The Believing Brain
The making and breaking of the belief engine
Introduction to February’s Theme
Each month, we explore a new theme on how to live what the ancients called the “good life”—a life in the pursuit of becoming the best version of oneself.
For the month of February, we will be exploring the themes of reason and rationality.
The ancients believed that the path to the good life was paved through reason. Socrates famously believed that it was through knowledge and understanding that we rooted out flawed thinking. The Stoics viewed rationality as our superior ability over other creatures that made us special. The enlightenment thinkers placed tremendous weight on our ability to reason and believed it was through the lens of reason we could, and should, view our actions.
In short, reason is what drives the world toward progress and growth.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)1
As such, the exploration of reason this month will help us better understand our multitudes, review common flaws in our thinking, and better align our reasoning abilities to help us live better lives.
This Week at a Glance:
Kicking off our month on the exploration of reason and rationality, we will be investigating beliefs—what they are, where they come from, and how we can best use them to our advantage.
Inscribed at the entrance of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi were three maxims for living. The most important and most well-known of the three is the maxim “Know thyself.”2
The first step in coming to terms with who we are begins with the beliefs that we hold.
By the time you finish this meditation, you’ll learn:
🍭 Where beliefs come from and how they’re developed;
🍬 How the brain evolved to be a story-making machine through pattern analysis;
🍫 How to overcome current beliefs and expand one’s mind.
Let’s dive in.
Most people never end up questioning their beliefs—they simply inherit them.
Beliefs are most often acquired from our parents and upbringing, our friends, our cultural influences—but we accept them all at face value.
And yet beliefs are a vital part of our every day existence. They help us through each day, ushering in an understanding of the world we encounter.
Beliefs in their simplest form are an acceptance of statements as truth in our eyes. They are what we deem to be real, whether or not there is evidence to support them.
More importantly, our brains are hardwired to be belief engines. Dating back to our days on the plains of Africa, if our ancestors heard a noise in the brush and they didn’t react, they learned the hard way it was, more often than not, a lion.
So the brain evolved to be a believing machine that would help us quickly find patterns in everyday existence3, make a story of it, and have that story invigorate us to action.
While a simplistic view of the world (noise in brush, run the other way) helped our ancestors, it does not work so well in our societies today.
When we never stop to question our beliefs, or the formations of them, we leave ourselves disadvantaged and vulnerable to faulty reasoning. It is these innate belief tendencies that can easily lead us down the path of irrationality.
Think back to the times where we thought there were “witches”. How many lives were lost and illogical reasoning applied to those periods? How many things today will be looked at the same way a hundred years from now?
When something is unknown, our mind fills in the gap with information we do know, regardless of whether or not it is accurate. The brain works to make connections and fill these gaps so as to be attuned to its environment. It is constantly working on the puzzle of life, trying to place, or in some cases wedge, facts in order to create an understanding of the world.
And it is here where we run into pitfalls in our thinking and beliefs. If we allow our brains to perform this function, without ever questioning or performing deeper research, then we disadvantage ourselves to only seeing half pictures of the world.
The world is an extremely complex place filled with chaos, randomness, and events we could never see coming, events Nassim Nicholas Taleb would refer to as “Black Swans”.
But because the world is so complex, we look to simplify. We look to make connections wherever we can. We see big events occur and we immediately try and form a cause-and-effect connection.
But more often than not, life holds too many variables and too many intertwining circumstances for us to easily distill events so simply.
As
states in his new book Fluke4:“The real story of our lives is often written in the margins. Small details matter, and even the apparently insignificant choices of people we will never meet can seal our own fates.”
What we need to do is take a step back outside of our own knowledge, outside of what we believe, and instead take account of the broader knowledge that the world holds. We need to test our beliefs against this knowledge and see if they hold up.
This is counter-intuitive as the brain works in the opposite direction due to confirmation bias. According to :
“Beliefs come first; reasons for belief follow in confirmation of the realism dependent on the belief.”5
As we stated at the beginning, we inherit our beliefs from many different areas of life but we often do not question them—that is, unless they are tested in life, usually due to personal experience.
There is a difference between what we believe we would do and what we would actually do when those beliefs are put to the test, when we’re actually in a position of required action.
Belief in many circumstances is but a pretense to action. Knowledge comes when the belief is pressured by action.
However, in order to get the most benefit from this pressuring of our beliefs, we need to be open and receptive to being wrong. But built within each of us is a threshold of cognitive discomfort we are willing to tolerate.
First discovered in 1950s by the psychologist Leon Festinger6, cognitive dissonance runs rampant within us when we refuse to let go of our beliefs and instead, actively work to undermine the facts and proof we’re presented with in an effort to retain our own beliefs.
Simply put, cognitive dissonance is when our beliefs and reality are in contradiction of one another. So instead of accepting reality, we create distance from it and move closer to our previously held belief through rationalization. We find whatever information or proof we need to in order to pump up this rationalization for ourselves.
We do what is necessary to no longer be uncomfortable.
But why would we do such a thing? Why wouldn’t we want to just admit we’re wrong and move on?
There’s a variety of reasons such ego, reputation, and embarrassment. But perhaps the number one reason our beliefs are so hard to change, why we reject evidence that we’re wrong, is our identity.
According to , this is due in part to our desire to keep our identity consistent over time:
“Because our beliefs form the fabric of that identity, we are also motivated to keep our beliefs intact.”7
So the longer we hold these beliefs, the harder it is to change them. And when we’re known for holding certain views of the world, to change them means to let go of a part of ourselves, to allow part of us to die off, to lose a part of our identity.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. The philosopher Karl Popper has stated we cannot ever prove a theory to be right.8 We can, however, work to better strengthen our theories and beliefs through supporting facts and evidence the way scientists do.
“[Of scientists] These are men with bold ideas, but highly critical of their own ideas; they try to find whether their ideas are right by trying first to find whether they are not perhaps wrong. They work with bold conjectures and severe attempts at refuting their own conjectures.”9
In other words, they are consistently testing their theories to see whether or not they in fact hold up to peer reviews, new evidence, etc. Turning the scope on one’s self, this is what the philosopher Michel de Montaigne meant when he wrote:
“We must really strain our soul to be aware of our own fallibility.”10
At times, beliefs are a house of cards, easily toppled over by facts and evidence. But if we’re dedicated to better understanding ourselves, if we really care to know, we will allow ourselves permission to review and be reviewed. We will test our beliefs and see how they hold up.
The poet Maggie Smith once wrote that we’re all fountains, “…soft, pulsing. We all come into the world unfinished, still stitching ourselves together.”11 We’re beings of tremendous depth, and like the water from the fountain, can shift, grow, shrink, and contort ourselves to fit the needs of the moment.
We get closer to ourselves by following the stitches, understanding the strands, seeing their connections, making new, stronger, more precise ones.
It is from this that we begin to see our true selves.
It is from this that we begin to understand our beliefs.
It is from this that we actually build evidence for our beliefs and in turn, learn who we are.
3-Bullet Summary:
The world is filled with complexity and simple explanations and beliefs are usually inaccurate to get a true sense of the world;
Beliefs are more often than not developed first and our reasoning for the belief comes second through confirmations we find;
We break our cognitive dissonance by understanding why we may not want to release the belief.
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Until next week,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems
Stobaeus, The Delphic Maxims
Today we refer to this as “patternicity”
Michael Shermer, The Believing Brain
Leon Festinger, When Prophecy Fails
Karl Popper, The End of Faith (By Sam Harris)
Karl Popper, Fooled by Randomness (By Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
Michel de Montaigne, How to Live (By Sarah Bakewell)
Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful