William James is supposed to have said, "Thinking is what a great many people think they are doing when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." Courtesy of a tip from Roo and the friendly folk at the Brisbane City Council library service, I've finally got my hands on Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain , which explains this aphorism in a lot more detail. I previously encountered Shermer through his Why People Believe Weird Things , a fun journey through a set of beliefs on the edge of the intellectual world like Holocaust denial, alien abduction, Ayn Rand's Objectivism and the psi quotient. Shermer revealed himself as an intensely curious, sympathetic but highly skeptical observer, constantly on the hunt for evidence. The Believing Brain covers some of the same territory but it's a much more technical book dealing with the question from the point of view of Shermer's own specialist field, neuro-psychology. What it is about our brains, S
'Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp.' - Rachel Carson