This book has been on my Kindle for ages and in December 2020 I finally got round to reading it. As it's packed with information it took me almost a month to finish it. This book is all about belief: religious faith, belief in paranormal things, aliens, political systems... You name it. Shermer explains how we form beliefs in our brains and the importance of our tendency to recognize patterns. I enjoyed his writing style. He explains complicated concepts with real-life stories. That way the book...

I have been following Michael Shermer's column in "Scientific American" for years. It's the first thing in the magazine that I read. This book definitely did not dissapoint. Shermer starts off with anecdotes and then goes into the very specific. Oft repeated throughout the book is that belief comes first, rationalization of the beliefs afterward. First we decide to believe, then the evidence collected tends to support what we believe. This is regardless if the subject is religion, paranormal, UF...

Shermar makes an impressive and convincing argument against belief. Not only religious and political beliefs but also scientific beliefs which makes this book even more special. Any believer may find this book pretty damning to his beliefs. The last chapters were specially informative on the way science was confronted by the Catholic Corporation of the Church. It took the Church around 300 years to finally withdraw their claim against Galileo. No wonder believers are a resilient bunch.

In the end I want to believe. I also want to know. The truth is out there, and although it may be difficult to find, science is the best tool we have for uncovering it.

This is an excellent, comprehensive examination of the things we believe, and why. It is a very well-written, well-organized book with a unifying theme: we form our beliefs, and then we rationalize them with explanations. We initially formulate our beliefs through two processes: patternicity and agenticity. Patternicity allows us to form all sorts of weird beliefs, including the whole gamut of superstitions. For example, if something bad happens when a black cat crosses your path, and at a later...

Up until page 140 this is a 5 star book. These are the pages where the author describes belief as stemming from what he calls patternicity and agenticity. Our minds have evolved to spot patterns. Agenticity is the story we overlay on the patterns. The patterns may be random, yet, if they explain a something very good (a ritual before placing a bet correlates with a few wins) or negative (unlucky clothing or actions) we may ascribe significance to them and they become beliefs. We often have the b...

What an amazing book......If you ever want to understand,the psychology of why we Believe,grab this one,very well written,so informative........It will help you understand why many of us are not immune to logic fallacies, conspiracy theories,why genius and madness are living on the same street but just couple of blocks away from each other,why we believe in weird things like god(s),angels, prayers,superstition rituals,alien abduction and How is even possible for one person to hold different conf...

The first half of this book is quite good. The author explains rationally how the brain operates and even gets down to neurons (but it is readable).The brain (the neurons) is always looking for patterns. We have done this for thousands of years to survive. It is a lot easier to find patterns than to be a skeptic. Some of the patterns are correct and some are not.Page 62 (my book)People believe weird things because of our evolved needs to believe non-weird things.Page 88Humans readily find patter...

This author is no fun. Many things I enjoy reading about (conspiracy theories, religion, UFOs, ghosts, etc.) he debunks in this book. And my intellectual mind agrees with him 99.9%. I would really like if Bigfoot is stalking the US northwestern wilderness. But there is no scientific evidence. Only anecdotes exist. Darn. I am one of those people who needs proven facts. I enjoy legends and folklore and I hope some of these things someday end up being proven true.

There were a few books in this book and I only enjoyed one of them. Unfortunately for me, most of the content was repeat information from things I've read/heard before. The first sections dealing with the biology of the brain were interesting.So much of the book (a book in itself) was spent refuting things that don't exist (UFOs, ghosts, god, 9/11 conspiracies, etc.) it was tiresome. I know they don't, I don't need it explained why. This continued on for a long, long time. I almost gave up on th...

Here's the tl;dr review: If you're looking for the ways that we tend to trick ourselves and how to deal with that reality, see Predictably Irrational or The Power of Habit. Shermer's book is definitely not the book for that.Now the full review:I was really excited about this book. I was hoping that it would update and extend Consciousness Explained with contemporary neuroscience about belief. That was, after all, exactly how the book billed itself through the marketing coverage and through the f...

