 Thank you so much for that warm welcome and while you're at it if you'll do me a favor and stop by the book table and give the same warm welcome to my partner Pat Lindsey who does all the skeptic magazine covers which you'll see here in a moment and does all the typography and design and layout. And Daniel Lockston who is our junior skeptic editor and illustrator and the author of several books on evolution for kids so I'll say hi to Daniel when you're back there. And then we invite you to join the skeptic society and subscribe to skeptic magazine you get the quarterly publication every three months it's funny how that works. And in addition to that you get the decoder ring and the launch codes for the Da Vinci code and the names of the Illuminati which are all important. We do have a lecture series at Caltech that many of you know about if you're in the Southern California area we have a good lineup coming up in the fall I've got Lisa Randall coming from Harvard on October 9th Steve Pinker also from Harvard on October 23rd and a whole bunch of other really good speakers including Beck Stenger who's here who also be speaking for us with his new book. So do we have slides yet sir maybe not okay oh here we go so are they up oh yeah they're up okay good I can see that now sorry didn't see it back here. So some of you asked about quite a few of you asked about the Colbert report and what that's all about so I thought I'd just tell you the story so I don't have to retell the story 200 more times today. I just tell you a little bit about what it's like to do that kind of show is he always in character yes he's always in character even for the obligatory author shot at the end when he's blasting out the door to go home he still stays in character. It's filmed in New York it's right near where the John Stewart show is filmed you can only do one of the two shows they have the same bookers who talk to each other and they never double booked their guests so you have to do one or the other. They're both good they're both the best shows except for maybe Oprah in terms of for authors that's why publishers always want to try to get their authors on these shows. The Obama bump I mean not the Obama bump Colbert bump with the Obama bump at Occidental College where I used to teach anyway so it's real my book was like 478 just before I went on the show and it was on Amazon and it was at number 19 overall nationally for all books within six hours of doing the show so it's real and I checked this morning and it was at like 63 still top 100 several you know five days later so that that is pretty amazing according to my publicist it doesn't matter if you do Larry King or Pierce Morgan or or Bill Maurer none of those shows have any effect at all on book sales so for some reason Colbert and Stewart are the two hottest ticket items and there's more viewers of Colbert than Leno in 18 to 35 age group so that's that's how those shows work they fly into New York and and then they take you over there about four hours in advance the publisher does a the producer does like a pre-interviewed days before and amazingly I think she actually read my book they almost never read your book they just go by the press release and but she did she had a bunch of questions that led me to believe she actually read it so I was impressed with that of course that's all irrelevant that's not really part of the show and then like the hour before you go on she came in with a list of about 20 different funny lines he might use with me like the one about Jesus misses you because I used to be a believer so that was one of like 20 different lines I think he used two or three of the lines there's 85 people work on that show for one guy for 22 minutes out of the 30 minutes of actual produced show he has 15 full-time comedy writers versus me and I'm not even that funny and so that's why they tell you the first thing and they tell you this like six times don't be funny don't try to tell jokes that Stevens job leave that to the professionals I do actually think that's a good idea because that's what well of course Colbert is he's actually a really funny guy and he's super fast very smart obviously quick facile at the jokes on the spur but if you have 15 full-time writers refining every bit all day long what we actually see on the air is really the funniest stuff that's that's one reason why these shows are so good anyway that's a little bit about that so I wanted to talk about the believing brain the new book I'll just give you just a quick rundown the reader's digest condensed version of it so I start off with a basically in my first book why people believe weird things this is sort of the the book end of that ten books later nine books later that is I'm interested not just why people believe weird things but why people believe anything at all and in this sense the weird things are a subset of things you have to believe things so we end up believing weird things because we're not good at discriminating between true things and weird things or non non things or false things or whatever so my thought experiment is imagine you're a hominid on the planes of Africa three and a half million years ago and your name is Lucy thank you some people get that a lot of people in the Midwest don't get that Lucy who's Lucy you know the little hominid three and a half feet tall anyway and and I'm reminded of the Gary Larson cartoon of the Australia Pythesians in the cave party and the guys going you're not the Lucy hominid on the planes of Africa three and a half million years ago and you hear a rustle in the grass is it a dangerous predator is it just the wind well if you think it's a dangerous predator and it turns out it's just the wind you've made a type one error false positive you connected a to b but a is not really connected to be you made a mistake in thinking but that's a low-cost error to make no harm you're just more skittish and careful and cautious and vigilant and you move around the the weird noise and that's pretty much the end of that and we've all seen on the furfinn and feather shows what animals are like out in the wild they're fairly skittish especially preyed upon animals on the other hand if you think the rustle in the grass is just the wind it turns out it's a dangerous predator your lunch congratulations you've been given a Darwin award for taking yourself out of the gene pool without reproducing so in other words I'm arguing that there was a natural selection for making one kind of air versus another kind of air type one error is