How do people start believing in stuff?
My seven-year-old grandson Solomon recently said, ‘Grandpa, did you know that if you stare at a hummingbird for five minutes, it brings good luck?’
‘How do you know this?’ I asked.
‘I stared at a hummingbird for five minutes and after that my friend at school had something good happen to him. I forget what it was.’
‘Okay, I’ll try that sometime.’
Solomon had experienced one thing and observed something totally unrelated, put the two together and voila!, he believed that one had caused the other. This belief could stay with him a long time. Good thing something horrible hadn’t happened to his friend or he might have believed he caused it.
And so it goes. The human mind links cause and effect in astonishing ways. Have a positive attitude and the sun shines all day (unless it’s rain you want). Think bad thoughts and a tree falls on your car, not your neighbor’s car. Pray for a white Christmas and poof, there’s two feet of snow in the morning. Pray every night to Jesus or Saint fill-in-the-blank and you’ll live forever in heaven or whatever after you’re dead. No proof of concept necessary.
Here is the reason: Beliefs are possible entirely because of the abstract thinking capability of the human brain. Belief is a neurological process, an interpretation of one event in relationship to another (cause and effect). Dogs, horses and reptiles don’t do this (that we know). Animals learn to recognize threats and can be trained, but belief and superstition are uniquely human.
Belief often starts with a powerful personality (parent, priest, rabbi, imam) who instills the notions by repeatedly preaching what terrible or wonderful things will happen if we behave a certain way or have certain thoughts.
So, is belief good for us? In computer jargon, ‘is belief a bug or a feature of being human?’ After roughly 200,000 years of modern Homo sapiens on earth, the answer remains controversial.
And after all those thousands of years of high-level thinking, the neurological origins of belief are not understood at the cellular level. We know where language and ocular vision arise in the brain. In what lobe of the brain does belief originate? There are mappable neural signals in several lobes that have the potential for shaping beliefs. One personality trait for 'openness', associated with creativity and beliefs, has been mapped to several anatomical structures in the brain.
It is good there is progress, but much more research is needed before we understand the origin of belief. In the meantime, in the absence of indisputable factual evidence, it might be best to have doubts about even your most cherished beliefs.
