Why are brains superstitious? Would you wear a nice sweater that belonged to a murderer? What does this have to do with mind reading or our interpretation of coincidences, or why kids often need their special blanket, and what any of this has to do with the brain. Welcome to Intercosmos with me David Eagelman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford and in these episodes we dive deeply into our three pound universe to understand some of the most
surprising aspects of our lives. So here's today's question. Why do so many humans across time, across geography, even across the levels of education. Why do they believe in things they can't see and that presumably are not true, like ghosts or guardian angels, or curses or telepathy, or sacred
relics or vengeful gods or karma or lucky socks. Even if you consider yourself totally unsuperstitious, you might still find that you say something and then you knock on wood, or maybe you dribble the ball three times before you take a basketball free throw, or maybe you would hesitate at the idea of moving into a house where a murderer lived. Now this is all strange behavior, right, because if you're a total rationalist, you'd say, look, no problem
moving into that house. Criminality doesn't rub off on the walls. Those are totally separate issues. But somehow it's hard to move into that house. We see examples of superstitious behavior around us all the time. The tennis player John McEnroe, he would always refuse to step on the white lines of a tennis court between points. People cross their fingers,
They avoid walking under ladders, they avoid black cats. So it probably won't surprise you that surveys consistently show that belief in the supernatural is alive and well even in highly secular, scientifically advanced societies. In the United States, a majority of people believe in angels sixty nine percent according to Gallup polls, And by the way, that's way more than believe in the Big Bang theory forty nine percent, and over twice as much as evolution by natural selections,
which is thirty two percent. And this is broader than just the influence of religion. More generally, people believe in fate, in manifesting energy, in spiritual healing, in meaningful coincidences, and This all forms part of a rich, persistent global pattern of supernatural thought. So where does this all come from? This question about supernatural thinking has long fascinated scientists and philosophers.
Some people answer this in a social lens, for example, that beliefs bind groups, and some researchers point to the psychological benefits, like belief gives us a sense of control in an unpredictable world. But there's also a deeper clue, and it has to do with the fact that the foundation of our supernatural beliefs is not taught to us. It arises spontaneously. Our brains generate them over and over from early childhood without instruction. Across cultures. The details change,
but the need to reach for invisible explanations is a constant. Why. Well, it's because we don't see the world like we're passive recorders of reality. Instead, we are pattern makers. We fill the world with meaning. Our brains take incomplete data and they infer causes. We hear rustling leaves in the forest and we attribute agency. We hear a story about a murderer's house and we attribute some essence to it. We see a coincidence and we mark it up to destiny.
As we're going to see today, this sort of superstitious thinking is actually a useful feature of the brain. All this starts to make a lot more sense from the neuroscience point of view, because these beliefs are natural outcomes of how human minds work. So today's episode is about this, this strange and fascinating corner of our cognition, the super sense.
Super sense is a term coined by the developmental psychologist Bruce Hood, who noticed something curious in his research with children, even very young kids, before they're deeply exposed to cultural teachings, they show supernatural thinking. They believe that people have invisible essences, they recoil from bad objects, They believe in mind over matter,
or that thoughts can influence events. These behaviors emerge early and automatically, so Bruce wrote a book called Supersense, Why We Believe in the Unbelievable, in which he explores why our brains are so naturally inclined toward the mystical, the magical, the metaphysical. In the book, he digs into the biology of belief, the brain mechanisms that underlie superstition and magical thinking, and spiritual conviction. Why world class athletes have their rituals.
Why the belief that everything happens for a reason is so hard to shake. Why you wouldn't accept a heart transplant from a death row inmate. So the question is why are these patterns so persistent and what do they reveal about the human brain. So today we're going to examine what happens when our ancient circuitry collides with the modern world and why, even in an age of satellites and particle accelerators, the supernatural never really goes away. So
here's my conversation with Bruce Hood. Okay, so, Bruce, you've been intrigued by supernatural thinking. People often believe things that defy rationality. So let's start with some examples of.
That, so familiar ones of ghosts and spirits, which form the basis of a lot of storytelling in our culture. But I'm also interested in the more obscure things, like the rituals that people often engage in. That they might have special things that they do sports rituals I think are fascinating, that people have to touch certain things or
wear certain clothes. And then there are more obscure things like this sense of being stared at most people think they can tell where they're being watched, and that's an interesting one because that doesn't sound supernatural to a lot of people. But when you consider it from a scientific perspective, then it's not really easy to understand how that could
be done by any natural process. So really it's all those sorts of things which, in the cold light a day and you look at them through the scrutiny of a scientific lens don't stand up.
So anything like that is in the category.
And when you look at things like that, you realize, wow, this actually cuts across cultures and as far as we can tell, across time as well. Right, everybody seems to do this, Yes.
And that's exactly one of the interesting things which suggests it might be universal. Whenever you find aspects of human behavior in different cultures that strongly suggests that it might be something to do with our biology, rather than being entirely culturally specific. There are, of course very specific cultural supernatural beliefs, but if you look at them more closely, you can see that they're very often based on the
very same premise. So for example, life after death, souls and spirits and ghosts, you'll find it just about every culture.
And so you categorize this under the umbrella term supersense. So give us give us understanding of what this means.
Well, the super sense term, it was really the almost appealing to the intuitive nature, that these things seem like they're something you can detect, or that they feel real. I mean, this is the important point for many people when you ask them, why do you believe in these things? They say, well, I've had experience of it, or I've had that sense of being watched, or I've sensed the presence of people in houses or ghosts or whatever, that
uncanny kind of sense of reality. And so I wanted to capture the supernatural term, but also a sense in which these things feel correct, because ultimately in the book, I argue that they really all really come from an intuitive way of thinking, as we have as children.
And so this supernatural thinking, you argue that this is rooted in our deep mental architecture.
So for me, supernatural phenomenon include anything like energies, forces, causes, entities, anything which people use to explain the experiences that they've had. So that also includes all the religious ones, but I'm also more interested in the ones which are not obviously derived from pure religion, and that includes everything else I mentioned earlier, like superstitious rituals and personal kind of you know,
our attachment to objects and sentiments, mentality. These are things which I find fascinating because I think they evoke the same sort of underlying mechanisms, and those mechanisms really come from a brain which evolved to make sense of the world, and you can see this operating in children. I began as a developmental psychologists, and so I've always been fascinated in the way that children makes sense of the world.
So we talk about them having intuitive theories, which are ways of understanding the world evoking causal mechanisms that are not taught formally, and that's the important point. These are things that children spontaneously come up with as their own
explanations for why the world is the way they are. So, for example, when it comes to making a distinction between living and non living things, they spontaneously think there must be some sort of energy or life force in a living thing which gives it sort of autonomy and self propelled motions, as opposed to more inert things like.
Objects and wooden blocks and stuff like that.
So Jiennal already starting to draw a distinction between the biological and non biological in the way that they think about that. And once they've made that distinction, they then also start to evoke the notions of intentionality. They start to infirm minds having causes for making things do the things they do. And that's the beginnings of mind body dualism, which is a philosophical position, and that I think is also the basis for a lot of beliefs in.
The body and mind being separate.
And if that's the case, then well, once the body's gone, maybe the mind continues to exists, and therefore you have the basis of spirit, souls, and ghosts and the afterlife. So in kind of understanding the world around them, children are evoking the kind of causal mechanisms or intuitive theories which lay the foundation for what can become adult supernatural beliefs.
And I think that's the way that religions actually are working, is that they kind of operate or their successful because they tap into what our inclinations about what could be possible, ghosts, life after death, and so on.
So the idea is you think, look, here's a living object, but there's a mental state that's different. And so when Grandma passes away, she still exists even though her body is buried. Right, this is what dualism means. We have the mental and the physical being separate, whereas the view
of modern neuroscience is that these things are linked. The reason that's the view of modern neuroscience is because anytime a person gets damage to the brain let's say, stroke, at tumor traumatic brain injury, things like that, we see very specific changes in who they are based on what's happened with the brain.
As Pinker put it very aptly, said, the mind is what the brain does. So it's a sort of I hate the analogies of software and hardware, but yeah, the mind is the operating system in many ways. And your science, as you say, tells us that if you damage or disease the brain or drug it, I'll change the concepts of the content of the mind. But the general point is that most people would assume that the mind is separate to the body, but neuroscientists tend to sort of
be more materialistic about that process. But let's just assume that you've gone for the mind being separate from the body. Then once the body's gone, then if you don't see it as being tethered to the body. Then that allows for a whole lot of beliefs. So it could be things like astral planing, you know, leaving your body and traveling around the world, or projection, all the sorts of things that people readily acknowledge or identify with as being
phenomena that they think they've experienced. So there's a whole lot of you know, there are a lot of natural phenomena that people reinterpret us supernatural. It's not to say that these things couldn't possibly happen. I mean, for example, take telepathy. Telepathy in its current state, we would argue, well, being able to read someone's mind without technology would be
a supernatural ability. But you know, you've worked with human interfaces, it won't be long before you can actually start to read the output of the brain, and maybe that could be transmitted to another person and effect you could read minds at a distance. So it's not impossible, but at the moment it's just not as improbable given our current understanding of the technology and our scientific theories.
Okay, so we just cover an intuitive dualism, this idea that mind and body are separate. What else is bearing in our cognitive architecture such that that leads to supernatural beliefs.
Okay, so my favorite is essentialism. This is something that I've I continue to think about. It's something that I've done research upon. Essentialism is that once you form an emotional attachment to an item, you essentialize it. And that can be you know, it can be an object, it can be a possession, that can be another person even But the point is essentialism is evoking a core identity sort of if you like, a metaphysical property to a physical entity that gives it its unique identity.
So give us an example. Just everyone understands what centialism is.
Okay.
One of my daughters formed a very emotional attachment to a her blanket as she calls it, and I've heard it's not uncommon. About two thirds of children in the West form a strong emotional attachment to a teddy bear or a blanket. Now, what starts off, I think is a simple sensory support thing that helps them to get off of sleep at night and add some sort of security if you like this, sometimes called security blankets.
These objects soon.
Become irreplaceable and they're anthropomorphized. In other words, children treat them as if they are entities which have thoughts and feelings and get lonely. We did an experiment that children who had attachment objects mentalized them. They thought that they had mental states, and what makes them essentialize is that
they're irreplaceable. So we did other experiments with Paul Bloom, the psychologists, where we create this illusion where we could duplicate any object, a toy or a blanket or anything, and we asked the children whether or not.
They were different or not.
And children were very happy for any object, any of their favorite toys, to be duplicated. But once you offered the opportunity to put their blanket, their unique sentimental object, into a machine which appears to duplicate it, they were really distressed by that. And I think that speaks to the idea that they didn't like the idea that you could somehow, you know, copy something which is authentic, and
that is actually a behavior which manifests in adults. When you think about the value that we placed on authentic objects and.
Works of art.
A work of art is valuable by its providence, by its authenticity, by its origins. And if you had two identical works of art that you couldn't tell the difference between That would be really difficult for someone who really has an emotional attachment to the original. So I think it's a connection between are processing about objects and identity and this emotional tag that we add to it, like this internal metaphysical property which makes it unique and irreplaceable.
So give us you've got a great example about a cardigan sweater. Give us that example.
So I think one of the best demonstrations, if you like, of central reasoning is the contagion effect. So if I was to offer you a cardigan sweater and say, David, would you put this on for twenty dollars, you probably say, yeah, sure, twenty dollars, I'll put it on, depending how how much you need the twenty dollars. If I then say it to you, well, would you still put this cardigan on if you knew it belonged to Jeffrey Dahmer or Fred
West or whatever cereal curry you can think of? And then immediately people feel a revulsion and repugnance, a kind of sense of disgust and the idea of coming into physical contact with a cardigan as if it somehow contains the essence of the former murderer. So I think that's a fascinating demonstration that people evoke all sorts of ideas or metaphysical notions about E manifesting or contaminating the physical world.
Now it turns out, of course, whenever I've done this, it's not a real it's not really it doesn't really belong to Jeffrey Dahmer, Fred West. But the mere mention of that is enough to make people feel disgusted. So you might say, oh, well, that's just simple association. As soon as you say the names of famous serial killers, of course people are going to feel revolted and disgusted.
But I think it's a really interesting counter example. So for example, if I say would you hold a book, and I give you a book, a cookery book, for example, you say, no problem with that cookery book. I said, what have you discovered that actually this was the personal possession of Aldolf Hitler out of Hitler's cookery book. Then people would go, well, that's rather disgusting, that's murder billy. You don't want to have anything to do with that. So it could be you could argue, well, maybe that's
because you've used the word of out of Hitler. But if I was to offer you a biography of out of Hitler, then you wouldn't feel the same discuss it's the personal contact that this supposed book has had which triggers this kind of intuitive notion of essentialism. And that's what I find very fascinating because it explains a lot
of our attitudes to contamination. It explains a lot of explains a lot of prejudices about not coming into contact with peoples are maintaining a certain distances is what they do in traditional Indian societies with the cast system. There's a notion in which people do not want to come into physical contact, and I think that's because of a kind of naive biological theory or germ theory that they think is operating.
So we talked about dualism and we talked about essentialism. In your book, you had one more pillar upon which supernatural thinking lies.
Causal reasoning might be one of the issues, which is theological that people think things happen for a purpose, so they evoke causal mechanisms, were causal determinists, so we can't easily see randomness. In fact, the brain is not set up for this. You'll know this is neuroscientist that we invariably impose structure and order everywhere. So this explains why people see patterns all the time and they infer causality.
And you know, if they have a dream about somebody dying and by chance the person does die, they think that's a prophecy.
And so people.
Immediately see all the coincidences as being auspicious, when in fact we're surrounded in the sea of random chance and coincidence, but we only ever notice the ones which seem to be sort of important or poignant, and this leads us to draw all sorts of sort of causal mechanisms about how we can predict the future and so on. So that's another example of a mechanism which is very common.
We can't help but see structure.
In order, and that's a good thing because that's one of the ways that we make inferences in the world when we see causality.
So give us an example of the kind of supernatural thinking that we see coming out of that.
So one of the most common forms of that behavior is in sports rituals. So for example, let's say you go into the you know, to the tennis court, and you have a particularly great day so you start to say, what did I do differently? And I say, oh, I was wearing that pair of socks, and you decide to put them on the next sit. You don't normally wear that pair of socks, so you're trying to make sense of what happened, and you put them on another day and guess what, you have another good day at tennis.
And soon, very quickly that becomes a ritual and it becomes shaped by operating conditioning. This is from psychology, so we know that you know animals and humans, their behavior becomes shaped by reinforcement, and soon that becomes part of your ritual. And what's interesting is that actually it does work in some sense because it gives you a sense
of control. If you think about it. A lot of the rituals that we have are often to do with very important life events like birth's, deaths, starting a new business, all the sorts of major transitions in life. We want to try and control them, and that's why we have all these additional rituals to provide a sense of control
over that. So, yeah, even though it may start off as a spontaneous kind of quirk, it soon becomes part of the whole habit preparing for that match, and that might prepare or give the player as the confidence.
Something that's so fascinating is that it's so difficult to shake this kind of intuitive reasoning that we do about the world, even among philosophers or scientists. This is with us. So as an example, I'm sure you know this question about the Star Trek transporter, which is, if I were to step into the Star Trek transporter and it degrades me, it pulls me apart adam by adam, and reconstructs me on the surface of the planet.
Is that me?
Because it's just a bunch of atoms that were put together on the surface of the planet. So did I die and someone else came about? And then there's a second version of this transporter philosophical question, which is, what if the transporter breaks me down into all my atoms and then shoots those atoms themselves over to the planet
and then it's reconstructed. And people often feel better about the second scenario because it seems like, Okay, well, they're my atoms and you're just putting them back together like a jigsaw puzzle. So this is an issue of both the essentialism and the dualism. But this proves really hard for us to shake these sorts of cognitive architectures that we've grown up on.
Yeah, yeah, I love that example of the transporter. It builds.
It's actually a modern version of the Ship of Theseus, which was the parable or the story of the King of Greece. When he died, they put a ship into storage, and the shipwrights went back to look at it each year, and they noticed that some of the planks need replacing, so they eventually they replace the planks to the extent eventually none of the original wood is left on show. So the question is is it still the ship of Theseus?
And if that transition happens gradually, people think, oh, yeah, it's just like you're just renovating or repairing a ship. But it's still the ship of Thesius, even though it doesn't contain any of the original material. And then you say, okay, let's assume they never threw that wood away, are you. Now they re construct a second ship, which is the
Ship of Thesis. And this really throws people because identity and unique attachment that we have to thinks that we care about evoke this essential notion and it is a kind of metaphysical property.