fairly low-cost type two errors are high-cost so using an evolutionary theory model based on called Hamilton's rule basically why would we be nice to other people that are not our twins or our immediate offspring there's a whole series of formulas for how much energy you put into a system how much risk you take and so on versus what the benefits are cost-benefit ratio so I show in the book the formula of how this works and why we would tend to be have selected have a selection process for making one kind of air versus the other kind of air that is the rule of thumb is just believe everything you hear and see just in case it's real because there's no time well okay so why why can't we get it right why can't we just sit there in the grass collecting more data to see if it's a dangerous predator or just the wind and the answer is because that will also get you taken out and eaten for lunch that is sitting there collecting more data is itself a costly risky process so it's much better to make snap intuitive rapid decisions based on minimal data because there's no time to collect more data so our brains of all this capacity or this propensity to just make really fast decisions and that's what all the research in cognitive psychology behavioral economics and so on the the enlightenment vision of humans as rational calculators maximizing our utility and and our happiness and making making these rational choices through free will is an illusion none of that is true that isn't how we do it we stand there in front of the toothpaste section in the supermarket we just grab the one because it's blue or whatever we recognize the logo we don't sit there and analyze the ingredients and so on and all our decisions are made that way from toothpaste espouses to jobs and careers and and houses and so on we rarely do rational calculations and so the the reason people believe weird things is because we have to make rapid cognitions about believing all sorts of things the rule of thumb is just believe pretty much everything and this is why everybody including skeptics and scientists tend to fall into the trap of just believing things because that's what we heard or we were raised that way or so on the difference is of course is I'll finish up at the end of this little talk the science has a built-in self-correcting mechanism called the scientific method with peer review and corroboration and and checking and rechecking and and blind and double-blind conditions and all this because scientists are no better at this than anybody else every scientist would love his pet theory to be true they can advance their career much more rapidly win prizes gain raises and so on by having their particular pet theory turned out to be true so of course they're going to succumb to the confirmation bias where they look for and find confirmatory evidence or what they already believe and ignore the disconfirming evidence everybody does it so it's not just political ideologues and economic ideologues and religious people and so on everybody all of us every one of us has this problem so I call this belief dependent realism there is a real world but it's our understanding of it is dependent on our beliefs most of our beliefs are arrived at for non-smart reasons non-rational reasons we were raised that way emotional subjective elements to it family background siblings peer groups teachers mentors books that we read influence of culture and so on all that shapes our beliefs and then and then and then we employ our cortex with our great ability to rationalize and collect all the data we need to support it so that's how it works and I have quite a bit of research showing the research on this how it's related to the levels of uncertainty in the environment the more uncertain the environment is more anxious you are in a particular situation the more likely you are to fall into these traps of just believing things finding patterns and call that patternicity the tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise by the way those of you who've asked me why do you why did you create a new name why not just use Paradoia because I can hardly pronounce Paradoia anyway and and that isn't what I mean I I don't mean the process of just seeing the face of Jesus in a tortilla the Virgin Mary inside of a building or grilled cheese sandwich I mean all kinds of patterns and that we have to find patterns and learn and connect the dots that's what we do that's what I'm really talking about with patternicity all sorts of patterns and that the more uncertain the environment is the more likely you are to see patterns it seems to happen more in the right hemisphere than the left hemisphere it's a whole body of research on these different things dopamine appears to be related to it the more input from dopamine you get through experiments by giving subjects al dopa for example they're more likely to see a losery patterns that aren't there so we're kind of starting to hone down on where in the brain this happens why it happens what the neurochemical transmitters are related to finding these patterns and this is all connected to how the brain works and how we learn and we should be cautious not to be too critical of people that find lots of patterns we have to be careful about this because although and you know this this classic skeptics line you know keep it keep a mind open enough to see radical new ideas but not so open minded that your brains fall out well that that is a truism because and I have all section in that chapter on creativity and madness see patternicity this isn't a bad thing it's often a good thing see new patterns that no one else has ever seen that is the basis of creativity and genius this is how you discover make a new discovery in science or create a new genre in music or a new style in art the problem is is that if your brain is kind of wired up to be super creative and see patterns all over the place maybe you also see patterns that aren't real and so my favorite example that I use in the book is that say the difference between Richard Feynman and and John Nash Feynman wins the Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery of these components to quantum electrodynamics and Feynman diagrams where he sees a vision in his head of how these subatomic particles interact and he sketches them out and you put them on the side of his van which you can still see if you ever get to Southern California I'll take you to see it his van with the famous Feynman diagrams on the side and this as the story goes he was driving up Lake