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Believing: The Neuroscience of Fantasies, Fears and Convictions
A thrilling, illuminating inquiry into belief: What are beliefs? Where do they come from? Are they a form of knowledge? How do they tie to evidence? Why do people believe things for which there is no justifying evidence? How is the brain involved? By a leading neuropsychiatrist.
- GenresNonfiction
267 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
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August 26, 2015
I must say that I am a bit disappointed with this book. Its full title is "Believing: The neuroscience of fantasies, fears and convictions". And at the end of the prologue the author says that he was interested in studying what beliefs are, where they come from, how they relate to evidence, why they persist in the absence of evidence or in the presence of contradictory evidence and what the role of the brain is. Promising, right? So maybe naively, I expected answers to these questions. But the book turned out to be more philosophical in its discussion, and less "neuroscientific". The little of neuroscience discussed in the book is more in the line with what a common person will say. For example, a common person will say that someone did X because that was pleasing to him - directly or indirectly. The neuroscientists will say that action X causes activity in the pleasure centre of the brain that can be measured by an fMRI (probably the result of dopamine production) and that makes us feel good. Well, this latter explanation does not really advance our understanding of why this person did X more than the former explanation.
So how far down the causality chain did I expect the author to delve? Well this depends on what we consider as a satisfactory explanation. Do we need to get down to elementary particles? Not if an explanation at the molecular level suffices to explain how a process works and what we can do to change it. For example, if we know how the brain creates a feeling of pleasure (by secreting dopamine) and how dopamine production eventually stops (by dopamine inhibitors) and how hallucinatory drugs become addictive (by blocking the action of the dopamine inhibitors and thus cause the brain to be flooded with dopamine), then we can change the addiction by creating pharmaceuticals that either inhibit dopamine production or inhibit the action of the hallucinatory drugs on the inhibitors.
Part of the problem with this book is that the definition of a belief is too broad. The author does not restrict his inquiry into religious or ideological beliefs but extends it to cover even common day-to-day beliefs. For example, it is my belief that if I turn on the faucet, water will come out and further it is also my belief that if I drink the water my thirst, or that weird feeling I am having right now, will be gone. The author says that our brains have a bias in creating beliefs. Well thank God for that because if they did not we will have to start from scratch every time we wake up!
The author says that for some beliefs the distance between them and evidence is very small or non-existent (as will be the case after I turn on the faucet once), while for others it is very large, and that our brain has a tendency to eliminate this gap either by looking at the evidence or making it up! Again, not surprising. Of course our brain will try to close the gap because if it did not then someone could believe in something even though he also knew that what he believed in was either incorrect or unsupported by evidence?
Which brings us to evidence. Some evidence are easy to establish as the causal agents of something and are also easy to gather. For example, in the case of the faucet, I just need to do the experiment once to figure out the causality between turning the faucet and water running out. But what of other more complicated things: for example, I believe that my spouse loves me. So what do I need as evidence to close the gap between my belief and "reality"? Would taking a bullet for me be too much to ask? What about if she just said that she loves me? Clearly, then the "evidence" in this case are subjective and may vary substantially from person to person. So then what kind of evidence are they? And how useful is it to describe beliefs and distance from evidence?
In any case, I got to thinking that maybe I was being foolish to expect answers to questions that should not even be posed in the first place. For example, although we know a lot about dopamine production, it may not be very productive to ask "but why some actions, that do not involve the physical intake of a substance, cause dopamine production and others do not?" And there can be an infinite series of "whys" that could only have answers if molecules had goals and "objective functions", which they do not, other than the ones given to them by evolution.
So how far down the causality chain did I expect the author to delve? Well this depends on what we consider as a satisfactory explanation. Do we need to get down to elementary particles? Not if an explanation at the molecular level suffices to explain how a process works and what we can do to change it. For example, if we know how the brain creates a feeling of pleasure (by secreting dopamine) and how dopamine production eventually stops (by dopamine inhibitors) and how hallucinatory drugs become addictive (by blocking the action of the dopamine inhibitors and thus cause the brain to be flooded with dopamine), then we can change the addiction by creating pharmaceuticals that either inhibit dopamine production or inhibit the action of the hallucinatory drugs on the inhibitors.
