Strange Beliefs and the Skeptics's Brain

I've been struggling lately trying to understand why teaching people critical thinking skills is so damn hard. Why are so many humans seemingly unable or unwilling to think beyond habit, convention and superstition? Renown skeptic and author Dr. Michael Shermer says the human tendency to believe strange things -- from alien abductions to dowsing rods -- boils down to two of the brain's most basic, hard-wired survival skills.

I think brain tendencies are one key factor, but sociocultural contexts also play a major role. There is a whole gambit of "environmental" complexities that trigger and/or afford certain embodied cognitive expressions. We still need to know more, however, about the general architecture of neuro-functioning and the more specifc 'circuits' that underpin how behavior is expressed.

In the 20 minute video below Shermer tries to explain what these deep 'structures' are and how they can often get us into trouble:

As founder and publisher of Skeptic Magazine, Michael Shermer has exposed fallacies behind intelligent design, 9/11 conspiracies, the low-carb craze, alien sightings and other popular beliefs and paranoias. But it's not about debunking for debunking's sake. Shermer defends the notion that we can understand our world better only by matching good theory with good science.

In the absence of sound science, incomplete information can powerfully combine with the power of suggestion (helping us hear Satanic lyrics when "Stairway to Heaven" plays backwards, for example). In fact, a common thread that runs through beliefs of all sorts, he says, is our tendency to convince ourselves. We overvalue the shreds of evidence that support our preferred outcome, and ignore the facts we aren't looking for. Shermer's work offers cognitive context for our often misguided beliefs. He is also the author of Why People Believe Weird Things and The Mind of the Market.