Robert Burton, author of On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not (2009), has a new book, A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves, and he recently spoke about the book at Google.

As a bonus, you can also catch his discussion of his previous book, On Being Certain, at Authors at Google, June 9, 2008 [see below].

Robert Burton: "A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind", Talks at Google

Published on Jul 15, 2013

Despite 2500 years of contemplation by the world's greatest minds and the more recent phenomenal advances in basic neuroscience, neither neuroscientists nor philosophers have a decent understanding of what the mind is or how it works. Nevertheless, with powerful new tools such as the fMRI scan, neuroscience has become the de facto mode of explanation of behavior.

In A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind, Robert Burton brings together clinical observations, practical thought experiments, personal anecdotes, and cutting-edge neuroscience to decipher what neuroscience can tell us about ourselves-- and where it falls woefully short. At the same time, he offers a new vision of how to think about what the mind might be and how it works.

A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind is a critical, startling, and expansive journey into the mysteries of the brain and what makes us human.

About the Author: 

Robert Burton, M.D. graduated from Yale University and University of California at San Francisco medical school, where he also completed his neurology residency. At age 33, he was appointed chief of the Division of Neurology at Mt. Zion-UCSF Hospital, where he subsequently became Associate Chief of the Department of Neurosciences. His non-neurology writing career includes three critically acclaimed novels and On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not. He lives in Sausalito, California.

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Authors@Google: Robert Burton - On Being Certain

Uploaded on Jun 11, 2008

Dr. Robert Burton visits Google's Mountain View, CA headquarters to discuss his book "On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not." This event took place on June 9, 2008, as part of the Authors@Google series.

In On Being Certain, neurologist Robert Burton challenges the notions of how we think about what we know. He shows that the feeling of certainty we have when we "know" something comes from sources beyond our control and knowledge. In fact, certainty is a mental sensation, rather than evidence of fact. Because this "feeling of knowing" seems like confirmation of knowledge, we tend to think of it as a product of reason. But an increasing body of evidence suggests that feelings such as certainty stem from primitive areas of the brain, and are independent of active, conscious reflection and reasoning. The feeling of knowing happens to us; we cannot make it happen.

Robert Burton, M.D. graduated from Yale University and University of California at San Francisco medical school, where he also completed his neurology residency. At age 33, he was appointed chief of the Division of Neurology at Mt. Zion-UCSF Hospital, where he subsequently became Associate Chief of the Department of Neurosciences. His non-neurology writing career includes three critically acclaimed novels. He lives in Sausalito, California. Visit his website at http://www.rburton.com.

Robert Burton's "Skeptic's Guide to the Mind" (Brain Science Podcast 96)

This week's episode of Dr. Ginger Campbel's Brain Science Podcast features a conversation with Robert Burton, author of On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not (2008) and his new book, the topic of this discussion, A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves (2013).

Book description:

What if our soundest, most reasonable judgments are beyond our control?

Despite 2500 years of contemplation by the world’s greatest minds and the more recent phenomenal advances in basic neuroscience, neither neuroscientists nor philosophers have a decent understanding of what the mind is or how it works. The gap between what the brain does and the mind experiences remains uncharted territory. Nevertheless, with powerful new tools such as the fMRI scan, neuroscience has become the de facto mode of explanation of behavior. Neuroscientists tell us why we prefer Coke to Pepsi, and the media trumpets headlines such as “Possible site of free will found in brain.” Or: “Bad behavior down to genes, not poor parenting.”

Robert Burton believes that while some neuroscience observations are real advances, others are overreaching, unwarranted, wrong-headed, self-serving, or just plain ridiculous, and often with the potential for catastrophic personal and social consequences. In A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind, he brings together clinical observations, practical thought experiments, personal anecdotes, and cutting-edge neuroscience to decipher what neuroscience can tell us – and where it falls woefully short. At the same time, he offers a new vision of how to think about what the mind might be and how it works.

A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind is a critical, startling, and expansive journey into the mysteries of the brain and what makes us human.

Enjoy the podcast.

Robert Burton's "Skeptic's Guide to the Mind" (BSP 96)April 26, 2013

ROBERT BURTON, MD

In On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not Robert Burton showed that the feeling of certainty, which is something we all experience, has its origin in brain processes that are both unconscious and inaccessible to consciousness. Now in his new book A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves he extends these ideas to other mental sensations such as our feeling of agency and our sense of causation. The idea that much of what our brain does is not accessible to our conscious awareness is NOT new, but Dr. Burton considers the implications for our understanding of the MIND.

When we talked recently (BSP 96) Dr. Burton explained that his new book has two many parts. The early chapters he extends the principles he developed in On Being Certain to other mental sensations. We tend to take things like our feeling of certainty, agency, and causation for granted, but he points out that these are generated in parts of the brain that we can neither access or control. What makes A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind stand out is that Burton then explores the implications of this reality. He argues that while we can become ever more knowledgeable about how our brain works the MIND, which is something that we each experience subjectively, is much more illusive.

The fact that we are trying to study the MIND with the MIND has inherent limitations and I think that Dr. Burton is right when he says our response should be HUMILITY.

Download BSP 96 (mp3)

Free Episode Transcript (Coming Soon)

 

References:

• A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves by Robert Burton 
• On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not (2008) by Robert Burton 
• Are You Sure? The Unconscious Origins of Certainty by Ginger Campbell 
• An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume (1748) 
• See the free episode transcript for additional links and references. 

Related Episodes:

• BSP 42: A discussion of On Being Certain 
• BSP 43: Interview with Robert Burton about On Being Certain 
• BSP 67: Interview with Thomas Metzinger, author of The Ego Tunnel 
• BSP 85: Interview with Sebastian Seung, author of Connectome.

Here Be Dragons: An Introduction to Critical Thinking

It seems sometimes, okay often, that critical thinking skills are nearly obsolete in this culture. People seem to generally accept whatever they hear without any willingness, desire, or ability to examine its validity. This free little documentary looks at how this works with pseudoscience and "woo woo" stuff in the media - it's decidedly skeptic in its perspective.

Here Be Dragons

Here Be Dragons is a video introduction to critical thinking. Most people fully accept paranormal and pseudoscientific claims without critique as they are promoted by the mass media.

Here Be Dragons offers a toolbox for recognizing and understanding the dangers of pseudoscience, and appreciation for the reality-based benefits offered by real science.

Here Be Dragons is written and presented by Brian Dunning, host and producer of the Skeptoid podcast, author of Skeptoid: Critical Analysis of Pop Phenomena, and Executive Producer of The Skeptologists.

Watch the full documentary now

Secular Buddhist Podcast - Episode 94 :: Sue Blackmore :: Skepticism, Meditation, and Consciousness

Friends have already shared this on Facebook - interesting discussion. For those who have not heard it, here it is. By the way, the Secular Buddhist Podcast is good stuff, so check out the site. If you go the page linked to in the title below, there are videos and a selection of Sue Blackmore's books.

Episode 94 :: Sue Blackmore :: Skepticism, Meditation, and Consciousness

Dec 9: The Secular Buddhist Podcast

Sue Blackmore

Professor Sue Blackmore joins us to speak about meditation, consciousness, and her move from belief in the paranormal to skepticism.

It is fairly well-known that I’m a skeptic. Not to be confused with a cynic, or a denier. As host of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast, Dr. Steven Novella of the New England Skeptical Society, has described:

“A skeptic is one who prefers beliefs and conclusions that are reliable and valid to ones that are comforting or convenient, and therefore rigorously and openly applies the methods of science and reason to all empirical claims, especially their own. A skeptic provisionally proportions acceptance of any claim to valid logic and a fair and thorough assessment of available evidence, and studies the pitfalls of human reason and the mechanisms of deception so as to avoid being deceived by others or themselves.”

Our experiences in meditation and other states of consciousness are worth studying. Beneficial, observable effects occur, but we sometimes get tripped up in the conclusions we draw about them, and the causes we think explain them. Skepticism provides us with a way to assess what we think may be happening, and learn. What we find may not be “comforting or convenient”, or even close to what we thought was happening, but our practice is about seeing things as they really are, not how we want them to be. With the cleansing of delusion, we have an opportunity to learn and grow on a stable foundation of knowledge.

My guest today is uniquely skilled and suited to this podcast, as I rarely get to speak with someone who is well known to both skeptics and meditators alike. Sue Blackmore is a freelance writer, lecturer and broadcaster, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Plymouth. She has a degree in psychology and physiology from Oxford University (1973) an MSc and a PhD in parapsychology from the University of Surrey (1980). Her research interests include memes, evolutionary theory, consciousness, and meditation. She practices Zen and campaigns for drug legalization. Sue Blackmore no longer works on the paranormal.

She writes for several magazines and newspapers, blogs for the Guardian newspaper and Psychology Today, and is a frequent contributor and presenter on radio and television. She is author of over sixty academic articles, about fifty book contributions, and many book reviews. Her books include Dying to Live (on near-death experiences, 1993), In Search of the Light (autobiography, 1996), Test Your Psychic Powers (with Adam Hart-Davis, 1997), The Meme Machine (1999), Conversations on Consciousness (2005), Zen and the Art of Consciousness (2011) and Consciousness: An Introduction (a textbook, new editions 2010 and 2011). Her work has been translated into more than 20 other languages.

So, sit back, relax, and have a nice Sumatra Black tea.

Podcast: Download

:: Discuss this episode ::

Columbia University Press Blog - An Interview with B. Alan Wallace

Cool - and thanks to the press for sending me a heads up that they had posted this. Here is a little taste of the interview, with is posted in support of this new book, Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic: A Manifesto for the Mind Sciences and Contemplative Practice, due out in the fall of next year.

November 9th, 2010 at 7:34 am

An Interview with B. Alan Wallace

The following is an interview with B. Alan Wallace, author of Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic: A Manifesto for the Mind Sciences and Contemplative Practice coming out Fall 2011.

In this interview Wallace reflects on some of the major ideas and themes that have informed his work. And for the time being, you can read some of his other works Mind in the Balance: Meditation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity, Hidden Dimensions: The Unification of Physics and Consciousness, Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge, and Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground.

Question: How does Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic differ from your previous books?

B. Alan Wallace: In this new book I synthesize many of the themes addressed in my earlier works, but I also focus more clearly on specific issues such as areas of confrontation and collaboration between Buddhism and science, the role of semantic information and meaning in the natural world, human nature, the question of free will, a Buddhist model of mental health, Buddhist methods of attentional training and contemplative inquiry, and the role of skepticism in Buddhism and how it may help break down ideological barriers that currently inhibit the scientific imagination. All too often, skepticism is applied only to others’ beliefs, but a central theme of Buddhism is that it is our own false beliefs and assumptions that lie at the root of our own unrest and discontent. So the primary focus of our skepticism should be inwardly directed, rather than aimed at other’s beliefs. My own encounter with Buddhism and science has helped me enormously in this regard, and I hope this book will likewise be of service to others in their open-minded pursuit of greater understanding.

Q: How did your background in science inform your experiences as a Buddhist monk?

BAW: My background in science traces back to my education when I was 13 years old and was deeply inspired by a science teacher to devote my life to the study of ecology and wildlife biology. This was my aim during my high school years and during the first two years of university education. Then at the age of 20, my interests turned more toward Buddhist philosophy and meditation, and a year later I left university and for the next 13 years devoted myself to the study and practice of Tibetan Buddhism, first in India and later in Europe and America. But the spirit of open-minded inquiry, skepticism of commonly accepted beliefs and assumptions, and the emphasis on experiential investigation—which are the great strengths of science at its best—has powerfully influenced my engagement with Buddhism. Here for the first time I found a spiritual tradition that welcomed such pragmatism, constructive skepticism, and empiricism. So this allowed me to unite my scientific interests and spiritual aspirations.

Q: How do you characterize your skepticism?

BAW: I aspire to the skepticism of the Buddha, who challenged many of the religious and philosophical assumptions of his era.

Read the whole interview.

Tags: Columbia University Press, Blog, Interview, B. Alan Wallace, Buddhism, books, Science, skeptics, Religion, physics, Buddha, Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic, Manifesto, Mind Sciences, Contemplative Practice, meditation, consciousness

Scientific American - Kool-Aid Psychology: Realism versus Optimism

There's much to like in the positive psychology movement, but its rejection of traditional therapeutic work is not one of them. I have had some serious issues with their whole ethos of focusing only on the positive, and I've mentioned that here before.

In this article, Michael Shermer (of The Skeptic) riffs on Barbara Ehrenreich's recent book that "systematically deconstructs—and then demolishes—what little science there is behind the positive-psychology movement and the allegedly salubrious effects of positive thinking." Here is the whole article.

Kool-Aid Psychology: Realism versus Optimism

How optimism trumped realism in the positive-psychology movement

By Michael Shermer

I am, by nature, an optimist. I almost always think things will turn out well, and even when they break I am confident that I can fix them. My optimism, however, has not always served me well. Twice I have been hit by cars while cycling—full-on, through-the-windshield impacts that were entirely the result of my blissful attitude that the street corners I had successfully negotiated hundreds of times before would not suddenly materialize an automobile in my path. Such high-impact, unpredictable and rare events are what author Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “black swans.” Given enough time, no upward sloping trend line is immune from dramatic collapse.

A bike crash as a black swan is, in fact, an apt metaphor for what the investigative journalist and natural-born skeptic Barbara Ehrenreich believes happened to America as a result of the positive-thinking movement. In her engaging and tightly reasoned book Bright-Sided (Metropolitan Books, 2009), she shows how the positive-psychology movement was born in the halcyon days of the 1990s when the economy was soaring, housing prices were skyrocketing, and positive-thinking gurus were cashing in on the motivation business. Academic psychologists, armed with a veneer of scientific jargon, wanted in on the action.

The shallow bafflegab of such positive-thinking pioneers as Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking, 1952) and Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich, 1937) or the “prosperity gospel” preachings of such contemporary “pastorpreneurs” as Frederick “Reverend Ike” Eikerenkoetter, Robert H. Schuller and Joel Osteen are predictably data-light and anecdote-heavy. But one expects better of respected experimental psychologists such as Martin E. P. Seligman, who almost single-handedly launched the positive-psychology movement in academia that is, according to the Positive Psychology Center Web page (www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu), “the scientific study of the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive.” Ehrenreich systematically deconstructs—and then demolishes—what little science there is behind the positive-psychology movement and the allegedly salubrious effects of positive thinking. Evidence is thin. Statistical significance levels are narrow. What few robust findings there are often prove to be either nonreplicable or contradicted by later research. And correlations (between, say, happiness and health) are not causations. Seligman and his colleagues drank the positive-thinking Kool-Aid, Ehrenreich shows, but she provides the antidote.

Take Seligman’s “happiness equation” (physics envy lives!): H = S + C + V (Happiness = your Set range + the Circumstances of your life + the factors under your Voluntary control). As Ehrenreich notes, “if you’re going to add these things up you will have to have the same units [of measurement] for H (happy thoughts per day?) as for V, S, and C.” When she confronted Seligman with this problem in an interview, “his face twisted into a scowl, and he told me that I didn’t understand ‘beta weighting’ and should go home and Google it.” She did, “finding that ‘beta weights’ are the coefficients of the ‘predictors’ in a regression equation used to find statistical correlations between variables. But Seligman had presented his formula as an ordinary equation, like E = mc2, not as an oversimplified regression analysis, leaving himself open to literal-minded questions like: How do we know H is a simple sum of the variables, rather than some more complicated relationship, possibly involving ‘second order’ effects such as ... C times V?” We don’t know, thereby rendering the equation nothing more than a slogan gussied up in math.

Isn’t positive thinking better than negative thinking? All other things being equal, sure, but the alternative to being either an optimist or a pessimist is to be a realist. “Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things ‘as they are,’ or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions,” Ehrenreich concludes. “What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings.”

Feelings matter, of course, but the first principle of skepticism is not to fool ourselves, and feelings—both positive and negative—too often trump reason. In the end, reality must take precedence over fantasy, regardless of how it makes us feel.

Tags: Psychology, therapy, culture, skeptics, Scientific American, Kool-Aid Psychology, Realism versus Optimism, positive psychology, Michael Shermer, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided

What Skepticism Reveals about Science - Michael Shermer

Michael Shermer is his usual entertaining self.

What Skepticism Reveals about Science

A skeptic's journey for truth in science

By Michael Shermer

In a 1997 episode of The Simpsons entitled “The Springfield Files”—a parody of X-Files in which Homer has an alien encounter in the woods (after imbibing 10 bottles of Red Tick Beer)—Leonard Nimoy voices the intro as he once did for his post-Spock run on the television mystery series In Search of...: “The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It’s all lies. But they’re entertaining lies, and in the end isn’t that the real truth? The answer is no.”

No cubed. The postmodernist belief in the relativism of truth, coupled to the clicker culture of mass media where attention spans are measured in New York minutes, leaves us with a bewildering array of truth claims packaged in infotainment units. It must be true—I saw it on television, at the movies, on the Internet. The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, That’s Incredible, The Sixth Sense, Poltergeist, Loose Change, Zeitgeist the Movie. Mysteries, magic, myths and monsters. The occult and the supernatural. Conspiracies and cabals. The face on Mars and aliens on Earth. Bigfoot and Loch Ness. ESP and PSI. UFOs and ETIs. JFK, RFK and MLK—alphabet conspiracies. Altered states and hypnotic regression. Remote viewing and astroprojection. Ouija boards and Tarot cards. Astrology and palm reading. Acupuncture and chiropractic. Repressed memories and false memories. Talking to the dead and listening to your inner child. Such claims are an obfuscating amalgam of theory and conjecture, reality and fantasy, nonfiction and science fiction. Cue dramatic music. Darken the backdrop. Cast a shaft of light across the host’s face. The truth is out there. I want to believe.

What I want to believe based on emotions and what I should believe based on evidence does not always coincide. And after 99 monthly columns of exploring such topics (this is Opus 100), I conclude that I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe but because I want to know. I believe that the truth is out there. But how can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true and what is actually true? The answer is science.

Science begins with the null hypothesis, which assumes that the claim under investigation is not true until demonstrated otherwise. The statistical standards of evidence needed to reject the null hypothesis are substantial. Ideally, in a controlled experiment, we would like to be 95 to 99 percent confident that the results were not caused by chance before we offer our provisional assent that the effect may be real. Failure to reject the null hypothesis does not make the claim false, and, conversely, rejecting the null hypothesis is not a warranty on truth. Nevertheless, the scientific method is the best tool ever devised to discriminate between true and false patterns, to distinguish between reality and fantasy, and to detect baloney.

