The earlier discussion of the brain’s energy conservation (in chapter 9) is another possibility. The brain acts very rapidly at the neuron level. Information travels from one part of the brain to other parts in milliseconds. Yet, as noted, by comparison, the brain is strikingly slow in thinking through complex issues with contingencies. This is due to the time and energy costs involved in evaluating evidence and creating models. Energy conservation also appears to be responsible for simplifying complex information, preferring the use of available tool kits rather than occasionally approaching familiar tasks anew, decreasing ambiguity and uncertainty by narrowing divides, and packaging complex and often-contradictory evidence as beliefs to offset the costs associated with thinking during moments of information overload or complexity. Although establishing or creating a belief may require the expenditure of energy, once beliefs are established, the cost of believing appears to be minimal. (Energy conservation may explain findings such as boosting gamma brainwaves improves subjects’ performance on abstract-reasoning tests and electrical stimulation to the brain can increase learning.24) In effect, changing a belief is not an energy-free activity such as correcting a misspelled word: beliefs are networked to other beliefs in the brain, to pleasure and reward centers, and so forth. Altering these many relationships is highly energy dependent and time consuming.
Combining the preceding points, if
we are born to believe,
the brain is prepared to believe,
people overvalue their beliefs,
beliefs are associated with self-righteousness, pleasure, and reward,
the brain is biased in favor of divide reduction,
the brain has numerous systems that facilitate belief development and perpetuation,
divide distance does not predict the strength or believability of belief,
we see what we believe,
emotions often determine what is believed,
beliefs reduce ambiguity and uncertainty,
and beliefs conserve brain energy,
then we are endowed with a brain that will favor belief creation and disconfirmation failure and is one step ahead of consciousness.
When it comes to ourselves, we like to think that we are open-minded and reflective. At moments, we are. There are other moments, however. Beliefs dealing with religion, politics, morals, family, ethnic groups, aesthetics, neighbors, sports heroes, science, politics and politicians, atypical behavior and desires, local and national governments, international institutions, land use, spouses, parents, children, and even pets are often devoid of even the slightest hint that they are treated by open and reflective brains. Further, the range and depth of experience and knowledge in daily life differs from person to person, place to place, and brain to brain. Different brains, places, and experiences assure that there will be a wide range of beliefs and divides. This is the world in which we live. There is no escape. It is deeply infused with intransigent beliefs.
Not everyone will agree with this assessment. There are optimists who maintain that the age of faith has been succeeded by a secularist age of reason, enlightenment, scientific enrichment, political liberty, and open-mindedness. Yet the scorecard of daily life reads otherwise. The contention that the world is now living in a period of scientific enrichment, enlightenment, and political liberty may apply to a small percentage of the world’s population. But to contend that this state of affairs is worldwide ignores events and trends of both the last and the present century:1 national, ethnic, and religious wars and murder; oppressive dictatorships; human exploitation; poverty; discrimination; rampant crime; and environmental destruction hardly invite the conclusion that daily life has been graced in the way optimists claim or wish.
Scientific research over the last one hundred years has clarified much about the brain and its systems that contribute to beliefs and divides. What is often overlooked is that there are no indications that these systems will change in the foreseeable future—evolution moves slower than a snail’s pace. Moreover, each new generation begins its journey in life with a brain that is the product of millions of years of evolution. Like our arms and legs, the same brains that belonged to our great-great-grandparents will be around for generations to come.
Our brains will develop technological innovations and devise new forms of creativity. At times they will support humanitarian acts and efforts to eliminate disease, poverty, and discrimination. They will endorse efforts to address climate change and species extinction. Yet, at times, the same brains will indoctrinate others, embrace intransigent beliefs, fail to disconfirm unsupportable beliefs, resist belief change, and favor believing over skepticism and divide reduction over the careful review of evidence.
The probable outcome will be ongoing personal and group conflict, the emergence of new self-interest groups, and the failure to address critical questions adequately. For example, will there be enough food and water in the year 2045 when the world’s population is expected to reach nine billion people? If not, will it be our lot to live out the tragedy of the commons? And how can neighbors, members of city councils, and friends who embrace diametrically opposed beliefs figure out how to get along?
Critical to an understanding of daily life is an understanding of how the brain believes and manages divides. It is not that this understanding will suddenly resolve many challenges and problems. What it does mean is that understanding should not be ignored. If there is clear and compelling evidence that the brain works in certain ways, then it follows that efforts to resolve problems fired by conflicting beliefs should take into account these workings. If nothing else, this accounting will partially clarify why many problems persist and remain unsolved.
Given the preceding perspective, many current factors that influence and are influenced by belief and divides might be discussed. Three have been selected for comment: information overload, belief fragmentation, and the time-compact present.
