hard
time trying to readjust,
you have difficulty seeing
the old world you came from,
you try and tell the other
prisoners about your finding
but they dismiss you,
they mock you, call you crazy.
They don't believe you,
to them you've become
another shadow on the wall.
Some are afraid, others
too comfortable to leave
the only thing they've ever known.
So what holds us to believe
these shadows are real?
What stops us from breaking our chains
and setting ourselves free?
Why is it that we believe?
(mysterious music)
- So in The Believing Brain
I argue that our beliefs
come first and than finding
evidence for the beliefs comes
second and I really started
with just the neural science of
belief, it's just connecting
the dots, finding patterns
in nature and it's about
building percepts into concepts.
So you have information
flowing in through your eyes
and your senses and so
forth and you piece these
sensory input together
into just basic patterns.
The pattern of a face or the
pattern of the face on Mars or
whatever and then from that
you build ideas on top of those
and then ideas on top of
ideas and so this sort of
convergence of lots of neural inputs
generates what we call beliefs.
- So when I think about
the word belief, to me it
just means something
that I hold to be true.
And that can be anything, it
could that my wife loves me,
it could be that the sun is
going to come up tomorrow.
You can have all sorts of beliefs right.
Some that can be based in
evidence, some that are not
necessarily based in scientific evidence,
although they are certainly based
on other kinds of evidence.
So for me a belief is just
something that you think is true.
- It's a setting between
the input and the output
that makes you who you are,
those beliefs that you have
set in that middle, that's what
makes you behave differently
on the output side than
say your best friend.
Say well my best friend and I,
we behave a lot the same way
but you don't behave identically,
identical twins don't behave identically.
- There are so many factors
that cause people to
either pretend to believe something
or to actually believe something.
Among those factors, for example are,
I found one of the biggest
factors is that people think
that having certain beliefs
makes them a better person.
Intrinsic to faith is it
is good to believe this,
this is important.
So among those people have
and will hold certain beliefs
'cause they think it makes
them a better person,
they think it has a moral valiance to it.
Something that else that
is communities of people
hold certain beliefs and
when everybody you know holds
a certain belief, when your
friends hold a certain belief
it's much more difficult
to let that belief go.
- I mean I think belief
is really crucial right,
we're not robots, we
don't just sort of follow
some pre written code
to navigate the world.
We have to have an
understanding of that world
and how it works, what actions
will have good results,
what actions will have bad results,
what way we can sort of be in the world
and that all involves beliefs
and it can be things we
learned from our families,
things that we learned from
experience, things we learned
from the society and culture
around us or from the
organizations we were part of
or the educational systems
we were brought up in.
And all of that forms a very
personal sense or instinct
and sort of set of beliefs
about how the world works.
- So the development of
beliefs is a pretty fascinating
question, why do I believe
X and you believe Y?
Why does that person believe
in God and this person
believes in Allah and that
person believes in Krishna?
So a lot of it has to do
with where you're born,
who is around you, what sort
of cultural milieu you're
growing up in and being exposed to.
So in other words what's around you
and your environment
that's shaping that belief?
What are you being told to believe?
And that's certainly a part
of it but it's not all of it.
If that was all of it
than none of us would ever
change our beliefs, none of
us would have beliefs that
are different from our parents
or from our dominant cultural group.
- We're to question that belief,
oh everybody believes it,
Cushing and Dunning talk
about that in The Big Sort,
how people divide themselves,
they talk about it in context
of politics mostly, how
people divide themselves into
ideological communities,
communities of like, communities
of similarity and then it becomes
very easy to other people,
other people as people
and other people's ideas.
- And then once those are
set you then start looking
for more information,
sensory input that reinforces
that particular belief
and not any other belief.
So you do what's called
the confirmation bias,
where you look for and
find confirming evidence
for that particular belief and no others.
- Type one and type two errors are when
you either believe something erroneously
or you don't believe
something and you should.
So a type one error, for
example in psychology we
think about type one errors at
what's called a P=.05 level.
So we think, when we do research,
when we publish research,
if we have a finding that
has a probabilistic level of
chance less than five percent
we think that's a good study.
So in other words, there's
only a five percent chance
that this significant difference
or the significant finding
is due to chance rather
than actually being there.
Now we can still, obviously
we have a five percent chance
so there's still some things
that could be due to chance.
So what we're trying to protect against is
saying that something is
true when it's not true
and that's at type one error.
The type two errors are when
you don't believe something
but it turns out that it actually is true.
- And so my thought
experiment is imagine you're a
Hominid on the plains of
Africa three and a half million
years ago and you're a small
brained little Australophocaena
and you hear a rustle in the grass.
Is it a dangerous predator
or is it just the wind?
Well if you think the rustle
in the grass is a dangerous
predator and it turns out
that it's just the wind
that's a type one error, a false positive.
You thought A was connected to B,
but there's no connection at all.
That's relatively harmless,
animals have that are just
skittish and cautious and they
move around very carefully
and they run off at the slightest sound
of a twig or branch
snapping, that kind of thing.
But if you think the rustle
in the grass is just the wind
and it turns out it's a
dangerous predator, you're lunch.
You've just been given a
Darwin Award for taking
yourself out of the gene pool early.
So making type one errors
is less costly than making
type two errors, that is
thinking that the pattern
is not real when it turns out that it is.
So what I'm arguing is not
that people believe weird
things because they're ignorant
or stupid or uneducated,
it's that our brains
naturally just find meaningful
patterns, connect the dots,
just assume these patterns
are real and fused with
intentional agency and so on.
And so it's the default
option, it's the less costly,
evolved, naturally selected
belief process of just
assuming everything you see
and hear and read about,
whatever, is true until
something else changes your mind,
which is very rare.
- We have, presumably, a genetic
predisposition to believe
there is an agent, even
when there really isn't.
It's better to be that wrong,
wrong that way than to say,
oh there's no agent and
in fact there really is.
Why do we have the feeling
that a human's doing that?
Probably because it
activates our mirror neurons,
even though the human's not visibile.
And so we're actually
looking into this to see to
what extent does the
brain fill in humanness.
What we've really noticed
about our mother nature given
genetics and so forth is
that they probably were ideal
for 100,000 years ago or
some timeframe there about
but if you look at our
genes in modern society,
there's a lot of context in
which they don't work very well.
- Taking a sort of a stance
from evolutionary psychology,
we try to think about,
what are these mechanisms
that we have currently?
Because obviously
evolution shapes our genes,
which in turn shapes our brain,
which in turn shapes our
behavior and our cognition.
So our behavior and our
cognition are in least in part
influenced by our evolutionary past.
- Well in the environment
of our evolutionary ancestry
the things you perceive are
usually fairly accurate.
I mean our brains evolved
to be reasonably accurate
at finding patterns, simply
because enough time has
passed that those that had
an inaccurate picture of
how the world works were
less likely to survive.
But by accurate I just
mean enough to survive,
so believing that the rustle
in the grass is a dangerous
predator and not the wind
keeps you from getting killed
but it also leads you to believe
all sorts of other things
that are just not true,
these false positives.
So believing that your
astrology column is meaningful
or that New Age beliefs
are all true, those are not
dangerous beliefs for the
most part, the average person
who reads his astrology column
isn't going to be taken out
of the gene pool for that.
So so much of those things just survive,
just sort of in the background because
they're not selected against.
And so we end up with all
these kinds of beliefs
that are not true, but
they're not the result of
necessarily of ignorance
or lack of education,
It's just part of how the
brain is designed to operate.
- So one of the interesting
things about people is
that we have what is called naive realism.
So in other words when I
look at the world I naturally
am inclined to believe it is
whatever I think I'm seeing.
And so much of us just accept it,
it seems like for example
that the earth is still.
If I'm sitting down in
a chair I'm not moving,
in reality I'm hurtling on a
giant rock through outer space
at hundreds of thousands
of miles per hour.
It sure doesn't seem that way.
If I look at the sun, it
really does appear that sun
is moving throughout the
sky 'cause I'm standing here
and I see the sun moving
throughout the sky.
Turns out no, we're the
ones that are moving right.
- So what logical arguments
could some sort of priest
in ancient Egypt have made to
convince the average person
that that sun was a god,
I don't think it was probably that hard.
Most folklore about gods say
that if you look straight
into the eyes of the god you'll go blind.
Okay the sun definitely
fits well into that one.
Gods generally have the
power of life and death,
so certainly when the sun
goes away for long periods
of times, crops fail, things get cold,
people could even start
to die in extreme cases
and so the sun has the power
to kill us and our livelihood.
The sun is, I can't reach
it, I've taken rocks
and tried to hit it and
see if it would jolt.
As far as I can tell the rock
didn't get anywhere near it.
So this sun lives in some
realm that is one that
we simply cannot inhabit,
that we are inferior to.
It's up there, the things that are
superior are always above us.
So many reasons for believing
that the sun is a god
and when you don't have
a better explanation
than that you go with that one.
- So epistemology is basically
how you know what you know.
Faith is usually but not
always a word that people use
when they don't have enough
evidence but they decide
that they're just gonna believe anyway.
It's a very slippery word,
people can try to get out
of the fact that they know at
some level that what they're
believing makes absolutely
no sense whatsoever,
in fact that it's
preposterous and so that's why
they play these semantic
games where they switch
the word from faith to
hope and faith to trust
but those are not the same words
and they have very very
different meanings.
- And so humans it turns
out have tons and tons of
different cognitive
problems in terms of memory,
in terms of perception, where
we're very easily fooled.
And if you don't believe this
than you can go to a magician
and you can have them do
some magic tricks for you and
they can make things appear
and disappear out of thin air.
They're not really making
things appear and disappear
out of thin air right, they're
using our natural tendencies
in terms of perception,
like visual perception,
in terms of paying attention
to certain things and ignoring others.
They're playing on those.
And so seeing it turns out
is not always accurate,
you don't always see the
world as it truly is.
- In the context of this
conversation with faith based
experiences and faith based
traditions, we have many many
people who will say the same thing.
Mormons for example say, I feel the bosom,
the shaking of my bosom, I
feel the burning in my heart,
I feel it so strongly,
that's how I know it's true.
Different of different faith traditions
will say the same thing.
They'll have recourse
to personal experience,
they'll have variant, this
couldn't all possibly be
coincidence, I see meaning
everywhere, look around you,
every single thing is proof,
I'm not sure what it's proof of.
It's proof of different
things to different people
which is part of the problem anyway.
- Personal experience and
anecdotes are a starting point,
they're not an end point.
