More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
As part of human culture, we are so immersed in storytelling that it is easy to assume that all beliefs come from other people telling us what to think.
Francis Bacon said, we prefer to believe what we prefer to be true.
supernatural beliefs are a product of natural thinking.
Communicating and sharing ideas with others expands your knowledge so that you don’t have to discover everything by yourself.
What we do naturally and spontaneously at the most basic level is look constantly for patterns, imagining hidden forces and causes. Even the way we see the world is organized by brain mechanisms looking for patterns.
Our brain has its natural rhythms that it likes to settle into.
Rituals produce a sense of control, or at least the belief that we have control even when we don’t.
some researchers even question whether there is such a thing as conscious willful control.
Giving gifts, exchanging objects, owning possessions, and making pilgrimages are all examples of our need to make physical contact with
others.
There was culture in the caves.
In fact, we love to learn about things we cannot experience ourselves.
Children make judgments based on their past experiences.
The contrast effect of storytelling has been demonstrated experimentally by showing that the bizarre is best remembered in the context of a normal story line.
We all typically overestimate how much we understand, and this is especially true of Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
Every culture has a creation story because humans are naturally inclined to understand the world in terms of patterns, purpose, and causality.
Everything you know must be learned.
you need to be born with some form of mind design.
Early ideas may never be truly abandoned.
A child who has an idea thinks that others also share the same idea.
As Homo psychologicus, our social nature depends on our ability to be mind-readers.
Aware that appearances can be deceptive, he proposed that the world we experience is only a shadow of true reality.
This is because lovers want to achieve both a spiritual and physical union.
This is because education can have little impact on traditional belief systems.
Staring is not a passive act but an active event that affects us emotionally.
If we are being watched, we generally conform to social rules.
altering the brain alters reality.
The tendency to seek and perceive patterns where the rest of us see nothing may be part of the creative process.
Rationality and supernatural beliefs can coexist in the same individual.
it’s something that is easily triggered in most of us.
We can all entertain weird and wonderful beliefs about the world.
are they any benefits of the supersense?
fellow man did not share these sacred values, we would not trust them and we could not love them.
