Shermer; The Believing Brain
Book	Page		Topic
Shermer; Believing Brain	59		Patternicity
Shermer; Believing Brain	59		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.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	60		Patternicity -- the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise.		1
Shermer; Believing Brain	62		Antidotal association is a form of patternicity that is all too common and that can lead to faulty conclusions.		2
Shermer; Believing Brain	63		Superstition and belief in magic are millions of years old whereas science, with its methods of controlling for intervening variables to circumvent false positives, is only a few hundred years old.		1
Shermer; Believing Brain	63		Any medical huckster has only to advertise a handful of successful antidotes in the form of testimonials.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	65		Patternicity is a potent force in human nature. Visit a Las Vegas casino and observe people playing the slots with varied attempts to find a pattern between pulling the slot machine handle and the payoff.		2
Shermer; Believing Brain	67		Hardwired Patternicity		2
Shermer; Believing Brain	67		Patternicity is common across the animal kingdom.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	67		Ethology -- the evolutionary origins of animal behavior -- pioneered by Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz in the 1950s.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	67		Imprinting -- a type of phase-dependent learning whereby the youth of a species at a critical period in their development will form a fixed and lasting pattern of memory for whoever or whatever appears before them during that brief span of time.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	67		Incest taboo -- two people growing up in close proximity to each other during a critical period in childhood are unlikely to find each other sexually attractive as adults.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	67		Evolution has programmed within us a rule of thumb: don't mate with those with whom you've grown up because they are very likely your siblings and are thus too genetically similar.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	67		Natural selection endowed us with emotions, e.g. an emotion for incest disgust.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	67		Our brains are developmentally sensitive to forming incest patternicities, and that happens even with people we grow up with who are stepsiblings or others not genetically related to us.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	67		When a herring gull chick perceives the mother gull's yellow beak with the red dot, it promptly begins pecking at it, triggering the mother to regurgitate some food for the chick to eat.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	69		Facial Recognition Patternicity		2
Shermer; Believing Brain	69		Face recognition in humans is a form of patternicity that begins shortly after birth.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	69		When an infant observes the cooing happy face of its mother or father, the face acts as a sign stimulus that initiates the innate releasing mechanism in the brain to trigger that fixed action pattern of smiling back, thereby setting up a symphony of parent-child staring and cooling and smiling -- and bonding attachment.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	69		The newborn brain is preconditioned by evolution to look for and find a simple pattern of a face represented by two to four data points: two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, which may even be represented as two dots, a vertical line, and a horizontal line.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	69		Facial recognition neural connectivity synaptic efficacies were built into our brains by evolution because of the importance of the face in establishing and maintaining relationships, reading emotions, and determining trust in social interactions.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	69		We scan others' faces for emotional leakage: sadness, disgust, joy, surprise, anger, and happiness.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	69		We subtly notice the difference between a real and a fake smile and the upturn of the outer eyelids for the genuine article.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	69		Faces are important to a social primate species such as ourselves.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	70		People are inclined to see faces in random patterns in nature -- e.g. "man in the moon" or face on Mars that is an eroded mountain.		1
Shermer; Believing Brain	70		The location in the brain where faces are recognized and processed has been established by neuroscientists. In the temporal lobes of the brain the fusiform gyrus is actively involved in facial recognition.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	70		There are two separate neural pathways for processing faces -- one for processing faces in general and another for processing facial characteristics in particular.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	70		Large (magno cells) comprise the relatively rapid-firing magnocellular pathway that processes large receptive fields and carries low spatial frequency (course coarse-grained data) information (and a general face).		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	70		The smaller cells that comprise the relatively slower firing parvocellular pathway that processes small receptive fields and carries high spatial frequency (fine-grained data) information (facial details such as eyes, nose, and mouth).		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	70		The brain first processes the global shape of the face, such as the general outline with two eyes and a mouth, and then processes the details of facial features, such as the eyes, nose, and mouth.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	70		The difference between slow and rapid processing of information is interesting because in the search for neural correlates of consciousness, most theories hold that rapid unconscious processing happens before slow or conscious awareness.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	72		Brain activity involved in the initiation of the action was primarily centered in the secondary motor cortex.		2
Shermer; Believing Brain	72		The secondary motor cortex became active 300 ms before subjects reported their first awareness of a conscious decision to act.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	72		Awareness of our intention to do something trails the initial wave of brain activity associated with that action by about 300 ms -- 3/10 of a second elapse between the brain making a choice and our awareness of the choice.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	72		Add to the 300 ms processing time the other 2/10 of a second to act on the choice, and it means that a full half second passes between our brain's intention to do something and our awareness of the actual act of doing it.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	72		The neural activity that precedes the intention to act is inaccessible to our conscious mind.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	72		Research studies show how deeply ingrained patternicity is in our brains, hardwired into our unconscious and generating patterns beneath our awareness.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	72		There is an innate pattern of greeting everywhere in the world that people are born understanding without any cultural training.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	72		Innate pattern of face greetings around the world (pictures)		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	73		Research work by Paul Ekman and others have presented a body of uncontestable evidence for the evolutionary origins of facial patternicities.		1
