The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

"A wonderfully lucid, accessible, and wide-ranging account of the boundary between justified and unjustified belief." —Sam Harris, New York Times–bestselling author of The Moral Landscape and The End of Faith

In this work synthesizing thirty years of research, psychologist, historian of science, and the world's best-known skeptic Michael Shermer upends the traditional thinking about how humans form beliefs about the world. Simply put, beliefs come first and explanations for beliefs follow. ...