So when I hear someone
say I had this experience,
I felt touched by God, I
heard the voice of God,
I saw an alien, whatever
it was your experience was,
to me that's a starting point.
As a scientist I say,
"That's really interesting.
"What's the next step?"
I don't just stop there, which
is what a lot of non skeptics
do, for them that's enough
right, that's the end all be all
is I've experienced
this so therefore it is.
- The problem of person
experience is a complicated one
and one of the things
that, I'm interested in how
we can help people realize
that personal experience
doesn't necessarily translate
into any objective truth
about the world and there are
many ways you can do that.
You know one way you can
do that, for example,
is you can help people
realize that other people
in other faith traditions
have these intense, intense
personal experiences and
is there a way that we can
figure out of those experiences
that they have latch onto
reality, see that way that
person isn't threatened.
That way that person doesn't
feel like there beliefs
are under siege and then they
invoke a defensive posture.
- The formation of beliefs
seems to have a lot to do with
your environment, as well
as some natural sort of
personality and cognitive characteristics.
But those interact a lot
with what we call our
natural biases and heuristics
And the major one of those
that we see at play is what's
called the confirmation bias
and so the confirmation bias
is where if I already hold
a belief I'm very very
likely to just confirm that belief
and ignore things that contradict it.
So if I believe that, for
example, that ghosts are real
and someone comes up to
me and tells me a story
about their encounter with a
supposed ghost I'm going to
be very likely to agree with them,
to take that story in,
to say that is great.
But then if somebody comes up
to me and tells me how they
did an investigation and
found out that this ghost was
nothing more than a creaky floor board,
I'm gonna ignore that.
And this confirmation
bias is very very powerful
and it literally colors
the world as we see it
and this isn't just for things
like paranormal beliefs,
or spiritual beliefs, I
mean this is literally
everything we believe in.
- Most of us most of the time
hold beliefs, not that we
arrived at through rational
calculation but they're usually
emotionally based, things we
were just raised to believe,
our peer groups and our friends believe.
Just things we're sort of
surrounded by in our culture
and we come to believe
for whatever reason.
And then it feels good to
believe it, your social group
believes it, you're reinforced
constantly to believe it,
all that dopamine going around
in there, it's reinforcing.
And so when you're presented
with contradictory data,
not only are smart people
less likely to see that,
they're more likely to distort
the data because they're
so good at rational calculations
of justifying beliefs,
because they're smart and
usually well read and so on.
So what happens is no
matter how much data you
present they can always find
a few pieces of information
over here that seems to support it.
(mysterious music)
- One of the things that
we see as I would say an
evolutionary spandrel
of going with the flow,
of sort of seeing what people
around us are believing
and believing the same sort
of things, is that it's very
hard for us to not believe those things.
And so this means that it's
hard for me to escape a belief
that I already have or
escape a belief that others
around me have because it's adaptive.
If I am, for example, in
a small tribal system,
50, 60,000 years ago it's
not going to be very adaptive
for me to be going against
the group all the time.
So we have that sort of
natural propensity towards
belief in authority figures,
towards accepting hierarchy situations.
But what that does, that
makes us very not prone
to then try to question
those things a lot of times.
One of the earliest sort
of pioneers in this work
was a guy named Solomon
Asch and he ran some really
interesting studies that
have been rerun a number
of times in different populations
looking at conformity.
And in one of his earliest
studies what he did was he
brought a group of five
people in, four people were
confederates of the experiment,
so they were in on it,
they were part of the experiment.
And only one person would
actually be the subject
and they would show lines on
a screen and they would just
ask the people out loud,
"Which of these lines match?"
So they show line A, is it
matching with B, C or D?
You would have the confederates,
the people who were in
on the experiment give the right answer.
And on some of them they
would give the wrong answer
and these are very clear cut
situations, I mean everyone
can tell looking at these
lines which ones match up.
What they found was that even
these very very clear cut
situations, even when there
wasn't really any direct social
pressure people would still
conform to the wrong answer,
the blatantly wrong answer
about a third of the time.
We can see that playing out
on a larger level once you
start even having things
like larger social pressure.
So where there are
punishments or rewards for you
conforming or not
conforming to a behavior.
It turns out it changes a
lot of your behaviors when
the people around you
act a particular way.
- You know the expression
you can't reason somebody out
of something they didn't
reason there way into
in the first place, very
much applies to religion
and say political ideologies, cults.
People join these things,
they get involved, they commit
to it for some emotional
reason, for social reason.
Yay though I walk through
the valley of the shadow
of death I shall fear no
evil for thou art with me,
thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
You know there's a lot of
people, that's what they get
out of religion, the music
and the social aspects,
there's just a lot of positive
social reinforcement,
emotional reinforcement.
Such if that you walked in
there and said hey you know the
big bang explains this and
the multiverse and the fine
tuning argument is no good,
they don't care about any of
that, the average guy that goes to church,
he doesn't even know about those things.
- So in the context of faith
many people pretend to know
about the flood, the resurrection,
Mohammad or flying to
heaven on a winged horse or
Bahai faith or you could pick
from any religious tradition you want.
So pretending to know things
you don't know is when
people, theologians and
apologists in particular are
good at this, they pretend
to know the qualities of God.
They pretend to know what
God wants other people to do
with their genitalia for example.
They're pretending to know those things
but they don't actually know those things.