Shermer; Believing Brain	73		Mimicry is another form of patternicity.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	75		Supernormal stimuli combine the principles of mimicry and the FAP system and have been documented in numerous instances of ancient innate human patternicities hijacked by the modern world.		2
Shermer; Believing Brain	75		Modernity and has commandeered our ancient propensities for patterns of sexual preferences, leading to expectations of women's faces and figures to match these supernormal stimuli seen it perfect supermodels with long legs, hourglass figures, 0.7 waist-to-hip ratios, and large breasts, perfectly symmetrical faces with blemish-free complexions, full lips, large alluring eyes with dilated pupils, and full heads of hair.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	75		In the environment of our Paleolithic ancestors, the "normal" dimensions of these physical characteristics were proxies for general health, and thus there was a natural selection for emotional preference for women who approximated such physicality.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	75		Like food that is nutritionally rich and environmentally rare, such physical characteristics of women are both strongly desired and without satiation, so our brains can be tricked into feeling that more is better.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	76		In the sign-stimulus-FAP system these supernormal stimuli, such as silicone enhanced breast, lip implants, makeup to enhance the eyes, rouge to blush the cheeks, high heels to extend the legs, and the like, all trigger an even stronger emotional and behavioral response.		1
Shermer; Believing Brain	76		Women are attracted to men who are taller than they are, with narrow waists and broad shoulders, who lean and muscular builds, symmetrical faces and clear complexions, and strong jaws and chins.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	76		The characteristics of men are related to a good balance of testosterone and other hormones, and they serve as proxies for general health in terms of selecting a mate with whom to have children.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	76		Because sexuality is so much more visually attended to by men, pornography as a supernormal stimulus is almost entirely a guy thing.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	87		Agenticity		11
Shermer; Believing Brain	87		Agenticity -- the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	87		We often impart the patterns we find with agency and intention, and believe that these intentional agents control the world, sometimes invisibly from the top down, instead of bottom-up causal laws and randomness that makes up much of our world.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	87		Souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, and talented designers, government conspiracies, and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention are believed to haunt our world and control our lives.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	87		Combined with our propensity to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise, patternicity and agency form the cognitive basis for shamanism, paganism, animism, polytheism, monotheism, and all modes of Old and New Age spiritualisms.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	88		Many highly educated and intelligent individuals experience a powerful sense that there are patterns, forces, energies, and entities operating in the world.		1
Shermer; Believing Brain	90		We are natural-born supernaturalists, driven by our tendency to find meaningful patterns and impart to them intentional agency.		2
Shermer; Believing Brain	90		Agenticity and the Demon-Haunted Brain		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	118		The "pleasure center" of the brain was discovered in 1954 by James Olds and Peter Milner of McGill University, when they accidentally implanted an electrode into the nucleus accumbens of a rat had discovered that the rodent became very energized.		28
Shermer; Believing Brain	118		The rats pressed the bar until they collapsed, even to the point of foregoing food and water.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	118		The pleasure effect has since been found in all mammals tested, including people who have undergone brain surgery and had their nucleus accumbens stimulated. The word they use to describe the effect was orgasm.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	118		Unfortunately, there is a downside to the dopamine system, and that is addiction.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	118		Addictive drugs take over the role of a reward signals that feed into the dopamine neurons.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	118		Gambling, pornography, and drugs such as cocaine cause the brain to flood itself with dopamine.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	119		Neuroscientists make a distinction between a "liking" (pleasure) and "wanting" (motivation), and there is a lively debate about whether dopamine acts to stimulate pleasure or to motivate behavior.		1
Shermer; Believing Brain	119		Pleasure reward is related to the pure pleasure of, say, an orgasm, whereas the motivation is related to the anxiety an addicts feels when their next fix is in doubt.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	119		A prominent researcher suspects the role of dopamine is in motivation rather than in pleasure per se, whereas the opioid system appears to be central to pleasure.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	119		For purposes of understanding the neural correlates of belief, the central point is that dopamine reinforces behaviors and beliefs and patternicity, and thus is one of the primary belief drugs.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	119		The connection between dopamine and belief was established by experiments exploring the neurochemistry of superstation, magical thinking, and belief in the paranormal. People with high levels of dopamine are more likely to find significance in coincidences and pick out meaning and patterns where there are none.		0
Shermer; Believing Brain	260		When people arrive at a decision that makes them emotionally comfortable, ventral striatum -- a part of the brain associated with the reward -- becomes active.		141
Shermer; Believing Brain