Why We Believe

"For if you have never had a paranormal experience such as these, and believe in none of the things that science says do not exist excepts as tricks played on the gullible or - as neuroscientists are now beginning to see - by the normal workings of the mind carried to an extreme, well, then you are in a lonely minority." - Newsweek, November 3rd, 2008.

I know that I was thinking about other things during the week before the November elections. Which is probably why I didn't notice this article well before tonight's long-overdue cleaning of the abode brought it to my attention. I'll comment on it here, as a follow-up to my recent post.

I'll start with a brief run-down of some of my internal comments while reading the article...

"Here we go again with 'psychic phenomena = alien abduction'."
"Shermer, Shermer, oh Shermer again." (I personally think that Shermer is a reasonable, though overly-invested, skeptic. But no wonder parts of this article read like some of his recent columns in Scientific American.)
"Crap, this is long."
"Who decided that the week before the election was a good time to run this piece? And why?"

For those of you who won't bother to read the article, let me just present a list of the proposed explanations for paranormal beliefs...

• People see more patterns in noise when they feel a loss of control. Our current social and political turmoil predicts the current rise of interest in the paranormal. (I can't in good conscience touch that.)
• An inability to think scientifically, as demonstrated by self-professed alien abductees who wouldn't accept an alternative hypothetical explanation for their experiences. (Hey, if I woke up on the floor, I'd believe I had fallen out of the bed.)
• Loneliness. Apparently telling people that they will end up lonely and socially-isolated is enough to make them more likely to confess a belief in the paranormal. (Shit! I should be out partying tonight instead of at home cleaning...)
• Our brain wasn't evolved for actual reality. We sometimes shut down the part of the brain ("a bundle of neurons in the superior parietal lobe") that distinguishes where our body begins and the material world ends. (Sweet! All I have to do is turn these neurons off and I'll have a built-in trip?! How do I patent that?)
• Your brain is filling in the blanks with regards to sensory information. It's all in the interpretation. We use our "existing cognitive structures to make sense of an ambiguous or amorphous stimuli." (That's true, but it's funny how we never invoked that excuse to explain how people perceive something that science agrees is actually there...)
• It's all your imagination because "the regions that become active when people imagine seeing or hearing something are identical to those that become active they really do see or hear something in the outside world." (It's a miracle that we can distinguish one from the other at all!)
• It's all the mind reinforcing itself with that good ol' psychological glitch called the confirmation bias - "the mind better recalls events and experiences that validate what we believe than those that refute those beliefs." (Until someone explains to you that 'he's just not that into you.')
• We evolved to have a brain that protects us by signalling false positives for threatening phenomena. (Theoretically though, this should be cancelled out by the 'it's all your imagination', right?)

Ah, and now the list of proposed explanations for extreme skepticism...

• A feeling of intellectual superiority. "It is rewarding to look at the vast hordes of believers, conclude that they are idiots and delight in the fact that you aren't." (The academic counterpart to 'holier than thou'.)
• It allows one to belong to a community, which is what we all crave. (Can't I just join a book club? Or a volleyball league? Seriously - why do we need to create community around our respective beliefs in the paranormal?)

That's it. End of list.

Just remember - if you have the impression that this article has a clear bias, it's probably all in your imagination because your brain is wired to confirm its belief that journalism is unbiased. Maybe you're stressed and therefore you're seeing a pattern that really isn't there. Maybe you should go find some friends, or take a course in logical thinking. Maybe your brain is trying to protect you by alerting you to the possible threat of media indoctrination.

Dude, seriously.