Boulevard there from Pasadena up to Altadena where I live and he lived and with big Feynman diagrams on the side of his van and somebody rolls down the window at the stop sign and says how come you have Feynman diagrams on your van he said because I'm Feynman which I thought that'd be really cool to be able to say that and then by contrast John Nash won the Nobel Prize in economics for his discovery of the mathematical relationships of subjects in games so game theory prisoners dilemma ultimatum games these sorts of things there's something called Nash equilibrium of how subject contestants in a contest a game whether it's something like prisoners dilemma or whether it's nations in a cold war state or or anything like that people in relationships business contracts and whatnot they reached this Nash equilibrium anyway that's not important what's important is that John Nash was also seeing patterns that no one else saw and and if you see enough weird patterns it's actually called schizophrenia and you remember he's the subject of a beautiful mind and he described in the book anyway when asked why is it you you think aliens are talking to you and there's secret government agents that talk to you and he said because it's the same source I get for my mathematics of understanding game theory in other words there's there's no discriminatory tool in the brain to tell the difference between these patterns over here that turn out to be real so important you win a Nobel Prize for it and these patterns over here that are just madness so there is a fine line between creativity and madness and now there's a extensive database Nancy Andreessen University of Iowa is probably the best source for this that her database anyway these are all super creative people people that have won prizes in their fields and and so on and she brings them to the university and scans our brains and so on a significant percentage of them have different degrees of mental illness either a manic depression or schizophrenia or either them or their immediate family members so there's something genetically programming the brain to see lots of patterns on the one hand this is good on the other hand it may not be so good so right it's good the rub is finding the balance there okay back to our thought experiment common on the planes of Africa three and a half million years ago Russell in the grass dangerous predator is a dangerous predator just the wind what's the difference between the wind and a dangerous predator the wind is an inanimate object dangerous predator is an intentional agent the difference between being an inanimate force an intentional agent is what I call aginicity the tendency to infuse these patterns with an intentional agents that operate secretly invisibly controlling the world running things whether these are gods and ghosts and spirits and demons and angels or conspiracies our brains also tend to because we're natural born doulas tend to think that there's two things corporeal and incorporeal body and soul brain and mind I have a little pet peeve in the book about quit using mind words it's probably the result of my recent experiences with Deepak of using these mind words because it's too it's too fuzzy it doesn't tell us anything it makes us think that there's something else in mind that's besides the substrate the brain itself but we know that in fact if you destroy parts of the brain through tumors or brain injury or or strokes or Alzheimer's dementia senility as the neurons die the brain function the mind whatever you want to call it dies with it as your brain dies your memories die where do they go without the brain this was my contention with Deepak where is Aunt Millie's mind when her brain goes from Alzheimer's and by God he had an answer you want to know what it was the matrix the matrix I said great where do I get that other than Netflix without the substrate there is no there's no mind right so but nevertheless we tend to think that there's a dualistic force an essence that continues on all the good research on this by Bruce Hood and and Paul Bloom at Yale and others that for example a few if you ask subjects would you wear Hitler's sweater almost everybody goes no no cuz like infused with evilness like evil is a thing a substance that that it really exists outside of people are but would you wear mr. Rogers cardigan sweater oh yes it would feel so warm and make me feel moral and upstanding and one of these guys put up Brad Pitt sweater on eBay for sale washed or unwashed which one do you think got the most money yeah of course everybody wants the essence of Brad Pittness or whatever that would be now there may be evolutionary reasons for this scent has has a good and bad properties to it the the sense of disgust the things that we that smell really bad and make us have a an emotion of disgust usually tend to be things related to body bodily experiments and communicable diseases things like that that we probably shouldn't get too close to because in our evolutionary history they probably did cause widespread disease something like that so there's a good reason why we have a repulsion for things that are bad especially if they smell bad or related to that versus something like the scent of your lover somebody you love or some good smells like flowers or roses or whatever these bring on good a good sense of of a positive emotion and so that would then maybe be connected in this essentialistic way to good good behavior more moral behavior in that sort of thing anyway I have a long discussion about that but the problem is that the process is that we then naturally tend to believe in invisible agent so I so then I have chapters on God in the afterlife these are obviously elements of that so although yes of course I can't prove there's no God I think I build a pretty good case to show that there's lots of positive evidence to show that we create gods in our brains and exactly how this happens and where it happens in the brain is not one place God's too com complex of a of an idea to happen in just one little spot but I show how this whole essentialism dualism this agency all this stuff sort of combines into different parts of the brain to gel into this idea of a God not not just Yahweh God but any God invisible gods lots of God's polytheistic gods animistic God spirits of any kind demons angels and so forth and then you can just take that from brain neuroscience behavior genetics about 50% of pretty much everything we believe is heritable that is identical twins separated from birth raised in