OCTOBER 8, 2008
The new uncertainty principle
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Robert Burton is a neurologist (and novelist) who marshals scientific and psychological arguments and concludes that our strongest convictions can arise just as readily from prelogical processes as from rational thought. Alarmingly, Burton also suggests that our sense of certainty attaches as readily and firmly to false ideas as to true ones — and feels precisely the same whether we’re dead right or totally wrong.
That’s not to give certainty an altogether bad name. According to Burton, confidence in the unproven arises from the neurobiological reward systems our ancestors developed in order to be able to act decisively on the basis of abstractions and ambiguous information. When cavemen began relying on ideas — e.g., how to kill a woolly mammoth — their brains learned to have faith in thoughts and memories. Nowadays, the same reward systems provide us with the feelings of intellectual confidence needed to test certain hypotheses: whether light can bend (Crazy!), or a doomed marriage can work (Sure!). “Say hello,” Burton writes, “to abstract thought’s subliminal cheerleader.”
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On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not (St. Martin’s Press; hardcover; 272 pages)
Robert Burton’s website
