“Patternicity is common across the animal kingdom. Early studies in the 1950s by Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz, who pioneered the study of ethology—the evolutionary origins of animal behavior—demonstrated the capacity of many organisms to rapidly form lasting patterns.” — Shermer, Michael. The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies — How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. New York: Times Books, 2011.
“This is not just a theory to explain why people believe weird things. It is a theory to explain why people believe things. Full stop.” — Shermer, Michael. The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies — How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. New York: Times Books, 2011.
“Unfortunately, we did not evolve a baloney-detection network in the brain to distinguish between true and false patterns. We have no error-detection governor to modulate the pattern-recognition engine.” — Shermer, Michael. The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies — How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. New York: Times Books, 2011.
“We are the descendants of those who were most successful at finding patterns. This process is called association learning and is fundamental to all animal behavior, from C. elegans to H. sapiens. I call this process patternicity, or the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise.” — Shermer, Michael. The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies — How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. New York: Times Books, 2011.
“Inspired by Skinner’s classic experiments, Koichi Ono of Komazawa University in Japan ran human subjects through the equivalent of a Skinner box by having them sit in a booth in which there were three levers.6 Independent of their pulling the levers (but unknown to them) the subjects were then exposed to a number counter that granted them one point at a time, which was followed by a flashing light and buzzer (a scaled-down slot machine, as it were). The points were delivered in a VI schedule of reinforcement (just like the pigeons) of, on average, either 30 seconds (with a range of 3 to 57 seconds) or 60 seconds (with a range of 25 to 95 seconds). Before the experiment began the subjects were instructed, “The experimenter does not require you to do anything specific. But if you do something, you may get points on the counter. Now try to get as many points as possible.”
Since the subjects could not predict when the points would be delivered (because the schedule of delivery was variable), and people just seem to have a natural propensity to pull levers, some of them inferred a connection between (A) pulling the handles and (B) getting points. Patternicity. And there were some doozies. Subject 1 happened to get a point after pulling the levers in the order of left, middle, right, right, middle, left, and so repeated that pattern three more times. Subject 5 began the session with short pulls of all the levers, with the points accumulating quite independently of his pulls, but then by chance he happened to be holding the middle lever when a point was delivered, so thereafter he performed the superstitious ritual of three short pulls followed by holding the middle lever. Of course, the longer he held the lever the greater the chance that he would get another point (because they were delivered on a variable time schedule). After minute nine of the thirty-minute session, Subject 5 had his ritual down pat. Subject 15 developed the strangest rite of all. Five minutes into her session a point was delivered the moment she happened to touch the point counter. Thereafter she started touching anything and everything within reach, and, of course, since the points continued to be delivered, this odd touching behavior was reinforced. At the ten-minute mark she got a point just as she happened to jump on the floor, whereby she promptly abandoned touching and took up jumping as her new strategy, climaxing in a point being scored when she touched the ceiling, leading her to end the session early from ceiling-touching exhaustion. Technically speaking, in Ono’s words, “superstitious behavior is defined as behavior produced by response independent schedules of reinforcer delivery, in which only an accidental relation exists between responses and delivery of reinforcers.” That’s a fancy way of saying that superstitions are just an accidental form of learning. This is patternicity.”
— Shermer, Michael. The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies — How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. New York: Times Books, 2011.
“Our brains are belief engines, evolved pattern-recognition machines that connect the dots and create meaning out of the patterns that we think we see in nature.” — Shermer, Michael. The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies — How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. New York: Times Books, 2011.
“Imagine that you are a hominid walking along the savanna of an African valley three million years ago. You hear a rustle in the grass. Is it just the wind or is it a dangerous predator? Your answer could mean life or death.
If you assume that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator but it turns out that it is just the wind, you have made what is called a Type I error in cognition, also known as a false positive, or believing something is real when it is not. That is, you have found a nonexistent pattern. You connected (A) a rustle in the grass to (B) a dangerous predator, but in this case A was not connected to B. No harm. You move away from the rustling sound, become more alert and cautious, and find another path to your destination.
If you assume that the rustle in the grass is just the wind but it turns out that it is a dangerous predator, you have made what is called a Type II error in cognition, also known as a false negative, or believing something is not real when it is. That is, you have missed a real pattern. You failed to connect (A) a rustle in the grass to (B) a dangerous predator, and in this case A was connected to B. You’re lunch. Congratulations, you have won a Darwin Award. You are no longer a member of the hominid gene pool.”
— Shermer, Michael. The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies — How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. New York: Times Books, 2011.
“In the cortex of our brains there is a neural network that neuroscientists call the left-hemisphere interpreter. It is, in a man”
“In any case, if there is an afterlife and a God who resides over it, I intend to make my case along these lines: Lord, I did the best I could with the tools you granted me. You gave me a brain to think skeptically and I used it accordingly. You gave me the capacity to reason and I applied it to all claims, including that of your existence. You gave me a moral sense and I felt the pangs of guilt and the joys of pride for the bad and good things I chose to do. I tried to do unto others as I would have them do unto me, and although I fell far short of this ideal far too many times, I tried to apply your foundational principle whenever I could. Whatever the nature of your immortal and infinite spiritual essence actually is, as a mortal finite corporeal being I cannot possibly fathom it despite my best efforts, and so do with me what you will. ” — Shermer, Michael. The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies — How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. New York: Times Books, 2011.
“Over the past three decades I have noted two disturbing tendencies in both science and society: first, to rank the sciences from “hard” (physical sciences) to “medium” (biological sciences) to “soft” (social sciences); second, to divide science writing into two forms, technical and popular. As such rankings and divisions are wont to be, they include an assessment of worth, with the hard sciences and technical writing respected the most, and the soft sciences and popular writing esteemed the least. Both of these prejudices are so far off the mark that they are not even wrong.
I have always thought that if there must be a rank order (which there mustn’t), the current one is precisely reversed. The physical sciences are hard, in the sense that calculating differential equations is difficult, for example. The number of variables within the causal net of the subject matter, however, is comparatively simple to constrain and test when contrasted with, say, computing the actions of organisms in an ecosystem or predicting the consequences of global climate change. Even the difficulty of constructing comprehensive models in the biological sciences, however, pales in comparison to that of the workings of human brains and societies. By these measures, the social sciences are the hard disciplines, because the subject matter is orders of magnitude more complex and multifaceted with many more degrees of freedom to control and predict.”
— Shermer, Michael. The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies — How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. New York: Times Books, 2011.