Part of the problem with this book is that the definition of a belief is too broad. The author does not restrict his inquiry into religious or ideological beliefs but extends it to cover even common day-to-day beliefs. For example, it is my belief that if I turn on the faucet, water will come out and further it is also my belief that if I drink the water my thirst, or that weird feeling I am having right now, will be gone. The author says that our brains have a bias in creating beliefs. Well thank God for that because if they did not we will have to start from scratch every time we wake up!
The author says that for some beliefs the distance between them and evidence is very small or non-existent (as will be the case after I turn on the faucet once), while for others it is very large, and that our brain has a tendency to eliminate this gap either by looking at the evidence or making it up! Again, not surprising. Of course our brain will try to close the gap because if it did not then someone could believe in something even though he also knew that what he believed in was either incorrect or unsupported by evidence?
Which brings us to evidence. Some evidence are easy to establish as the causal agents of something and are also easy to gather. For example, in the case of the faucet, I just need to do the experiment once to figure out the causality between turning the faucet and water running out. But what of other more complicated things: for example, I believe that my spouse loves me. So what do I need as evidence to close the gap between my belief and "reality"? Would taking a bullet for me be too much to ask? What about if she just said that she loves me? Clearly, then the "evidence" in this case are subjective and may vary substantially from person to person. So then what kind of evidence are they? And how useful is it to describe beliefs and distance from evidence?
In any case, I got to thinking that maybe I was being foolish to expect answers to questions that should not even be posed in the first place. For example, although we know a lot about dopamine production, it may not be very productive to ask "but why some actions, that do not involve the physical intake of a substance, cause dopamine production and others do not?" And there can be an infinite series of "whys" that could only have answers if molecules had goals and "objective functions", which they do not, other than the ones given to them by evolution.
April 20, 2019
I don't recommend this book to anyone.
I had a hard time in the beginning pinning down what it was that I found off about the book. A little less than halfway through I came to the conclusion that I don’t find the author to be as smart as the book's topic of discussion would require. By the end of the book, and I confess to skimming through the middle chapters, I realized that this book has the same failings as other pop-science books written by journalists, and not specialists in the field. Almost all of his material come from research for the book and then his own musings on that, but not a full understanding of any of the topics from his profession. This is weird, because he's a psychiatrist, and that's a whole world excellent for looking at beliefs, especially when they go wrong, but these are only rarely mentioned in the book. To be fair, there are some great science journalists that can do this really well, but this author is not one of them.
There were a lot of little things that didn't seem quite right, but there were some major ones, and I will address them here. In short: 1) he does not know how to look for the answers he seeks, 2) he has a very poor understanding of science 3) he does not properly limit or define his own topic of discussion.
The first thing he writes about is a patient, Mrs. X, who firmly believes that her parents are not actually her real parents. He explicitly writes that she continues to behave normally, this in no way affects her attitude towards them, or has any other problems in life. This patient is what triggered his interests in beliefs, and I thought it all very valid and interesting. But for some reason, he thought he'd find answers in primatology, so he went to study monkeys. Fine. This involved observing their behavior and cataloguing and inferring what kind of "beliefs" could be driving their behavior.
Now I quote directly:
"Do monkeys, like humans, have beliefs? No evidence of this had been established when I arrived at Saint Kitts, but it soon became clear that they might, and that their beliefs were closely tied to their behavior."
Now call me crazy, but from what I understand about primatology, ALL YOU HAVE TO GO ON IS BEHAVIOR! There is NO OTHER source of information on these animal's internal world! If you deduce an animal's beliefs from their behavior then of course they are "closely tied" together!
To compound my impression that he didn't really have the full mental toolkit to handle this difficult topic, he writes, "the disconnects between belief and behavior like those found in Mrs. X and others are nowhere to be found. Something is occurring among humans that is absent among their distant relatives."
And how, pray tell, were you supposed to find anything like Mrs. X's disconnect when the ONLY issue she had, she reported VERBALLY! If I were to give him the benefit of the doubt, I'd say he might have oversimplified both stories for the sake of this book, that in reality there was more intelligence behind the monkey studies, maybe a specific hypothesis being tested. I found no evidence in the rest of the book that this may be so, but who knows.
Then the other point where I lost confidence in the author was his chapter on the similarities between the beliefs of religion and science. Now, I am very open to exploring the topic of how scientists (being human) can be led astray by their own beliefs; or that facts aren’t really facts and while scientists say this is so, they actually act as if there are facts; and even open to speculation that the scientist's faith in the scientific method is just that; faith. But no, the author was not up to the task. First of all, the chapter is a rather confusing mess of history and anecdote, without ever a real definition of what "science" and "religion" really are. But then he essentially makes the argument that since science has claimed things that have turned out to be false, and religion has said things that have turned out to be true, how different can the two things be, really? Also, both end up relying heavily on authority. He then includes some ramblings about how religion is biologically driven and might be at the basis of tool use, but I won't even try to unpack that.
He misses some really clear points about science (and not religion) that are actually at the foundation of why belief in science is not comparable to belief in religion:
1) While he explicitly writes about how the cornerstone of science is not about proving things but about falsifying them, he doesn't actually get what this means in practice. It's not a sign of weakness that science has produced incorrect theories, but rather it's strength that it corrected itself! Religion by contrast never changes its ideas because by design it does not try to prove itself false. Therefore even if there is a kernel of truth in religion, you cannot rely on it to be true! If there are ancient myths about God wiping away most of humanity with floods, and as it turns out there were actually devastating floods in the past, you did not get your "fact" from the myth but from science! The fact that science updates itself is what makes it inherently superior to religion; when you're sick, would you rather pray the same Hail Mary that has been murmured for thousands of years, or take the latest antibiotic?
2) Scientists do not rely on authority, they just trust each other, to a point, because at any time anyone can theoretically prove the other wrong. It's true that some voices are heard more than others, the so called academic super-stars, but if there's ever a claim that receives no criticism, it is considered a failing of science, not the norm. From a personal experience, I just accept what comes from most other fields that more or less squares with my understanding of things; I trust the authority of chemists, biologists, physicists, and geologists because I don't have the time or willpower to actually fact check or replicate their every claim, but I am confident that for every one of them there is a colleague in the same field with the same expertise that is poking holes at their every theory, and sometimes even rerunning the same experiment to see if the results are consistent. And likewise in my little microcosm of neuroscience I perform the same role of carefully reading my colleagues' papers to see if I can spot any methodological flaws, looking to see if anyone else found comparable results, and then retesting some of their experiments with my own. For actual scientists, seeing the name of a well-respected professor or institution might make you trust the results more at first impact, but if some well-prepared high school student comes with their own little air-tight science project that contradicts those super scientists, questions will be asked, and answers re-evaluated. This doesn't always happen, and a lack of replication studies is a real issue, but that is a whole other can of worms.
For someone with only a passing understanding of science, believing in science and believing in a religion amount to the same thing; an act of faith in an authority; it is for these people (a good majority) that there is overlap between the two. If you don't really know how science and scientists work, if you've never read an academic paper, or attended lectures on the scientific method and good scientific practice, then you well and truly are "believing" in science. This then makes such people vulnerable to the politicization of scientific findings, such as those around climate change, because if their foundation in trusting science was just trusting Dr.X, then what difference does it make if now Mr.Y seems more reliable? But this is not how actual science and actual scientists work.
Lastly, what was severely lacking in this book was definitions. Oh, it might seem like he provides them, in fact quite a few sentences read a lot like Miriam Webster, but he never properly addresses what *he* means by "beliefs" and what does and doesn't qualify. This is incredibly important, because the word belief, like so many others, is used in a wide range of occasions and some are more meaningful than others. Sometimes it seems like he refers to belief as any internal representation or interpretation, such as "I believe objects fall down and not up". Other times he is referring to the complex beliefs of religion where there is explicit acknowledgement of the fact that this is an act of faith and not of proof. It's fine to want to talk about all these kinds of belief, but you need to know when you're switching between them, especially when trying to make generalized statements! The author's last chapters are in fact dedicated to persistent beliefs that don't go away in the face of overwhelming evidence, and he follows that up with saying that ALL beliefs are persistent and hard to change. This just isn't so! The vast majority of what passes through our heads is open to change, because otherwise we couldn't cope with a changing world. If I believe my cat is locked outside, but my boyfriend from another room says "no, he's with me", I will instantly change my belief. When the author talks about beliefs that are hard to change, he is referring to the very interesting but very specialized subset of beliefs that we use to explain the world (religion, science, politics) or clinical cases such as his patient Mrs.X. But he cannot put all these under the same umbrella! Or he can try, but then it's his duty to justify the decision.
