Ever get the feeling that somebody’s watching you? Of course you do. Everyone does. Upon feeling this, have you ever looked up or around only to see that you are correct? Again the answer is almost certainly “Yes”. Towards the end of Supersense: Why We Believe the Unbelievable”, Bruce Hood tells us that approximately 90% of people believe that they can tell when someone is looking at them. 90% is a big number, it includes people who are religious and irreligious, men and women, smart and stupid, short and tall. But it’s false. You have no means of detecting when someone is looking at you if you can’t also see them. None. You’re just more likely to remember the few times you were correct instead of the many you weren’t. Yet nine out of ten people think they can detect something that isn’t there; nine out of ten people think they have a supernatural ability. Why?
That, broadly speaking, is the question that occupies Hood’s book and it’s a damned good one. Even atheists tend to be superstitious; they’ll avoid walking under a ladder, or tossing salt over their shoulder, or, in one of Hood’s favorite examples, donning a sweater that was once owned by a murderer. On the surface this would seem to be strange, why would a person who explicitly does not believe in supernatural forces care in the least about wearing a perfectly good sweater just because it had once belonged to a murderer? But he describes with fascination, and a hint of glee, that once told of the sweaters provenance people will shrink from it, skittish even about touching it, much less donning it.
Hood is an expert on cognitive development and that is where he finds his explanation. He describes how the human mind is wired for intuition, which basically boils down to finding patterns, even where none exist or there isn’t remotely enough information to rationally detect one. This is where the killer’s cardigan fits. Most people don’t know even one sweater wearing murderer, much less more than one. The sweater is therefore both novel and associated with something bad. The intuitive part of the mind shrieks an alarm (new + bad = avoid) even as the rational part of the mind says that the killer is in prison and the sweater isn’t the least bit dangerous. Trusting rational thinking over intuition like that isn’t easy. Doing it all the time is close to impossible, hence superstitious atheists.
Hood goes to great lengths to point out that while such things are irrational, they are also perfectly natural. He goes through numerous examples of experiments with child development, demonstrating how kids think and how that thinking changes as they grow and their brains develop. One of them asked children about how animals came to be. If you ask five- to seven-year olds they’ll either say that god made them or that animals have always been like that. If you put the same question to ten- to twelve-year olds, you’ll get a mixed response of religion and evolution, depending on their home environment. But if you ask eight- and nine-year olds you’ll get a very creationist account of how things came to be, regardless of whether they have religious or irreligious parents. In short, a part of our brains are hard wired to see purpose, whether or not there is any. That wiring is naturally present in childhood and sticks with us as we grow.
Another example Hood cites is that of the Auld Sod Export Company, which sells authentic dirt from Ireland to sentimental Americans. Hood points out that due to US import restrictions the sod has to be sterilized before it can be imported, thus the dirt is just that, dirt. It contains no seeds, nor essence of life, nor any bacteria; it is clean enough to eat. Yet for plenty of people this dirt is special enough, “sacred” as Hood describes it, to be worth purchasing. Even though there is no natural difference between this dirt and dirt geology deigned to place elsewhere, the intuitive part of the brain places an importance on it.
Since all people harbor those same thinking mechanisms, Hood argues that trying to be completely rational is both impossible and, more importantly, anti-social. Recoiling at the killer’s sweater demonstrates to other people in the room that you too abhor murder. Purchasing Irish dirt displays your affinity for the Emerald Isle. Every group of people, no matter how small or large, holds certain things sacred, holds certain ideas to be above a rational cost-benefit analysis. If we did not, we would have no means of bonding with other people, and as a social animal we need that almost as much as we need food.
It is that last point, that the sacred makes the social possible, to which Hood devotes the final, tiny chapter of this book. Quite frankly it would’ve been nice if he’d expanded that part a bit. Through more than two hundred well footnoted pages he builds a clear and convincing argument about the inherent nature of superstitious belief, of seeing patterns where there are none, of confirmation bias bedeviling us all. But only at the end does he touch on ideas like the social importance of things like sacred Irish dirt and murderer’s sweaters.
If our reactions to some things, positive or negative, are a form of social glue, what else does that tell us about ourselves? Could the strictly rational itself ever become sacred? If everyone possesses some intuitiveness and some rationality, what kinds of social and environmental factors push people more towards one than the other? Hood doesn’t really address these issues in the book, and while there’s a plainly obvious reason for that – he’s dealing with a lot of sacred cows and wants to keep his book on firm scientific ground – it still would’ve been interesting to get his take on some of the more open ended questions that are raised by his conclusion.
Nevertheless, “Supersense” is one of those rare books that can put a lot of past experiences into a new light in an “Oh, that’s why I felt that way that one time” kind of way. Books and articles about how the brain functions often do that sort of thing, but rarely are they as comprehensive as this one.