- I'm perfectly willing to
believe the average preacher,
pastor, reverend, et cetera
are great people, intent on
doing great things but one
reason they're able to do what
they're able to do is, and
one reason rituals have just
been built so heavily into
religious practice is because
rituals reduce our ability
to evaluate claims.
And so if somebody tries to
tell you God is the creator
of the universe and it
seems, well that's kind of a
bizarre theory or better yet, Noah's ark,
most Christians that I know
don't, yeah okay that's just
a weird story and it's
metaphor, allegory, whatever.
But I do know people that do
believe it literally as well.
- We are story telling
animals and we enjoy stories
and the willing suspension of
disbelief when you go to the
movies or you read a novel
is great, you have to do it
so that you really get into it
and you take the perspective
of the characters in the film
and you believe it's real
for the two hours that you're there.
There's nothing wrong with
that, that's called fiction,
that's called novels,
that's called entertainment,
you know it's part of
the game, it's great.
The problem is that for many
religions it's not enough
anymore to say well this is
our belief and you have your
belief and world's a big
enough place we can all have
our beliefs and everybody
goes their separate ways.
No too many people believe that
the world not be right until
every knee bows to our particular belief.
- I think the really
interesting thing is that even
though this is such a
threatening and negative belief
people would still prefer
to believe in a world that
has this negative or scary
explanatory structure
than one that is completely unpredictable.
(mysterious music)
- When I'm in a super stressful situation,
whether it's something
wrong with me medically,
whether it's a family
conflict, whether it's a war
situation, whatever it is,
we'll try to find ways to cope
with that, we'll try and find
something, sometimes anything,
to make us feel better
in those situations.
And for some people that's
a new belief system.
That's adopting a religion,
that's jettisoning a religion
for a new one sometimes,
that's turning to a particular
kind of alternative medicine
when conventional medicine
fails you and it's all about
trying to relieve that stress.
Like trying to get rid of that
stress, trying to mitigate
the effects of that stress in some way.
- Stress is a little bit
like levels of uncertainty
and feeling out of control
that leads to more magical
thinking and the value
of religion to people
and ideologies and that sort of thing.
But in terms of like how
evolution designs organisms,
you want to be medium stressed.
You want to be curious
enough to take some risks
that are kind of stressful, a little bit,
because otherwise you're
not gonna find food, mates
and so forth and expand
your territory and survive.
But you don't want to be too
risky if you're super low
risk and you'll do high risk
taking and you do anything
than you're more likely to be
taken out of the gene pool.
So what we find in studies
is that emotionally
and physiologically, it's
sort of a U shaped curve,
a medium amount of risk
and stress is good.
I think one of the things
religion and ideologies do
is that it tells people,
convinces people you're gonna be
over here, you're gonna
be totally stressed out
unless you buy into our belief.
- Most of us automatically,
even if we don't feel a
conscious fear, we can see
a amydalar activation in the
brain which is generally an
anxiety and fear response.
And we don't have a lot of choice over
whether our amygdala fires or not.
The idea that there is
always an agent out there
causing something, that
is probably at least
what I feel safe saying, was selected for.
- In clinical levels of
anxiety, what we have is people
who are worrying or afraid
about something to such
degree that it's causing them problems
adjusting to everyday life.
So if I'm walking outside in
my pasture and I see a snake,
I'm going to have a
small moment of fright,
because I don't know what
kind of snake it is right.
I just see it moving along,
it might be dangerous,
it might not be dangerous, I don't know.
And so I'll have a small moment
of fear and anxiety about
that and then I identify it
as a rat snake, it's harmless
and my fear will go away, I
won't be worried about it.
But if I have more clinical
high levels of anxiety
what will happen is that
I'll see that, I'll become
very very afraid, I won't
even be able to identify
this as something I shouldn't be afraid of
and then I'll never go
into the pasture again.
- There certainly is a
neurophysiological evidence
that we do have a fundamental
motivation of fear
and we've got this thin called the almond.
It's called by it's Greek name, amygdala,
and it's just a small structure
in the middle of the brain
that is particularly important for fear.
And so if I were to hold
up a snake in front of you
and in particularly if
you had a phobia of them
than you amygdala is
just going to go crazy.
And I could in fact, if I
could hold the snake up here
and a cute little bunny over
here you're gonna look at the
snake and so our brains are geared to,
given the choice, we'd rather look at
negative information than
positive information.
- So if I am anxious and
I have a belief system
that allows me to give a
simple sort of pat explanation
for why something did or did not occur,
all of a sudden that probably
makes me a lot less worried,
a lot less anxious, a lot less afraid.
It turns out that life is
random and chaotic right,
it is confusing, it is scary in many ways
and if I have a belief
system that allows me to say
well all I have to do is X or
Y and it's all gonna be okay.
- It's a little bit like what the TSA does
and the government does
with terrorist threats.
There is enough reality to
them, there are terrorists
but they build it up
like if we don't do this
we're all gonna be way over
here and it's gonna be terrible.
And religions have always done
the same thing, including all
the way to the ultimate
thing, you're gonna die.
And so the fear of death,
it's no the main motivator
for why people believe
in God and join religions
but it's certainly one of them
and it's appealing to think
this is not all there is, we
get to go on to this next place
but it's that fear, that
fear of death they play into
just enough to keep us in line.
- Fear is very tidy into
it because I think it is
nigh impossible to
experience fear without also
experiencing a lack of control right.
