The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths QUOTES

21 " 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.” No squared. The postmodernist belief in the "

― Michael Shermer , The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

22 " The release of dopamine is a form of information, a message that tells the organism “Do that again.” Dopamine produces the sensation of pleasure that accompanies mastering a task or accomplishing a goal, which makes the organism want to repeat the behavior, whether it is pressing a bar, pecking a key, or pulling a slot machine lever. You get a hit (a reinforcement) and your brain gets a hit of dopamine. Behavior—Reinforcement—Behavior. Repeat sequence. "

― Michael Shermer , The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

23 " Unfortunately, there’s a downside to the dopamine system, and that is addiction. Addictive drugs take over the role of reward signals that feed into the dopamine neurons. Gambling, pornography, and drugs such as cocaine cause the brain to flood itself with dopamine in response. So, too, do addictive ideas, most notably addictive bad ideas, such as those propagated by cults that lead to mass suicides (think Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate), or those propagated by religions that lead to suicide bombing (think 9/11 and 7/7). "

― Michael Shermer , The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

24 " Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”22 "

― Michael Shermer , The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

25 " Man is, in short, ‘perfectible’—meaning continually improvable rather than capable of actually reaching absolute perfection. "

― Michael Shermer , The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

26 " The scientific principle that a claim is untrue unless proven otherwise runs counter to our natural tendency to accept as true that which we can comprehend quickly. Thus it is that we should reward skepticism and disbelief, and champion those willing to change their mind in the teeth of new evidence. Instead, most social institutions—most notably those in religion, politics, and economics—reward belief in the doctrines of the faith or party or ideology, punish those who challenge the authority of the leaders, and discourage uncertainty and especially skepticism. "

― Michael Shermer , The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

27 " Computer scientists calculate that there have been thirty-two doublings since World War II, and that as early as 2030 we may encounter the singularity—the point at which total computational power will rise to levels that are so far beyond anything we can imagine that they will appear nearly infinite and thus, relatively speaking, be indistinguishable from omniscience. "

― Michael Shermer , The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

28 " The brain is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning. The first process I call patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data. The second process I call agenticity: the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency. We can’t help it. Our brains evolved to connect the dots of our world into meaningful patterns that explain why things happen. These meaningful patterns become beliefs, and these beliefs shape our understanding of reality. Once beliefs are formed, the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which adds an emotional boost of further confidence in the beliefs and thereby accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive feedback loop of belief confirmation. "

― Michael Shermer , The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

29 " We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with percepts. Memory, in this flawed model, is simply rewinding the tape and playing it back in the theater of the mind. This is not at all what happens. The perceptual system, and the brain that analyzes its data, are deeply influenced by the beliefs it already holds. As a consequence, much of what passes before our eyes may be invisible to a brain focused on something else. "

― Michael Shermer , The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

30 " In 1963, Skinner’s Harvard colleagues Charles Catania and David Cutts put humans through the pigeon paces by instructing each of twenty-six undergraduate subjects to press one of two different buttons on a box whenever a yellow light flashed and to try to accumulate as many points as possible on a counter. Whenever the subject gained a point a green light flashed. A red light indicated that the session was over, which was when the subject reached one hundred points. Unbeknownst to the subjects, only the right button could generate points, and those points were delivered on a VI schedule of reinforcement, with an average time between point delivery of thirty seconds. The results were revealing in that human brains are no less superstitious than bird brains: most of the subjects quickly developed superstitious button-pushing patterns between the left and right buttons, because if they pressed the left button just before the right button happened to deliver a point, that particular pattern was reinforced. Once subjects established a superstitious button-pushing pattern, they stuck with that pattern throughout the session because they continued to be reinforced for it. "

― Michael Shermer , The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

31 " In addition to localized neural networks, hallucinogenic drugs have been documented to trigger such preternatural experiences, such as the sense of floating and flying stimulated by atropine and other belladonna alkaloids. These can be found in mandrake and jimsonweed and were used by European witches and American Indian shamans, probably for this very purpose.32 Dissociative anesthetics such as the ketamines are also known to induce out-of-body experiences. Ingestion of methylenedioxyamphetamine (MDA) may bring back long-forgotten memories and produce the feeling of age regression, while dimethyltryptamine (DMT)—also known as “the spirit molecule”—causes the dissociation of the mind from the body and is the hallucinogenic substance in ayahuasca, a drug taken by South American shamans. People who have taken DMT report “I no longer have a body,” and “I am falling,” “flying,” or “lifting up. "

― Michael Shermer , The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

32 " Dopamine enhances the ability of neurons to transmit signals between one another. How? By acting as an agonist (as opposed to antagonist), or a substance that enhances neural activity. Dopamine binds to specific receptor molecule sites on the synaptic clefts of the neurons, as if it were the CTS that normally bind there.12 It increases the rate of neural firing in association with pattern recognition, which means that synaptic connections between neurons are likely to increase in response to a perceived pattern, thereby cementing those perceived patterns into long-term memory through the actual physical growth of new neural connections and the reinforcement of old synaptic links.
Increasing dopamine increases pattern detection; scientists have found that dopamine agonists not only enhance learning but in higher doses can also trigger symptoms of psychosis, such as hallucinations, which may be related to that fine line between creativity (discriminate patternicity) and madness (indiscriminate patternicity). The dose is the key. Too much of it and you are likely to be making lots of Type I errors—false positives—in which you find connections that are not really there. Too little and you make Type II errors—false negatives—in which you miss connections that are real. "

― Michael Shermer , The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

33 " On Being Sane in Insane Places, "

― Michael Shermer , The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

34 " In a 2009 Harris Poll of 2,303 adult Americans, people were asked to “indicate for each [category below] if you believe in it, or not.” The results were revealing.1 God 82 % Miracles 76 % Heaven 75 % Jesus is God or the Son of God 73 % Angels 72 % Survival of the soul after death 71 % "

― Michael Shermer , The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

35 " Photographs and videos are often misperceived and can be easily doctored, and lights in the sky have many prosaic explanations: aerial flares, lighted balloons, experimental aircraft, helicopters, clouds, swamp gas, or even the planet Venus, which, if you are driving on an undulating highway away from city lights, really does appear to be a bright light following your car. "

― Michael Shermer , The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

36 " the belief that the government can impose top-down measures to rescue the "

― Michael Shermer , The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths