The Unpersuadables Quotes

“We typically have a bias that tells us we are less susceptible to bias than everyone else.”
― Will Storr, The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

“By the time you have reached adulthood, your brain has decided how the world works–how a table looks and feels, how liquids and authority figures behave, how scary are rats. It has made countless billions of little insights and decisions. It has made its mind up. From then on in, its treatment of any new information that runs counter to those views can sometimes be brutal. Your brain is surprisingly reluctant to change its mind. Rather than going through the difficulties involved in rearranging itself to reflect the truth, it often prefers to fool you. So it distorts. It forgets. It projects. It lies.”
― Will Storr, The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

“I know that I am not right about everything, and yet I am simultaneously convinced that I am. I believe these two things completely, and yet they are in catastrophic logical opposition to each other.”
― Will Storr, The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

“Intelligence is no protection against strange beliefs.”
― Will Storr, The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

“Exposure to a mixed body of evidence made both sides even more convinced of the fundamental soundness of their original beliefs.' Confirmation bias is profoundly human and it is appalling. When new information leads to an increase in ignorance, it is the opposite of learning, the death of wisdom.”
― Will Storr, The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

“It might weigh little over a kilogram but, taken on its own scale, the brain is unimaginably vast. One cubic millimetre contains between twenty and twenty-five thousand neurons. It has eighty-six billion of these cells, and each one is complex as a city and is in contact with ten thousand other neurons just like it. Within just one cubic centimetre of brain tissue, there is the same number of connections as there are stars in the Milky Way. Your brain contains a hundred trillion of them. Information in the form of electricity and chemicals flows around these paths in great forking trails and in circuits and feedback loops and fantastical storms of activity tat bloom to life speeds of up to a hundred and twenty metres per second. According to the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, 'The number of permutations and combinations of activity that are theoretically possible exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.' And yet, he continues, 'We know so little about it that even a child's questions should be seriously entertained.”
― Will Storr, The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

“we go through our social lives convinced that everything we are saying, doing and feeling is being closely examined by those around us even though, in reality, they are all preoccupied with themselves, equally convinced the spotlight is on them.”
― Will Storr, The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

“Haven’t we all done this? Hardened a particular position, not as a response to superior information, but because of anger?”
― Will Storr, The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

“But once more, here I am - confronted with the counter-intuitive notion that intelligence is no protection against strange beliefs.”
― Will Storr, The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

“People say, “I wouldn’t have done that.” But they haven’t been exposed to any of the things, culturally, that might have made them do it. And the warning I take is that the number of people in a group who will stand out against these cultural forces are much smaller than you think, and you’re probably not one of them. In fact, I think you can probably tell if you are because you’re pretty bolshie already. If you’ve got a good career, and you’re pretty sociable and you’re going up the hierarchy and all the rest of it, where are you going to get your sudden revolutionary spurt from?”
― Will Storr, The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

“When we behave badly, it is usually because we were put in an unhappy situation. Circumstance has conspired against us. Really, I had no choice. When others do wrong, it is because of their character flaws.”
― Will Storr, The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

“Our beliefs and tastes are much more than they are. They signal to distances that lie far beyond their own limits. They are markers, signs that display the culture and moral structure that we have adopted for ourselves to live within. They are chapter titles in our story about the world.”
― Will Storr, The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

“We love to judge others. We love to categorise. We love to divide. We are the good guys, they are the bad guys. We the hero, they the demon. Why? Because it fits the model. It bolsters the ego. It makes us happy. It has even been demonstrated that depressed people, with their dysfunctionally gloomy predictions about themselves and the world, are more accurate in their outlook than the mentally ‘healthy’. The world, and your life within it, is far bleaker than you have been led to believe.”
― Will Storr, The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

“First and foremost, health and safety,’ she said. ‘If a UFO lands, you must wait until it’s stopped completely before approaching. Only invite the ETs to come closer if it is absolutely safe to do so. If anyone gets zapped, the first-aid kit is in the back of my tent.”
― Will Storr, The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

“Whenever and whatever happened to alter the boy's view of the world so radically, from the moment that it happened, Mackay's story becomes one of subservience to the contrary will within him that he calls God.”
― Will Storr, The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

“the only thing necessary to trigger tribal behaviour in humans is the creation of two completely arbitrary groups. Leave them alone in a room and watch it all begin:”
― Will Storr, The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science