So in conclusion, the author does not provide a meaningful or useful understanding of what beliefs are.
I had a hard time in the beginning pinning down what it was that I found off about the book. A little less than halfway through I came to the conclusion that I don’t find the author to be as smart as the book's topic of discussion would require. By the end of the book, and I confess to skimming through the middle chapters, I realized that this book has the same failings as other pop-science books written by journalists, and not specialists in the field. Almost all of his material come from research for the book and then his own musings on that, but not a full understanding of any of the topics from his profession. This is weird, because he's a psychiatrist, and that's a whole world excellent for looking at beliefs, especially when they go wrong, but these are only rarely mentioned in the book. To be fair, there are some great science journalists that can do this really well, but this author is not one of them.
There were a lot of little things that didn't seem quite right, but there were some major ones, and I will address them here. In short: 1) he does not know how to look for the answers he seeks, 2) he has a very poor understanding of science 3) he does not properly limit or define his own topic of discussion.
The first thing he writes about is a patient, Mrs. X, who firmly believes that her parents are not actually her real parents. He explicitly writes that she continues to behave normally, this in no way affects her attitude towards them, or has any other problems in life. This patient is what triggered his interests in beliefs, and I thought it all very valid and interesting. But for some reason, he thought he'd find answers in primatology, so he went to study monkeys. Fine. This involved observing their behavior and cataloguing and inferring what kind of "beliefs" could be driving their behavior.
Now I quote directly:
"Do monkeys, like humans, have beliefs? No evidence of this had been established when I arrived at Saint Kitts, but it soon became clear that they might, and that their beliefs were closely tied to their behavior."
Now call me crazy, but from what I understand about primatology, ALL YOU HAVE TO GO ON IS BEHAVIOR! There is NO OTHER source of information on these animal's internal world! If you deduce an animal's beliefs from their behavior then of course they are "closely tied" together!
To compound my impression that he didn't really have the full mental toolkit to handle this difficult topic, he writes, "the disconnects between belief and behavior like those found in Mrs. X and others are nowhere to be found. Something is occurring among humans that is absent among their distant relatives."
And how, pray tell, were you supposed to find anything like Mrs. X's disconnect when the ONLY issue she had, she reported VERBALLY! If I were to give him the benefit of the doubt, I'd say he might have oversimplified both stories for the sake of this book, that in reality there was more intelligence behind the monkey studies, maybe a specific hypothesis being tested. I found no evidence in the rest of the book that this may be so, but who knows.
Then the other point where I lost confidence in the author was his chapter on the similarities between the beliefs of religion and science. Now, I am very open to exploring the topic of how scientists (being human) can be led astray by their own beliefs; or that facts aren’t really facts and while scientists say this is so, they actually act as if there are facts; and even open to speculation that the scientist's faith in the scientific method is just that; faith. But no, the author was not up to the task. First of all, the chapter is a rather confusing mess of history and anecdote, without ever a real definition of what "science" and "religion" really are. But then he essentially makes the argument that since science has claimed things that have turned out to be false, and religion has said things that have turned out to be true, how different can the two things be, really? Also, both end up relying heavily on authority. He then includes some ramblings about how religion is biologically driven and might be at the basis of tool use, but I won't even try to unpack that.