separate environment still have remarkable similarities and not just the way they dress and and food preferences and things like that but political beliefs their economic and social attitudes the religious faith the very very parallel these are lines of evidence showing that that we created God and religions not vice versa and then of course culturally socially historically geographically you can show in a very positive way amounting lots of evidence against the God hypothesis that the number one predictor of what your religious faith is is where you happen to have been born you happen to have been born in India in the 20th century you're likely to be Hindu you're born in America you're likely to be Christian of course there's exceptions but statistically that's the way it goes so that alone tells us not to mention all the common elements of of all the different pre-christian religions that had virgin birth elements to their story resurrection elements and so forth raising the dead performing miracles these are all quite common so I document all those and show that it would be very unlikely I would be shocked if it turned out there was a God however just in case I have a little statement that I'm prepared to read as you never know so this is what I would say to God I should it turn out that I would have wrong anyway so 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 own 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 the ideal far too many times I tried to apply your fundamental 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 whatever you will and I mean it and then the last third of the book I talk about political and ideological beliefs because those are beliefs too that are dependent upon all sorts of subjective emotional components so I won't get into all that because I've spoken here about that before conspiracy theories I find really interesting and a little tricky because unlike say the paranormal or the supernatural conspiracies do happen Lincoln was assassinated by a conspiracy Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by a Serbian nationalists the black hand who triggered the start of World War one Watergate was a conspiracy there's lots of conspiracies that the the problem is is we tend to be a little too susceptible we people in general about believing anything you hear is therefore every conspiracy comes seems to be true like Jesse Ventura's love of anything he's ever heard must be a true conspiracy and so when I debated him on this I you know he was on on about 9 11 truth ism and how you know how do you explain the you know the play the buildings fellow you know all these arguments fell in their footprint building seven and he was on about the Pentagon to be hit by a missile so I asked him a simple question Jesse where's the plane if the missile helped to hit the building and not a plane where's the plane because it's gone and like Deepak never never fails to have an answer all they flew it to Canada and whisked the subjects of the the people the customers off and so on anyway so but if everything's a conspiracy then nothing's a conspiracy we have to have some way to discriminate between truth I have a little conspiracy detector kit in the book here's like the 10 things you know that make it to make it unlikely that a conspiracy would be true like if it if it involves world domination you know it's probably not true conspiracies tend to be very narrowly focused and so on although I have to say I had a recent scare about that watching that movie too big to fail on HBO based on the best-selling book too big to fail about the financial crisis and there's that scene in the movie that's also depicted in the book quite powerfully in September of 2008 where Paulson and Bernacke call in the top 10 CEOs of all the major bank Bank of America and Citibank and and Countrywide and so on and brings them all in a room and says all right guys we control like 70% of the world's finances and if we don't do something this weekend we're not gonna have an economy on Monday and I thought holy crap it's it's 12 guys in a room running the world like I said can't happen so I have to say some of my libertarian propensities are a little bit challenged about concerns for those kinds of non-transparent power sources do make me kind of nervous in this in this case the corporate financial world government has the same problem too so anytime you have those kinds of big forces that does make me think maybe some conspiracies at least have some element of truth so we have to keep an open mind about that and always test those so I'm gonna finish up here and just read the last two paragraphs of the book about why science is our best hope for getting around this trap of belief dependent realism so we now come to the end of this narrative journey of belief but it is really just the beginning of a new understanding of how the brain generates beliefs and reinforces them as truths of the many mysteries we have been covered in questions we have tried to answer one in particular stands out homo-rationalists that species of human who carefully weighs all decisions through cold hard logic and rational analysis of the data is not only extinct but probably never existed mr. Spock is science fiction and it's a good thing because people who have suffered brain damage to the emotional networks of their brains particularly their limbic systems find it nearly impossible to make even the simplest of decisions about the most mundane choices in life which toothpaste to buy for example with so many brands and sizes and qualities and prices to consider reason alone will leave you standing there in the store aisle frozen and indecision analysis paralysis and emotional leap of faith beyond reason is often required just to get through the day let alone make the big decisions in life in the end all of us are trying to make sense of the world and nature has gifted us with a double-edged sword that cuts foreign against on one edge our brains are the most complex and sophisticated information processing machines in the universe capable of understanding not only the universe itself but the process of understanding on the other edge by the very same process of forming beliefs about the universe and ourselves we are also more capable than any other species of self deception and illusion a fooling ourselves even when we are trying to avoid being fooled by nature in the end I want to believe but 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 thank you thank you Michael Schremmel ladies and gentlemen