I think it can be done but it's very rare
but what I think it really
does come down to is control.
I think the issue is that in
many cases out in the world
when we experience a sense of
threat, when we are afraid,
we also lack control over that situation.
I think what it does come down
to is this lack of control
or this uncertainty of the
world, is what causes us to
want to make sense of it and
understand what's going on.
- When we're not in
control of our environment,
or we don't think we're in
control of our environment
it's not very good for us in
terms of our mental health.
And so in psychology we talk
about this a lot of times
in terms of an internal or
external locus of control.
If I have an internal locus
of control I can in act
change in my environment, I
can do something, I can change
what's happening around
me, I can have an impact.
If I have an external locus of
control, then what that means
is that I don't think
that what I do matters.
- The relationship between
control and feeling secure in
environment and the process of
finding a illusory patterns,
patterns that aren't real
is a fairly strong one,
it's been tested in the lab
that if you put subjects
under conditions of feeling out of control
or anxious or uncertain
they're more likely to see
a illusory patterns in
a field of random dots
or random noises, that sort of thing.
And we know from the studies
on superstition and magical
thinking that the task you're
about to perform, if it's
dangerous and risky like
jumping out of an airplane,
if you're in a situation of
high uncertainty like sports
athletes and different high
risk or low probability of
success, like batters in
baseball, they're more likely
to have superstitions and magical rituals.
- You know so one of the
things we tested is we induced
various emotions in people
and some of those emotions
were certain and some of
those emotions were uncertain
and what we found consistently
across that sort of
experiment is that when people
were experiencing an emotion
that had uncertainty involved with it they
were significantly more likely to see
patterns in the world around them.
So they were more likely to
see conspiracies for example
or think that conspiratorial
behavior was afoot
than if they were experiencing
a more certain emotion.
- What's interesting
though is that in some
of our research in particular
we found that those people
who have more paranormal
beliefs and experiences,
they have worse overall mental health.
They show on the big five
factors, what we call more
neuroticism, so more being
prone to being anxious,
worried, depressed and than
they don't seem to do very well
because they're attributing
things more to these
external factors, it's ghosts,
it's spirits, it's demons,
it's whatever it happens to be.
- And you can see this in
modern baseball players,
batters have all sorts
of superstitions before
they go up to bat, they
have to pick up the dirt
and they have to rub it this
way and they have to touch
the bat that way and adjust
their hat and do this and that.
Some of them have elaborate
rituals about meals they have
to eat in proper order before
a game, that kind of thing.
But not the fielders, the
fielders who are very successful,
they're successful 95% of the
time, batters are successful
at most one third of the time.
I mean you can be a Major League
world class baseball player
and fail two thirds of
the time at the plate.
But the interesting thing
is they're the same people,
the batters and the fielders
are the same players.
The superstition, the
magical rituals are only done
in the task that has high failure rate.
So we know that lack of
control, lack of certainty,
uncertainty about the future, anxiety,
leads people to magical thinking.
- Lacking control is such
an adversive state that one
of the ways that we can feel
that we have more control
in the world is to
understand what's happening.
And so when we lack
control we're just gonna be
significantly, you know
we're going to seek out
and we're going to see more
patterns in the world around us
and those patterns can take
a number of different forms.
And I think in many cases
this is actually a very useful
instinct, so if something's
gone wrong, a situation's
done something strange that you
didn't expect and you really
have no idea, you're just
clueless about what's happening,
I think one instinct is just
sort of curl into a fetal
ball in in the corner and do nothing.
And that's not going to be
useful, that's not gonna
improve your situation and
it's not going to get you
anymore information about
the world around you
or what's really happening.
And so when you see
things that aren't real,
when you make a false,
you see a false pattern,
it it's enough to get you
moving, to see the situation
as something you can actually
navigate and so you take an
action, even if it's a
completely misguided action,
the situation's gonna respond
to that thing you just did
and you're going to get more information.
- Dopamine is a brain chemical
associated with learning
and memory, so high dopamine
rates lead to more likely
to find patterns in a
random series of dots,
that kind of thing.
Dopamine's associated with rats
pressing bars and so forth,
like Skinner's rats or
dogs learning things.
So we know the research
that dopamine is a neural
transmitter substance that's
released between neurons
that helps them communicate faster.
So when you learn something
you're neurons literally,
physically change, they
produce more dopamine
in these little tiny
receptors that than burst open
when the self fires and
releases dopamine in the
little synaptic gap between two neurons.
And what that does is tells
the neuron, fire again
when this thing happens and
that is the definition of
a reinforcer, is anything
that causes an organism
to repeat the behavior.
And in the brain it feels
good, anything that feels good
makes you want to do it again.
So sweet tasting foods,
sex, things like this,
they feel good because evolution
wants us to do more of it
but evolution doesn't want us to anything,
it's just now natural selection works.
So dopamine we know for
sure is related to this
and so if you infuse dopamine
into subjects they're
more likely to find
these illusory patterns
and employ magical thinking.
- When we're navigating
the world and we're faced
with situations in which
we need to make a choice
a lot of times our brains
use the emotions we feel
about those choices as
a sort of short hand,
or a summary of how we
feel about that situation
and sometimes it's very
useful, sometimes when you
have a sneaking concern
of fear about a situation
that's actually a sign you
need to look at it more closely
because you've overlooked something.
