Supersense

A while ago, we did a "power hour reading" much like the one we did last semester. We had about an hour in class to read a book about the brain and write a summary about it. I read the book Supersense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable by Bruce M. Hood. I read the chapter titled "The Biology of Belief," which discusses the biological basis of why we believe things that are clearly not supported by logic. Basically, he states that belief in superstitions is a result of humans' great capability for identifying patterns even when there are none, our natural self-centeredness, and the way our memory works.

the book I chose to read

To illustrate his point, Hood uses an example that most people would not think of superstition: the belief that one can sense when other people are looking at us. He says that it starts during childhood with a child's self-centeredness and the belief that vision works by something exiting the eyes, rather than light bouncing off an object and entering the eyes. After all, you are the center of your vision; when you move your eyes, what you see changes. This belief is further cemented by society through language like "looking at something," "piercing gaze," and "exchanging glances," as if vision was something physical. Then the belief of being able to sense someone else's gaze begins when we start to turn around and find someone really staring back at us. However, there are just as many times (or perhaps more) when we find nobody, but because of the way we think, we do not remember these times. Instead, we take what we already believe -- that we can sense gazes -- and take the one time when someone really was staring back at us as proof rather than the hundred times we found nobody as refutation. Furthermore, our self-centeredness makes us not think about things from the other person's perspective. Maybe that person only glanced over to see why we had turned around and had not been staring at us, but when we see someone looking at us, we automatically think of ourselves first.

However, not everyone is equal in these beliefs. Some people are naturally intuitive, more readily believing in the supernaturals. Others are more skeptic, requiring more evidence before starting to believe in something. Yet intuitive people are not necessarily less educated than skeptics, they just pick up patterns more readily. In one study, a group of university students were tested to assess their intuitive misconceptions. It was found that intuitive students were more likely to misattribute characteristics of one conceptual category to another; however, they scored just as high on rational tests as skeptics did.

Hood brings up the neurotransmitter dopamine as the basis of all these unbelievable beliefs. All mind-altering substances (such as drugs) and conditions (such as Parkinson's disease) that affect the body's perception of reality are tied in some way to dopamine. Dopamine affects the brain's ability to detect patterns -- too much dopamine and too many patterns are detected; too little and no patterns are detected.

This is quite a practical work, as it takes real-world beliefs and discusses why we believe them even though we know they are logically not true. These reasons can also be applied to other beliefs and used to explain why there are still people who believe that the earth is flat and evolution is not real, even though all conclusive evidence show that they are.