He misses some really clear points about science (and not religion) that are actually at the foundation of why belief in science is not comparable to belief in religion:
1) While he explicitly writes about how the cornerstone of science is not about proving things but about falsifying them, he doesn't actually get what this means in practice. It's not a sign of weakness that science has produced incorrect theories, but rather it's strength that it corrected itself! Religion by contrast never changes its ideas because by design it does not try to prove itself false. Therefore even if there is a kernel of truth in religion, you cannot rely on it to be true! If there are ancient myths about God wiping away most of humanity with floods, and as it turns out there were actually devastating floods in the past, you did not get your "fact" from the myth but from science! The fact that science updates itself is what makes it inherently superior to religion; when you're sick, would you rather pray the same Hail Mary that has been murmured for thousands of years, or take the latest antibiotic?
2) Scientists do not rely on authority, they just trust each other, to a point, because at any time anyone can theoretically prove the other wrong. It's true that some voices are heard more than others, the so called academic super-stars, but if there's ever a claim that receives no criticism, it is considered a failing of science, not the norm. From a personal experience, I just accept what comes from most other fields that more or less squares with my understanding of things; I trust the authority of chemists, biologists, physicists, and geologists because I don't have the time or willpower to actually fact check or replicate their every claim, but I am confident that for every one of them there is a colleague in the same field with the same expertise that is poking holes at their every theory, and sometimes even rerunning the same experiment to see if the results are consistent. And likewise in my little microcosm of neuroscience I perform the same role of carefully reading my colleagues' papers to see if I can spot any methodological flaws, looking to see if anyone else found comparable results, and then retesting some of their experiments with my own. For actual scientists, seeing the name of a well-respected professor or institution might make you trust the results more at first impact, but if some well-prepared high school student comes with their own little air-tight science project that contradicts those super scientists, questions will be asked, and answers re-evaluated. This doesn't always happen, and a lack of replication studies is a real issue, but that is a whole other can of worms.
For someone with only a passing understanding of science, believing in science and believing in a religion amount to the same thing; an act of faith in an authority; it is for these people (a good majority) that there is overlap between the two. If you don't really know how science and scientists work, if you've never read an academic paper, or attended lectures on the scientific method and good scientific practice, then you well and truly are "believing" in science. This then makes such people vulnerable to the politicization of scientific findings, such as those around climate change, because if their foundation in trusting science was just trusting Dr.X, then what difference does it make if now Mr.Y seems more reliable? But this is not how actual science and actual scientists work.
Lastly, what was severely lacking in this book was definitions. Oh, it might seem like he provides them, in fact quite a few sentences read a lot like Miriam Webster, but he never properly addresses what *he* means by "beliefs" and what does and doesn't qualify. This is incredibly important, because the word belief, like so many others, is used in a wide range of occasions and some are more meaningful than others. Sometimes it seems like he refers to belief as any internal representation or interpretation, such as "I believe objects fall down and not up". Other times he is referring to the complex beliefs of religion where there is explicit acknowledgement of the fact that this is an act of faith and not of proof. It's fine to want to talk about all these kinds of belief, but you need to know when you're switching between them, especially when trying to make generalized statements! The author's last chapters are in fact dedicated to persistent beliefs that don't go away in the face of overwhelming evidence, and he follows that up with saying that ALL beliefs are persistent and hard to change. This just isn't so! The vast majority of what passes through our heads is open to change, because otherwise we couldn't cope with a changing world. If I believe my cat is locked outside, but my boyfriend from another room says "no, he's with me", I will instantly change my belief. When the author talks about beliefs that are hard to change, he is referring to the very interesting but very specialized subset of beliefs that we use to explain the world (religion, science, politics) or clinical cases such as his patient Mrs.X. But he cannot put all these under the same umbrella! Or he can try, but then it's his duty to justify the decision.
So in conclusion, the author does not provide a meaningful or useful understanding of what beliefs are.
June 16, 2014
I'm not sure if Michael McGuire is just a poor writer or just didn't have much to say. He keeps indicating that he has something important to say, but never really comes through. People get stuck in their beliefs---not really a new discovery. The neuroscience part is "People get stuck in their beliefs...because of their brains." I was rather disappointed in this book because it seemed to promise more than it delivered.
August 29, 2013
I urge everyone to read it. McGuire's engaging voice and his experiences that inform his exploration of belief keep the reader riveted. His research on serotonin and its connection to dominant or high status males in vervet monkeys is fascinating. He also does much to explain why beliefs are often intransigent. An important book!
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