And by the way, what I've read, I don't know how to verify this, but what I read is that about half of the philosophers in Athens at the time felt that this was the original ship and half felt that it was not. So this is great. Yeah, it's been a problem for a long time.
Yeah. Well, I was just going to add there was another famous philosoph, Well he's not that famous, but his name was dun Scottis, and that's where we get the word dunce from Dune. Scottis was a medieval philosopher, and he made the distinction between essences of a group and essences for the individual. So what we've been talking about is what he would call haseity, which is the unique essence which specifies a unique individual. But we also essentialize groups,
and this is how you get prejudiced. So you say they're all alike or they've all got something like that, and that's that's quidity. So within essentialism literature, there are two distinctions. The essence of the group defines the membership of that group, and then the unique individual, which is the hasty. So all dogs have quidity because their dogginess but your Fido, your pet dog, has his own sort
of hasity. So it's an interesting distinction to draw. But of course hasity and quidity are metaphysical, they're complete concept their conceptual. We just invoke them when we're categorizing and drawing distinctions between groups and individuals and unique ones.
It sounds like he was a thoughtful person. Why did the word dunce come from his name.
Because they thought he was just because it was he was basically criticizing Plato. Plato was very much from the sort of you know, the group identities really, so they were I remember what was going on at the time, but that's the origin of the word does. But it was a whole the phosophers, you know what they're like. There was arguing about these sorts of things. But the point is that, and I always like to just mention this, David.
I always go back to the Lord of the flies, The Lord of the flies, you know, the William Golding story.
Of course, of these sort of kids.
Abandoned on an island, and people ask me, well, you know, are we teaching our kids all these belief systems? And I say, well, just imagine a real Lord of the fly scenario. Where you drop a bunch of kids on an island and you give them no culture, what would
they do? And I would argue that they would spontaneously generate the gods and the demons and the spirits and all the sorts of things that we find in today's culture, because that's how we make sense of the world, and it's how we understand it, interpret it, and try and gain a sense of control. So I think it's actually part of the natural condition of the human mind to generate all these extra you know, accounts and explanations.
And what's your take about where we are right now with artificial intelligence coming into its own and soon humanoid robotics everywhere in terms of our desire to anthromorphize.
Well, athropromorphism is of course, again something that children will spontaneously do. It's in our nature to kind of treat things as intentional agents and see them as purposeful. The late flosser Dan Dennett use the term the intentional stance, and he argued that when you infer intentionality is an easy way to interact with a complex system because you can see is goal directed, and all you have to try and do is figure out what its goals are.
I think AI is going to play into that. So I think we've got a new generation of people growing up more familiar with the technology, and AI and the large language models, as everyone's discovering, are incredibly good at simulating human thought and human actions. So I think it will be an interesting future with our interactions with these things.
I would imagine that there might be a premium for having real human interaction, and maybe I don't know, as the technology gets more indistinguishable from real humans, that might present a real problem to our natural tendency to try and identify with who we're speaking with.
So I think it will upset a lot of people.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I just did an episode with our friend Alison Gopnik about her view with some of her colleagues is that we should be looking at these large language models as a cultural technology, essentially like a library, a way of collecting lots of information and disseminating in different ways. But it's precisely because we're so prone to anthromorphizing that we can't help but assume it is an intelligent agent and treat it like a human.
Well, the interesting thing is, you probably remember The first chat bought was Eliza, which was building back in nineteen sixty seven, which was basically a low project to try and stimulate Raggierian therapy where you just repeat the question back. And what they found was even though the people working on it in you it was actually a piece of software, they nevertheless enjoyed interacting with it because it actually felt therapeutic to talk to them to a program.
So, yeah, we are.
We're very biased towards nthropomorphism, and I think we can easily be fooled and seduced by it.
Yeah, and you know, there's one more piece of that that I'm just working on this now. But I'm even trying to figure out how to phrase this. But I recently wrote a substack article about AI bots that engage in debate online and whether they can change the other person's mind, And the answer is they're quite good. They're much better at humans than changing the other person's mind.
In part this is because they argue genuinely and they don't insult, and they try to be empathic and so on, and so they actually have better debating skills because of that. There's an interesting question that came up, which is can we even use the term lying. So let's say the AI bought pretends to be a black man arguing for something.
The question is is it lying. Well, it's not lying anymore than if it pretended to be a white man or any person, because it's been trained on the entirety of humankind and so we can't even use words like it's lying. Instead, it's just representing one facet of what it is.
Well, of course lying, yeah, I guess. I mean what we're doing when we're interacting with humans and interacting with machines as we're inferring different levels of intentionality.
So a machine is.
Of just a very complex set of algorithms and data. It doesn't have intentionality as such, whereas when you're interacting with another sentient human then there's a whole set of other factors that we're entering into. What is this is a SoCal theory of mind that we evoke, which is one of their goals?
What do they want?
And you know, with good cause we have reasons to be sort of suspicious. Now, we can't be suspicious of technology, but it's only as a proxy of someone who programmed it, but not suspicious of the machine per se. Or whatever the interface you're dealing with. So I guess what I'm saying is that when you interact with what is another sentient human, then I think we're much more Our guard is up a lot, although we do tend, of course
to trust humans more than we trust machines. So I suppose I'm kind of contradicting that to some extent, but I can see how the inference of intentionality is an important premise upon which to kind of make a judgment about whether lying is taking place.
That was my interview with psychologist Bruce Hood, and we talked about why humans, all humans and all cultures in all times hold irrational beliefs. We talked about dualism and essentialism and our brains need to assign structure in order to things that are actually random. The lesson that emerges is that supernatural thinking is something that's not just restricted to superstitious people, but instead it reflects a central feature
of how the human mind works. If you are a regular listener to this podcast, you've heard me talk about how the brain is locked in silence and darkness inside the skull, and its job is to make sense of the thin, little trickle of input that it's receiving. It's all about meaning making. Our brains are shaped by millions of years of evolution, and they aren't just passively recording the world. They interpret, they infer, they guess, they imbue
the world with meaning. So what Bruce terms supersense is the whole system working as it is supposed to. These cognitive habits presumably helped our ancestors survive in a world full of uncertainty. It is better to assume that there's a predator lurking behind the bush and to be wrong,
than to assume you are safe when you're not. And just note that the reflex to avoid a murderer's sweater, or the feeling that someone's watching you, or the instinct to believe in fate or signs or karmic retribution, these don't happen because your parents taught them to you. They emerge naturally from the architecture of the mind. These are the shadows cast by a brain wired to detect threats and connections, to build invisible bridges between cause and effect.
Sometimes the wiring overshoots, and we see patterns where there aren't any We feel intention where there's only randomness. We imagine essences and objects. We look at some visible event and imagine invisible forces behind us. Now, that leads to strange behaviors and beliefs sometimes, but from the brain's point of view, that instinct is also what allows us to empathize, to believe in justice, to tell stories, to imagine better worlds.
In other words, the same circuitry that gives rise to magical thinking is what allows us to wonder, to hope, to hypothesize invisible forces like gravity, to fall in love with things that don't technically exist, like nations or ideals, or the person that someone might become. So it's hard to say we'd be better off without it. Sometimes we
need beliefs. So even as science offers better explanations for the world, like this disease was caused by germs instead of a shaman's curse, we're still going to find ourselves drawn to the invisible. Our brains are all we have to view the world through. We are human, and we're flawed, and even skeptical people still whisper wishes into birthday candles and still say something to their passed away loved ones
and quiet moments. So one lesson that emerges from Bruce's work, I think isn't only about suppressing these impulses, but more deeply understanding them. To see the brain as an engine that generates meaning, one that sometimes creates ghosts and gods and other times creates music and literature and political ideas. In the end, we're all navigating a world way too vast and complex for us to fully understand. So your brain does what it can. It connects dots in the dark,
it tells stories. So tonight, when you're lying in bed and you hear a creak in the floorboards and you think you feel the weight of someone's presence even though you're alone, pay attention. That's your brain humming its old tune, the tune that kept your ancestors alive, and that allows you to extrapolate ideas about what could be. Go to eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading. Check out my newsletter on substack and
be a part of the online chats there. You can watch the videos of Inner Cosmos on YouTube, where you can leave comments. Until next time, I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.