The Believing Brain | Michael Shermer

We can’t help believing. Our brains evolved to connect the dots of our world into meaningful patterns that explain why things happen. These meaningful patterns become beliefs.

Once beliefs are formed, the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which adds an emotional boost of further confidence in the beliefs and accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive feedback loop of belief confirmation.

In his previous books, Michael Shermer explained why people believe weird things and why people believe particular claims. In The Believing Brain, he writes about why people believe anything at all.