But other times it's less
warranted and we feel uncertain
or afraid for reasons that
aren't really that valid
but whether it's valid or
not we're still feeling
that emotion and that
emotion gets wrapped up
into our decision making process.
- We are mostly rational people right,
we are pretty well convinced
often times by logic.
Now we also have an
emotional side, which is very
powerful and useful side of us.
So at no point would I,
do I ever want to say
we just want to quail
emotion and make purely,
because in fact our unconscious
mind, which may be the
majority of our mind,
perhaps communicates with our
conscious mind through emotions.
So emotions certainly are still
today very useful in our behaviors.
- Ideas can be addictive just
like a drug can be addictive.
So what ideologies do, what religions do,
what cults do, what
ideological belief systems do
is they tap into the brains
natural dopaminergic system
but get it to fire in response
to ideas rather than things.
But the neural pathways
are still the same,
so they're just tapping
into the process that's
already been laid down by
evolution over millions of years
and so they're substituting
one thing for another.
And so it's not that people
can't get off addictive drugs,
they can and they do, and they
can't leave cults, they do.
It's just that it's harder to
do it because that dopamine
and that dopaminergic
system by definition causes
you to want to repeat
the behavior even if it's
going to the Scientology
meeting or whatever
it is that feels good, that's reinforcing.
- I think sometimes the
hard thing about letting go
of a pattern that doesn't
really accurately portray
the world is that the
world's a very complex place
and it's full of a tremendous
amount of uncertainty.
You know people are unpredictable,
they have multiple goals
and motives, some of
them are hidden from you.
You see if a lot of people
acting together, if you're trying
to get through a political
system or you're in a very
complex organization where
there's a lot of different goals
and a lot of different parties involved.
Or even if it's something made
up of the actions of people,
like the stock market, it's
very hard to see what's
going to happen next and so
sometimes letting go of your
false idea about the way
it works means returning
to that chaos and that
complete unpredictability
and that lack of control.
- What does it matter, what's the harm?
Well again the average person
who reads his astrology
column, something like that,
probably relatively harmless.
But we do know there are
correlations between people who
actually really believe
astrology columns for example
and who believe bigfoot is
real and that aliens landed
and then they start to shift into things
and then 9/11 was an inside job.
All of a sudden you're
getting into paranoia
and some of these people,
this leads to violence,
this leads to homegrown terrorist attacks.
So these people are just factually wrong,
so I call this the witch
theory of causality.
That if you believe that
the explanation for disease
and disasters is that
women cavort with demons
and fly around on brooms
you're either insane
or you live 500 years ago.
That's just what everybody believed.
It's not that these people
were immoral for burning
women as witches, they fully
believed they were doing
the moral thing, they
were just factually wrong.
And this is the contribution
of science to the world,
to making the world a better place,
that it really does matter
what's right or wrong.
Even though this little crazy
idea or that little crazy
idea, well what's the harm,
makes you feel better.
Yeah but in general bad
ideas lead to bad behaviors
and immoral, what we would
call immoral behaviors
so it's better to get it right.
- So why does it matter?
Why does it matter what people believe?
The number one danger we
face in the world right now
without any question about is ideology.
Ideology is linked to everything.
You couldn't possibly
name something that larger
macro issues and even to a
certain extend micro personal
issues in which ideology
was not a culprit.
So what ideology is, it's
like a filter, it filters out,
it's like one of those gold
sieves and you're dropping
linguistic propositions and
you're dropping statements
about the world and
the pan is the ideology
and lets certain things go through.
When people, ideologs think
in terms of conclusions,
they don't think in terms
of processes and the most
important thing that we
can do, the next move,
not in atheism, not even in
skepticism, the next move that
we need to take in terms of
fostering critical rationality
is teaching people to think
in terms of processes.
- A lot of times when I talk
to people who are non skeptics,
I talk to believers in various
kinds of alternative medicine
for example, they will ask me,
"Why don't you just leave me alone?
"What's the harm in me
believing in what I believe
"and you believing in what you believe?"
And for some things that's okay right.
Like if you think blue is the
best color and I think red
is the best color, okay
that's fine if we have those
different beliefs but if your
beliefs are causing problems,
either for yourself, for your
children, for society at large
than that's where the problems are lying.
So if you think that
vaccines cause autism so you
don't vaccinate your children
and you compromise our herd
immunity and you put those
among us who can't get
vaccines at a risk that's a problem.
That's a belief, a faulty belief,
that's causing real world problems.
If you think that evolution
is a myth, that's a problem
because you're gonna fight
that in the schools and you're
gonna fight our children
being taught biology as
we actually understand it.
And all of sudden now
our educational standards
are much lower and that's a problem.
If you think that being gay
is something that can be
changed through therapy and
that it's an unnatural state
and so you force lesbian,
gay, bisexual, transgendered
individuals into therapy that's
been shown to be damaging
to them, that results in
higher rates of suicide
and higher rates of depression
and anxiety and all sorts
of mental health problems,
that's a problem.
Faulty beliefs have
real world consequences
and that's why we have to combat those.
- If everybody only had
their own island great
but the fact is we don't
have our own islands,
we live in communities and
particularly in this society
and I'd extend the umbrella
to Western Europe in general
and to a certain extent
South America, but anyplace
there's a democratic systems,
people in democracies vote,
they effect other people, so
when people harbor beliefs
about reality that are
misaligned they think that what
they're doing is acting in
their own interest in their
interest to the community but they're not.