I have to admit at the beginning that I have a significantly pro-skeptic bias. I love skeptics, so it is hard for me not to like the book. An interesting book that belongs on my shelf between my books on psychology and science (The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions) and my books on agnosticism, skepticism, neo-atheism and the evolution of relig...

I decided to buy this book after watching a short Ted Talk featuring Michael Shermer in which he discussed the origins of belief. A natural born skeptic with two science based degrees who often finds herself wanting to believe (a huge X-files fan), I am fascinated by how people come to hold certain beliefs that on the surface appear flawed or irrational. So that said, this book appealed to me on many levels.On a personal level, I have a special interest in religious belief. Raised a Christian, I...

Audio book - 2:30 hours approx. from 13:35 hours total - Read by Michael Shermer 2 stars (provisional)I have read previous works by Michael Shermer, but these days I have to listen to audio books to satisfy my "reading" needs. Generally, authors do not make good narrators and Shermer is no exception. His delivery is stilted and where he thinks he has written something amusing, he uses a strange vocal characterisation which does not sound funny, but does sound most annoying.Some time in the futur...

I really enjoyed this book as it offers evidenced based reasons for why we humans are programmed to believe in external agents (when the evidence proves such things are internal in the brain) and why we find patterns where there are none. I find knowing such things comforting and I think I got a little dopamine reward when Shermer confirmed that we experience these things because we share the same brain biology (something I've argued often with regard to religion and other common belief systems)...

One of the most exciting books I have ever read. The author is a science historian, and writes monthly articles for The Scientific American. What I am going to describe here sounds cold and formal, but the book is written with spirit and vigour, with lots of the author's personal experiences and views included. It pulsates with amazing ideas - and I really relished every word. Basically, it showed that on the upside we humans are amazing thinking animals, capable of using logic and conducting ex...

This book bills itself as "why people believe weird things," but it's really more of "why you shouldn't believe weird things." It should be noted that I don't actually believe in any of the things discussed in the book (God, heaven, hell, and other religious things; UFOs and alien abductions; conspiracy theories, esp. 9/11 conspiracy theories), so the arguments against were tedious at best, and I gained no insight into why other people do believe them.Shermer's tone comes across as defensive (an...

یکی از کتابهایی که خوندنش باعث می شه پرده های زیادی از جلو چشم آدمی کنار زده بشه و حداقل می تونه باعث شه با نگاهی انتقادی تر و عمیق تر به وقایع نگاه کنیم.موضوع:به طور کلی این کتاب در مورد عقاید و باور های آدمی هست و توضیح می ده این اعتقاد و باور از موضوعات الهی گرفته تا تئوری های توطئه، خرافات، موجودات فرا زمینی و ... چه طور شکل می گیرن، و شکل گیری اون ها چه پیامدهایی خواهد داشت.خلاصهنظریه اصلی نویسنده این هست که ما ابتدا عقایدمون شکل پیدا می کنن که این شکل گیری عقاید ریشه های ژنتیکی به علاوه مح...

This review should prove that I don't always "high-side" my reviewing stars. In fact, let me be blunt — now that I've read one Shermer book, I have no more desire to read further writings of his than I do of Sam Harris, and for somewhat similar reasons. In Shermer's case, here's why.Here's derivative and blind spots intersecting -- Shermer briefly, but briefly talks about Kahneman's and Tversky's study in behavioral economics (without also citing Dan Ariely, among others). One will learn much mo...

I was hoping that this book would explain the biology and evolution of what makes us believe things. It does do that, but does not stick to that theme. Shermer digresses often and spends a good deal of time debunking beliefs in extraterrestrial visits, ESP, and a lot of pseudoscience. His discussions on religion were thought provoking, and I appreciated that. However, instead of coming back to the idea of why the human race believes things, he concludes with a long discussion of the history of s...