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The Believing Brain

From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies--how We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths
Community comment are the opinions of contributing users. These comment do not represent the opinions of Omaha Public Library.
Mar 05, 2014john_doh17 rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
My over all assessment is that this is a well written, interesting and worthwhile read. Part 1 Journey of Beliefs covers two people he respects and why they believe in the supernatural and his own personal story on how he came to not believe in the supernatural. I found Dr. Collins move from non-belief to belief to be surprising. I guess until you have the experience yourself it is easy to deny it could happen to you. Part II Biology of belief was probably the strongest part of the whole book. I was particularly fascinated by how we can feel other people as being present (like the mountain climbers) and how we can even do this in our own heads. Part IV Belief in Things Seen was probably the weakest section of the book. The list of biases in confirmation of beliefs was very good, but the rest was not quite up to the quality of the rest of the book. Mainly I think he fails to see his own political beliefs as being more unbiased and correct than others, when alas we are all fooled by our on beliefs, even when we know they are swaying us. Nobody escapes confirmation bias, myself and the author included. The history of astronomy was kind of dull too (at least how he wrote it, and I didn't think added a lot of value).