They're actually, because
they're using epistemology that
they can't rely upon to
take them to the truth.
But here's the tricky
part, here's the ringer,
the tricky part is they
think that the epistemology
that they're using makes
them a better person
and because they use this
epistemology their communities
are better, their relationships
are better but really
they're just relationships predicated
upon bad ways of coming to knowledge.
It's really, the whole
thing is really tragic.
- I think it becomes dangerous
when it harms other people,
when it misportrays organizations
or societies or groups
and makes them more threatening than
they should be portrayed as.
I think it can be dangerous
when people sink to many
resources into that belief structure.
- There are few think
that they're, they have
epistemological problems, people
tend to think that they're
smarter and more
knowledgeable than they are,
it's kind of a variation of
the Dunning-Kruger effect.
So how do we help people to realize that
they don't know what they
think that they know?
What I would have said, well
is there anything that I could
present you with, is there
anything that I could say to you
that would disabuse you of
that belief or that would help,
maybe cause you to rethink
or question or change?
- And then you can update
your view of the world
and so there's actually a
lot of utility I think to
taking action with a perhaps
flawed or bad idea of the
situation around you and then
updating it immediately as
you get new information as
opposed to doing nothing
and engaging in learned helplessness.
I think the real danger
happens when you don't update
that false impression of
the world and when you get
information that contradicts
it and instead of
updating that illusory
pattern you just grow it.
(tense music)
- Science by contrast
is counter intuitive.
Science starts off by saying,
it's the null hypothesis,
your theory, your idea,
your hypothesis is not true
until you prove otherwise that it is.
And that very opposite
to how our brains work,
this is why science is counter intuitive,
requires education and
practice and training.
- The strength of science is
that it double checks itself
right and I think that's
the exactly what is crucial
for discarding illusory
patterns is to double check
and instead of doubling
down and find an excuse to
dismiss every possible
conflicting piece of evidence
is to really actually
look at them clear eyed.
- The scientific method is a
couple of different things.
One is that it is the steps
involved in thinking kind
of scientifically, and
that includes being able to
look at a problem and figure
out some way to test it
in some sort of fashion where
we don't just try and confirm
our beliefs but we also try
and dis confirm our beliefs.
And then being able to
look at that data sort of
objectively and make
decision based off of that.
So in one way it's a method
but it's not just a cook book,
so not everyone who does science
does it the exact same way.
So it's more of an underlying
methodology but kind of a
toolbox, so it's here's how
I'm going to try and answer
these questions and I'm gonna
try and answer these questions
in a stepwise systematic
empirical fashion, rather than
just sort of guessing or relying
on my personal experience.
I'm gonna look at the data
rather than the anecdotes.
- Science is not a democracy,
we don't determine truth
by vote but in the other hand
there's only so many people
qualified to access string
theory or multiverse physics
or quantum global general
relativity and quantum physics.
Although we don't rely
on authority in science,
if I say well I checked with
my Cal-Tech physicist friend
when I read about a claim, I'm
no depending on an authority,
I have confidence that this
guy works in that field
and he knows all the exerts
and he'll tell me pretty much
what everybody's thinking right now.
So it's not faith, it's
confidence, it's not based on
authority, it's based on the
history that science works
and weeding out bad ideas
and we really do progress
closer and closer to the
way the world really is.
There is progress in science.
So these things that people
say, like oh scientists don't
know everything and oh they
laughed at the Wright brothers.
Yeah it's like, they laughed
at the Marx brothers, so what?
Being laughed at doesn't make you right.
- Somehow because science
can't tell us something
people think that gives them
a license to make stuff up.
It's weird, it's like, okay
well science can't tell us this,
okay it can't tell us this so what
is a reasonable inference from that?
Is that reasonable
inference from that to say,
well you know, I don't know?
Like we don't know at this
time, now we may never know,
there might be no point, in
matter how technologically
advanced we are that
we will know something.
But that's not a reason to
go, because we don't have
questions answered at this particular time
by a scientific process,
that doesn't mean that
any other alternative is more likely.
It doesn't even make sense.
But again that goes back
to what people value
and it also goes back to type of fear.
People have a fear of saying
I don't know, they have a
fear of thinking that you're
stupid or you look bad.
- Most ideas in science,
most ideas period are wrong.
Just across the board
most ideas people have
are wrong and science starts off with the
null hypothesis that your idea is wrong.
Now the burden of proof
is on you to convince us
that it's not wrong and
that's the heart of science.
It's skeptical by nature
and it's a good thing
because most ideas are crazy ideas.
- So lets say that you're
interacting with somebody
who has an obviously wrong
belief, like that vaccines
cause autism and you can
say, "Look, you're wrong.
"You're not right, here's all
the data, all the evidence,
"shows that you're clearly wrong."
They don't just go,
"Oh damn, thanks, that's
great, I'm so sorry."
They don't do that right?
When you argue with someone
and you tell them they're wrong
they don't just accept that,
instead what they do is
they entrench their beliefs alright.
They show what we call
psychological reactants,
which actually makes them
tend to grow stronger in
their beliefs when you just
tell somebody they're wrong.
- How can we help people
question their own beliefs?
Listen, model the behavior
that you'd like to emulate.
So if you want people to listen to you
than you listen to them.
Be sincere, be authentic,
be honest with people.