INFORMATION OVERLOAD
A frequently voiced explanation for the multiplicity of beliefs—“belief explosion” might be more apt—is information overload. Television, radio, newspapers, magazines, the Internet, e-mail, iPods, BlackBerrys, Facebook, Twitter, texting, and other forms of communication now bombard people with information from birth to death. We are inescapably entwined in an era of unparalleled information expansion.
Much information that finds its way to our brains seems unimportant. Most of the world’s population has little interest in news that warlords in some distant country are once again engaged in territorial disputes, that college X has won the NCAA wrestling title for the fourth consecutive year, or that a small town in Alabama is the home of three National Merit Scholars. In addition to news items, there is an endless string of conflicting pronouncements on health, law, migration, crime, politics, poverty, economics, discrimination, and so forth.2
This state of affairs was slow in coming. The onset of the information age can be traced to the invention of the printing press in 1578. The subsequent development of the telegraph and short-wave radio ratcheted up both the speed of information transmission and its volume. Volume and transmission increased severalfold during the twentieth century. One consequence is that information now accumulates faster than it can be absorbed and evaluated.3 Moreover, today, literally every technical means of communication is filled continually with information on literally every imaginable topic, a high percentage of which includes beliefs. These channels have listeners: for example, the average adult American watches TV some thirty-two hours per week and Facebook users are reported to access their own Facebook page seven times a day. The rapid spread and popularity of information of all types coupled with the time people spend accessing it invites the speculation that acquiring information is addictive. Ever more information is desired.
One result of the information explosion is that people with the same belief can select separate bits of evidence to support a belief they seemingly share. Conversely, people with very different beliefs can select th
e same evidence to support their different beliefs—for example, a statement by the pope can spark antithetic views among Christians, atheists, and Muslims. In short, we live in an information world composed of an immense and ever-expanding grab bag of news, opinions, and evidence from which people select what best suits their beliefs. Selection is particularly common among people with strongly held political, religious, and moral beliefs. It is also apparent among individuals working in public media, many of whom configure their interpretation of information in ways that are consistent with their beliefs4—it is not clear if they can prevent themselves from doing so. The upshot is this: the number of beliefs that are associated with discordant, irrelevant, and incomplete evidence increases daily.
For many who read this, there is little that is new in the preceding paragraphs. The information explosion and its implications have been discussed widely. Some commentators foresee dire consequences. For example, the Internet has been characterized as a threat to culture because it simplifies and feeds people with bits and pieces of information.5 As it has emerged as a dominant means of accessing information, studies show that recall of the accessed information declines while the recall of its sources increases.6 Others have come to view the Internet, cell phones, and other electronic devices as facilitators of conflict because of their use by criminals and terrorists. Still others have predicted “reputation bankruptcy” because a person’s past is difficult to erase in the digital age of data storage—Have you checked your credit score lately?7 Around the corner, there are those who view the explosion positively.8 They foresee easy access to information, quick and cost-efficient communication, and a broadening of awareness about important issues such as financial stability. Could this be due to neural systems that mediate optimism bias?9
Same information; different beliefs.
Still, on balance, a “dumbing down” of understanding is the highly likely consequence of overload. The greater the amount of available information, the less it’s susceptible to in-depth analysis and the greater the superficiality of its interpretation. This is the fate of much scientific reporting. Because of its often highly technical nature, the language of science differs from that of daily life.10 As a result, there is a tendency among writers to simplify findings and ideas, which has unnerving implications when such information finds its way to policy makers.11
It should not come as a surprise that the explosion has stimulated efforts at brain manipulation. For example, Google has developed algorithms that are designed to profile persons who query through their system. Once the profile is identified, responses to queries are organized according to what Google’s algorithm deems will be of greatest interest to the person accessing its system.12 The effort may be well intended. But an obvious effect is to direct a person making a Google inquiry to material that likely will reinforce the person’s beliefs.13
In 1964 Marshall McLuhan pointed out how media affects the patterning of human associations. The same point applies to how people communicate one to another. Comparing 1964 with today, there is an inverse relationship between the rise of electronic communication and face-to-face communication. There are some desirable effects of this change. Remotely located individuals can communicate rapidly and with ease via electronic means. It’s also possible (but unlikely) that, in discussing strongly held beliefs, Internet communications are more focused, less emotional, and less confrontational. Unlike what often characterizes face-to-face interactions, Internet messages can be carefully crafted and edited. But there is also information that is lost, such as a shared context and the opportunity to observe and interpret nonverbal behavior, voice pitch, and brain read. The trend of less and less face-to-face dialogue raises the possibility of an increase in intransigent beliefs due to reduced opportunities for belief modification.
BELIEF FRAGMENTATION
Belief fragmentation is not new.14 It comes and goes. In its current version, it is largely a consequence of information overload, the excessive number of beliefs that overload fosters, and the way the brain works. In its extreme form, no two people would share even similar beliefs—each of us would live in our own private world of understanding and meaning.