The null hypothesis means that the burden of proof is on the person asserting a positive claim, not on the skeptics to disprove it. I once appeared on Larry King Live to discuss UFOs (a perennial favorite of his), along with a table full of UFOlogists. King’s questions for other skeptics and me typically miss this central tenet of science. It is not up to the skeptics to disprove UFOs. Although we cannot run a controlled experiment that would yield a statistical probability of rejecting (or not) the null hypothesis that aliens are not visiting Earth, proof would be simple: show us an alien spacecraft or an extraterrestrial body. Until then, keep searching and get back to us when you have something. Unfortunately for UFOlogists, scientists cannot accept as de­finitive proof of alien visitation such evidence as blurry photographs, grainy videos and anecdotes about spooky lights in the sky. Photographs and videos can be easily doctored, and lights in the sky have many prosaic explanations (aerial flares, lighted balloons, experimental aircraft, even Venus). Nor do government documents with redacted paragraphs count as evidence for ET contact, because we know that governments keep secrets for national security reasons. Terrestrial secrets do not equate to extra­terrestrial cover-ups.

Read the rest of the article.

Tags: Science, skeptics, What Skepticism Reveals about Science, Michael Shermer, Scientific American

Skepticism Is a Small Movement

New York Review of Magazines reviews the only two skepticism magazines in the US.

When I worked in the magazine distribution business, we carried and distributed both these magazines, alongside Sedona Journal, Mountain Astrologer, and a whole mess of other magazines that provide skeptics with much of their material. I always enjoyed that quality of my job.

Skeptic

Circulation: 54,000
Date of Birth: 1992
Frequency: Quarterly
Price: $6.95
Natural Habitat: To the left of your Mythbusters! DVD collection

Skeptical Inquirer

Circulation: 50,000
Date of Birth: 1976
Frequency: Bimonthly
Price: $4.95
Natural Habitat: To the right of your Mythbusters! DVD collection

By Callie Enlow

Come one, come all! Step right up and buyourmiracle snake oil!Communicate with the dearly departed!Teach your schoolchildrenIntelligent Design!

In a world where UFOs are sighted daily, where The Secret books and DVDs go platinum, and where reality television shows center on haunted houses, Skeptic and Skeptical Inquirer exist to bring us back to earth.

According to both publications, the skeptic is less a know-it-all bubble-burster than the Lone Ranger of reason battling against an onslaught of misinformation. Even Lone Rangers need some support, and modern skeptics find solace in two organizations: The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, which funds Skeptical Inquirer, and the Skeptics Society, which publishes Skeptic. Furtherance of science and the scientific method are the main goals of both groups; exposing hokum and phonies is just a perk. Members of both organizations—primarily doctors, journalists and scientists—contribute the bulk of the magazines’ features.

The two publications are the only magazines for skeptics in the country, and, given their small readerships, one wonders whether the movement might benefit from producing only one. Both Dr. Paul Kurtz, founder of The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and Dr. Michael Shermer, co-founder of The Skeptics Society (both are de facto publishers of their organizations’ respective magazines) seem skeptical of the idea, though neither criticized the other organization or publication. When asked about the necessity for two skeptic publications, Dr. Shermer replied, “There’s a market for it and plenty of articles to publish, topics to cover [and] controversies to investigate.” Dr. Kurtz said of Skeptic, “They do good work and we’re similar in many senses, but we have a much broader base,” pointing out that The Committee of Skeptical Inquiry has many international Centers of Inquiry.

Like two scientists racing to reach the same conclusion first, both Skeptic and Skeptical Inquirer state their claims in a similar way. The magazines mainly publish stories centered on scientific controversy; predictably they are sourced to the highest standard. Talking chimps? Bogus. The data collection was flawed, according to Dr. Clive Wynn’s assessment in Skeptic. The dating website eHarmony.com’s “scientific” romantic successes? Not so amazing if you consider the company’s unpublicized failure rate, says Skeptical Inquirer editor Benjamin Radford, in his monthly column.

Read the whole review.

Tags: Skepticism, Small Movement, Skeptic, Skeptical Inquirer, Dr. Paul Kurtz, Dr. Michael Shermer, The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, The Skeptics Society, New York Review of Magazines