TAM is coming up, and in addition to the usual presentations I take part in, such as live recordings of the SGU and a science-based medicine panel and workshop, I will be giving an individual lecture on the various ways in which your brain can deceive you, which is to say, itself. The lecture is based on my Teaching Company course - Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills. (I thought it was going to be "your deceptive brain, which I think is better, but they opted for "mind".)
For me this is the absolute core of skepticism. Love of science and scientific literacy is, of course, also central to scientific skepticism, but knowledge of self-deception is what separates skepticism from just being a fan of science.
A deep appreciation for the magnitude of self-deception is also, in my opinion, a large part of what separate the skeptic from the believer. When I discuss topics of interest to skeptics with those who believe I often find that in my attempt to find common ground I come up against a hard wall through which I just cannot break. That wall is personal experience - the believer feels that they, someone they know, or many people have experienced the paranormal, healing, aliens, or whatever is the focus of their belief. They simply cannot wrap their minds around the possibility that such experiences amount to nothing but mundane (if unusual) experiences plus self-deception.
Most people exist day to day with the belief that what they experience is a fairly accurate and reliable reflection of reality. If they have an experience then that experience is largely rooted in the external world. This assumption is not surprising as this assumption, in fact, is built into how our brain's function - our brains operate specifically to create the illusion that what we experience is real.
The neurological and psychological reality, however, is far different. What we experience is largely an illusion, a narrative stream that our brains construct based upon highly processed and selected sensory information, distorted memories, and numerous cognitive biases and filters.
The end result is a neurologically fabricated fiction - although this fiction has its practical uses. It does draw our attention to things in the environment to which we must react, and it does allow us to adjust our behavior to improve our chances of survival (at least in the environment in which humans evolved). Reality is also distorted to make us feel good, reduce cognitive dissonance, minimize the burden of thinking about everything, and constantly questioning our own beliefs. Accuracy and deliberation are largely sacrificed for efficiency.
The end result is a mess. It gets us through the mundane details of our daily lives, although with constant error, but it is not suited to reliably dealing with the complexities of modern civilization, nor unraveling the secrets of nature. If we rely upon the reality that our monkey brains construct for us we are lead not to reliable conclusions but to incredibly false but pleasing conclusions.
Our brains err on the side of seeing patterns that are not there, perceiving agents in random events, believing in things that don't exist, and largely constructing reality to flatter our own egos and calm our fears and anxieties.
But fear not - we can transcend these flawed monkey brains (at least to a degree). There are two basic methods for doing this. The first is to understand all the various ways in which our brains deceive us so that we can compensate for these flaws. The second is to develop rigorous methods of observing and thinking that control for all these flaws and biases.
We call these methods Logic and Science.
Steven Novella, M.D. is the JREF's Senior Fellow and Director of the JREF’s Science-Based Medicine project.
Dr. Novella is an academic clinical neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine. He is the president and co-founder of the New England Skeptical Society and the host and producer of the popular weekly science show, The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. He also authors the NeuroLogica Blog.