The Idiot Brain: A Neuroscientist Explains What Your Head is Really Up To

by Dean Burnett

Science is the work of humans. By and large, humans are messy, chaotic and illogical creatures (due largely to the workings of the human brain) and much of science reflects this. Someone decided long ago that science writing should always be lofty and serious, and this notion seems to have stuck. Most of my professional life has been dedicated to challenging it, and this book is the latest expression of that.

The brain apparently thinks logic is a precious resource to be used only sparingly.

It’s common for readers, seeing any article critical of their existing views or beliefs, to immediately conclude it’s the work of a sinister power hell-bent on suppression, rather than a prematurely balding bloke sitting on a sofa in Cardiff.

Of course, you could be both @garwboy

Maybe the brain’s opposition to anything random is just a chance mutation that proved useful. That would be a cruel irony, if nothing else.

Being intelligent isn’t like being strong; a strong person is strong in every context. However, someone brilliant in one context can seem like a shuddering dunce in another.

These two traits, impostor syndrome in intelligent people and illogical self-confidence in less intelligent people, regularly overlap in unhelpful ways. Modern public debate is disastrously skewed due to this. Important issues such as vaccination or climate change are invariably dominated by the impassioned rantings of those who have uninformed personal opinions rather than the calmer explanations of the trained experts, and it’s all thanks to a few quirks of the brain’s workings.

But as counterintuitive as it may seem, the smarter a person is, the greater the odds of them being less confident in their views, and the less confident they come across as being, the less they’re trusted. Democracy, everyone.

The phenomenon of less-intelligent people being more confident has an actual scientific name: the Dunning–Kruger effect.