Cultural and religious myths and their political or moral equivalents return to the discussion at this point. Without the influence of group-uniting and shared myths or belief systems, individuals tend to believe whatever suits them. The more they do so, the greater the degree of fragmentation.
The American myth provides an instructive illustration. For almost four hundred years, the King James Bible provided a framework for beliefs, values, expressive symbols, and artistic motifs in which individuals—not all, of course, but many—defined and interpreted their social world and behavior and made judgments. Interpretations of the Bible served as a reference point for assessing behavior and decision making. The belief system provided nonlegal guidelines for perhaps 90 percent of our behavior—that is, for behavior not covered by formal laws.15 Without such guidelines, communities break down. Social participation declines. Personal and legal conflicts increase. Individual disenfranchisement follows. Consensus-based morality tends to disappear.16 Chronic stress may follow and, when it does, it is often accompanied by a biasing of behavior toward habit, which includes beliefs.17 These are outcomes that the advocates of secularism didn’t foresee.
To digress a moment to offer an analogy, what happens when beliefs fragment and there is no overarching belief system that people embrace to guide their behavior would be much like a football game in which all the players played by their own private rules.
Let me be clear about the preceding paragraphs. The point here is not that of passing judgment on whether one cultural myth is superior to others (although I have a view) or about the pros and cons of secularism. Rather the point is that a shared belief system is essential for social cohesion, otherwise beliefs fragment and social cohesion declines. The less a myth is shared by individuals, the greater the disruption of daily life. Belief polarization and self-righteousness about one’s beliefs can quickly follow. Discounting the merit of others and their beliefs takes on a reflex-like nature. As an example, take American politics from approximately the 1970s to the present. It is a period characterized by increasing character assassination of politically elected and aspiring officials often without a shred of evidence.
There are disturbing downsides to these points. Periods of fragmentation invite conflict of all types, including interpersonal, aesthetic, national, international, military, and legal. Fragmentation chokes off conflicting evidence and fosters divide reduction as a way of managing information and reducing energy expenditure by the brain. Believers come to attribute absolute certainty to their beliefs irrespective of their plausibility or evidence—for example, concerned individuals mount serious political campaigns against “smart electric meters” because they believe that the meters cause cancer. Doubts about one’s beliefs tend to disappear. Individuals deny the presence of global warming and dismiss evidence of human-caused environmental destruction and species extinction. Claims are made that those who believe in God are delusional.18 The net effect is turbulent times, turbulent brains, and turbulent emotions. In turn, there is an opportunity for perverse and destructive beliefs as well as oppressive doctrines to exert their influence.
As beliefs become personalized, attributions follow suit and serve as proxies for belief-supporting evidence. Similar scenarios apply to the readings of others’ brain states and triggering—for example, simply seeing a public official or a next-door neighbor may initiate a strong positive or negative response. Stories and models accommodate to these responses.
TIME-COMPACT PRESENT
It is Friedrich Nietzsche to whom the following statement is widely attributed: “Modern man eats knowledge without hunger.” What he might have meant is that modern man absorbs information without passion, necessity, and analysis. To do so is a trademark of the time-compact present.
In 1999 J. T. Fraser coined the term t
ime-compact present: the present—now!—becomes the dominant focus of attention and emotional investment.19 There is an excessive emphasis on the now at the expense of preserving what is valuable from the past. The uncertainty of the future disappears and is replaced by imaginings of infinite options. In effect, the present is cognitively and emotionally decoupled from the past and the future. Stories and models that depend on the past or a likely future to gain their structure and meaning in turn lose their relevance. What happened yesterday doesn’t mean that it will happen today or tomorrow. Information overload, brain reading, and attribution hype the here and now. It’s as if, as a species, we have rejected the wisdom of history and a serious appreciation of the uncertainty of moments to come.
Time-compactness means that the half-life of information—even very important information—is reduced sharply. For example, recall the March 29, 2011, Tohoku-Oki earthquake in the sea off of Japan.20 For several days, reports about human suffering, physical damage, rising radiation levels, and a seriously compromised nuclear power plant dominated the news. Except largely for Japan, by August 1, 2012, news about the earthquake and its details had all but disappeared. The event had begun its trip into the forgotten past.
With the loss of a time-related perspective, unrealistic hopes surge—yet another time-compact trademark. For example, during the past few decades, there have been repeated attempts to improve American education. In some schools, this has happened. But the overall goal of improvement is difficult to reconcile with high school graduation rates that range from 58 percent to 93 percent, as well as a breakdown in general literacy.21 Over the same period, universities have become largely fractious collections of interest groups.22 Progressively they have scrapped their traditional aim of graduating informed students in favor of preparing them for jobs or indoctrinating them with this or that ideology.23 This situation exists in part because of the consequences of time-compactness: imaginings and beliefs trump facts and an appreciation of what can be learned from the past and reasonably expected in the future.
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