How do we walk that line between
being blunt and forthright,
and I'm a big fan of
being blunt and forthright
and not coming across as upset or angry.
- That doesn't shut 'em down,
that doesn't piss 'em off,
the wall goes up and you have a fight.
So there's strategies to doing this.
You be polite, thoughtful, sense of humor
and you just say well
that's really interesting,
I read that book too,
I was fascinated by it.
Then I started wondering, I
wonder if that's really true,
I mean just the thoughts
and the universe will give
you want you want, I mean
if that were true wouldn't
that mean like people in
Africa that are starving and
dying of AIDs, they
just have bad thoughts?
I mean little children?
I mean that just doesn't,
to me that just doesn't seem
right, I mean if there's a God
or there's a universal force
that does that, I don't
know, what do you think?
And you just let 'em respond,
let 'em process the counter
idea without saying you
have to give up your idea,
you're a crazy moron for believing that.
If you do that usually
the wall just goes up.
- The question shouldn't be
do we let people have hope
believing these things that
aren't particularly accurate
portrayals of reality or do we take
them away and destroy their hope right?
I think the idea is how
do we give people a sense
that the world is sensible,
at least to an extent
so that they can exist in it
without feeling intense fear
or intense lack of control
and how do we do that with
as accurate a picture as possible.
- If you allow yourself to
believe non physical explanations
of the world you open your mind
up to a lot of crazy claims.
And so lets stop the
mythological side but lets use
science to figure out why
the social side of religion
has been so beneficial to us.
- It's about facilitating
those values in the person
with whom you're speaking
that make it more likely
that they will be trustful of
reason, revise their beliefs,
be sincere in their inquiry,
be honest with themselves.
- So we have to take different
tactics to help people
understand for example the difference
between empirical versus
anecdotal evidence.
I can't just say, "You're
wrong, bigfoot is a myth."
I have to be able to start at
a different level with them.
Being a good scientist means
being a good scientific skeptic
and so I think at the heart of
skepticism is the scientific
method and the entire reason
that we have to have the
scientific method is because
it turns out we're not very
good at knowing what it
is is actually out there
and what we're seeing versus
what we're not seeing.
And so it's really easy
for us to fool ourselves
and that's really why we
have the scientific method
'cause it's developed to
try and help prevent biases,
it's preventing us from fooling ourselves,
from just seeing what we want to see
rather than what's actually there.
- Well I think the spread of
skepticism comes from all of
us, everybody making a
contribution, just making the world
a little bit better place by
dispersing correct information
about the world by spreading
science and critical thinking
and skepticism and we
all do this in own ways.
So I publish a magazine
but you make a film
and we all have
conversations with friends.
So I do public debates but
I've done 10,000 little debates
with just a friend here, at a party there.
Now the question is what's the strategy?
How do you engage this person?
- And if we can help
people make this one shift
and it's complicated how we can do that.
One of the ways is we have
to help people value certain
things because the things
that people ought to value to
make it more likely that
they align their beliefs with
the truth, simply it's
not the case right now.
People aren't valuing those things.
- I think what folks like
ourselves seem to want to do
is try and convince folks to
use more empirical, either
methods for coming to understand
the world around them,
like getting news from the
environment for instance.
Or use empirical research,
and or use empirical research
to guide their behavior.
- Then I think the thing to
remember is A, be aware that
you might be more subject
to seeing these patterns
that aren't real and it
doesn't mean doubt yourself,
it doesn't mean dismiss them completely,
but it does mean just think
about it a little bit more.
Maybe if you have trusted
people who are also
aware of the situation
that you're trying to make
sense of check in with them, get advice.
And I think that one of the
things that we always have
control of, so in both my
original paper and in the paper
looking at how emotions
influence these effects what we
managed to do was actually
break the connection between
lacking control or uncertainty
and this pattern perception
via self affirmation.
- And so what I think we have
to do is we have to introduce
what critical thinking
is and why it's important
very early in educational process.
And for me personally that
begins with understanding
the psychology behind why we
do or do not believe things.
So we have to understand
how is it our brain fools us
and how our world can fool
us and how that changes our
beliefs and our behaviors.
And taking a step back
from just being inside
my own head to look at what do we know
about how the world actually operates.
- There's reason for hope.
What that reason for hope
is is rationality, is reason
and why is that the case?
We know that's the case
because if we can help people
to align their beliefs with
reality they're more likely to
come to the truth and lead to
their own human flourishing.
If we can help people stop
thinking in terms of ideology
and start thinking in terms of
processes that's what we need
to do, we need to help people
value those dispositions that
will lead them to a more
thoughtful and more examined life
and we know that's possible.
We know that's possible.
- I think we have a new enlightenment,
it's a science based enlightenment.
People accuse me of
scientism, guilty as charged.
I mean why not?
Call it whatever you want
but if we can get an answer
to a question using science,
what's wrong with that?
It doesn't take anything
away from art, from music,
from literature, from the
aesthetic appreciation of
beautiful things, sunsets, art, whatever.
It doesn't, it just adds to
it, it doesn't subtract at all.
I do think there's an arc
to the moral universe,
I do think it bends toward
justice, freedom and prosperity
and peace and so forth and
I do think that science
and reason are the main causes of that.
In the broadest sense of
it's really better to have a
proper correct understanding
of the way the world works
and science is the best
tool we have for doing that.
(thoughtful music)
