The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science by Storr Will

Author:Storr, Will [Storr, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: BIO000000, BIO021000, SCI080000
ISBN: 9781468309812
Publisher: Overlook
Published: 2014-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

11

‘There was nothing there, but I knew it was a cockerel’

So now we know. The men and women of science have delivered the shaming news and humanity has responded, in the main, by ignoring it. Of course it has – this is just what you would expect from brains that have evolved to project an image of reasonable, wise, clear-sighted coherence and yet whose decision-making engines run on a slick conjuration of illusion, prejudice and ego-bolstering sleights of truth; a system of irrationality that includes a kind of neural blacksmith’s workshop for dealing with uncomfortable facts – there the furnace for softening them up, there the hammer and tongs for reshaping them, there the window from which to toss them out.

But all this is not enough. Cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, the brain’s desire to have the outer, real world match its inner models of it – it takes us part of the way there. It tells us that a properly functioning brain cannot be trusted to think rationally and, because our minds play these tricks without telling us, that owners of brains cannot be trusted to judge their own rationality. But since meeting Gemma the Homeopath, I have come to suspect that there is something else going on – some crucial process that I have missed.

Gemma had one fact that required explanation: her belief that homeopathy cured her cancer. When I asked her to explain this belief, she gave me far less than any respectable scientific study could offer – no data, no proof. And yet she also gave me more. Gemma told a compelling tale. A young woman on her deathbed, a hapless medical service, scenes of lonely devastation, of falling hair and swelling moon-faces, of a deathly oncologist and a sensational recovery just in time for Christmas. Crack open the belief and something magical bursts out. A story.

The model-defending brain tells of an organ that is, naturally enough, defensive. But before it has any models to defend, it has to actually build them. If I am to track the source of faulty beliefs, I need to discover how they become a part of the model in the first place. I have to understand, not just the brain’s destructive powers, but also its creative ones. Creativity is, after all, a defining quality of humanity, and my journey has already found great glittering piles of it. Many thousands of followers of Swami Ramdev benefit from what I believe to be the placebo effect, and yet spin tales about ancient Eastern wisdom battling evil Western medicine. Buddhists feel the proven effects of meditation and yet run far from those safe lands, towards karma, reincarnation and extra-mortal realms inhabited by giants. Men and women feel an unexplained itch and weave a plot atop their welts that tells of nanotechnology and tiny wasps and a medico-industrial conspiracy. John Mackay experiences life in the world, and the mystery of its being here, and explains it using creation myths from the deserts of the old Middle East.

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