SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable

Written by Bruce M. Hood

Narrated by Kerin McCue

Director of the Bristol Cognitive Development Centre at the University of Bristol, Bruce M. Hood has been a research fellow at Cambridge, a visiting scientist at MIT and a professor at Harvard. SuperSense is a fascinating exploration of the forces that shape people's beliefs in the irrational-and also a compelling look at how these beliefs bind humans together in society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 2, 2012
• ISBN: 9781464035982

Bruce M. Hood

BRUCE HOOD is the author of The Science of Superstition and is one of the leading international authorities on child development and supernatural thinking in adults. He has a PhD from the University of Cambridge and has been a faculty member at UCL and Harvard and was a visiting scientist at MIT. He is currently the chair of developmental psychology at Bristol University in England and director of the Bristol Cognitive Development Centre. Born in Toronto, he now lives in Bristol, England.

Reviews for SuperSense

[melsmarsh · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Certainly gave some ideas of why the brain creates weird things like feelings of ghosts and being stared at. Will likely read more about the concept in the future.

[john257hopper · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a fairly interesting book about the nature and origin of irrational or supernatural belief - taking these terms not necessarily in a derogatory sense, but as representing a spectrum of non-scientifically verifiable views from mainstream religious beliefs, through belief in ghosts and fortune telling, to customary beliefs such as believing in luck, not walking under ladders, and even common or garden phenomena like believing we can tell when someone behind us is looking at us. His central thesis is that such beliefs are not necessarily taught as part of culture, but sometimes arise from our instinctive thinking as babies and young children. It's interesting stuff, albeit rather repetitive and this could probably have been rather shorter, though it is enlivened by some interesting experiments, for example offering people money to wear a cardigan, then challenging them by saying it belonged to a murderer - society's instinctive conventions prevent most people from wearing it knowing this, even though it's still the same garment. 3.5/5

[puddintame-358807 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a book that I was initially dissatisfied with, but found more interesting as I went along, so I would urge persisting if the first few chapters don't strike the reader. This is more hypothesis than theory, and Hood is forced to collect a rather scattered collection of facts to support it, and is, I think, perhaps a little too eager to find supporting information. Not that this is all bad: a theory often starts off with hypotheses and requires refining and further research. These are indeed very interesting subjects, and worth study.Hood's premise is that we almost all engage in magical thinking that does not correspond to reality and that we believe that subtle essences can be past through physical objects, such as his favorite, the cardigan belonging to a serial killer. Most people will refuse wear it, as if some tinge of evil might be passed by it. Much of this comes from our tendency to perceive patterns, even where they don't exist.My problem is that some of his arguments are unnuanced, and fail to consider other explanations. “[C]onsider how you would feel if you had to shake hands with a mass murderer […]. Why do we recoil at the thought? Why do we treat their evil as something contagious?” This ignores the social symbolism of shaking hands which confers at least some sense of social acceptability. On the other hand, therapists might shake the hand of such a person in order to establish a useful bond, and certain religious people might shake the hand in order to demonstrate the endless forgiveness both required and offered by their god.He also notes the belief that lighter things fall more slowly than heavy things. This is one of my pet peeves: in both physics and philosophy thinkers jump from the real to the ideal without much thought. Certainly, in a vacuum, a leaf may fall as fast as a cannon ball, but we don't live in a vacuum, and leaves often fall very slowly, so the belief isn't as ridiculous as he paints it. Even though it is wrong, I fail to see how it is supernatural.In the case of the cardigan, would you continue to wear the cardigan if you later found out that the person who gave it to you was a murderer? If I suddenly learned that someone had been murdered 20 years ago in the bed that I have been sleeping in for the last 15 years, I don't know that I would get rid of the bed.On the whole, I would recommend this as a look at a subject of study that has a lot of potential for fascinating insights in the future.

[bragan_8 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Why do people find it so easy to believe in supernatural things, from gods to ghosts to lucky socks to ESP? Some think that we're taught these things as children and simply fail to question them, but Bruce Hood contends that it has a lot more to do with the way our brains naturally experience and categorize the world, from the time we're very young. For instance, he argues that we have an intuitive sense that everything -- and particularly every living thing -- has a fundamental, invisible essence that defines it, and which can rub off on the world around it. This explains, among other things, why people are so keen to touch things that used to to belong to celebrities, and why we instinctively recoil from the thought of wearing a serial killer's sweater, no matter how thoroughly it may have been washed.There are a lot of deeply interesting ideas in this book, many of which are bound to be quite eye-opening if you've never encountered them before, and are still fairly thought-provoking even if you have. Hood also provides lots of fascinating (if often quite disturbing) examples of this "SuperSense" at work. Unfortunately, though, the structure isn't quite as good as the content: there's a lot of rambling and repetition here, and Hood sometimes seems to circle around the points he wants to make for a long time, rather than getting at them directly.

[citizenjoyce · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

When Hood says that he knows his readers are superstitious otherwise they wouldn't be reading his book, that took me back a little. Those of us who are not religious on occasion want to know why others are. He does indeed wind some things around to fit his theories, but some of his theories explain a lot. He says intuitive thinking arises naturally in childhood because of human's need to find causation and patterns in their environments. Intuitive spiritual reasoning consists of animism or the idea that all natural objects have souls; vitalism, the idea that the activities of life are under the guidance of something; and teleological reasoning, that things in nature exist for a end. No one has to instill these ideas in children, but they can be reinforced by religion. Rational thinking is more difficult and arises as a person is educated in the sciences. He also cites a little bit of the studies on the VMAT2 gene that encourages spirituality and dopamine which encourages a person to see patterns in life where they may or may not exist. So he says in a way we have no free will in whether or not we are religious. He talks a little about secular forms of supernatural belief such as a belief in esp or the conviction that you can feel someone staring at you. He says supernatural beliefs are good in that they hold society together in a sense of connectedness within the group and within humanity. I can relate a little to this as I don't struggle about whether or not to believe, it just comes naturally to me not to. Guess I have low dopamine and no VMAT2 gene. He does tend to repeat himself and probably is simplistic, but I found much of this enlightening.

[diwanna_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book was a bit different than I expected. First, it advocates supernatural beliefs, although not in the traditional sense. Second, it's mainly a book about child development. Bruce Hood states that we are born with instincts and learn things through a developed sense of intuition when we're young. Then those beliefs are replaced with rationale, but they never completely disappear. Hence our supersense. A wide range of topics are discussed. Overall a fairly quick and enjoyable read.

[cynthiaspicks · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Interesting premise--we are programmed to see faces/gods in patterns and relationships--but ultimately bogged down in extraneous detail. Rambling.

[electricray · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I heard Bruce Hood talking on Radio 4 and was sufficiently interested in what he had to say to buy his book - after all, a popular science writer engaging on the question of *why* we are impelled to believe in the supernatural, rather than intolerantly railing about how deluded people are that do, seemed like a healthy change. And Hood sets his book up nicely with some queasy dilemmas that will trouble not just the delusional among us: would *you* feel comfortable wearing Fred West's cardigan? I know I wouldn't. Hood's thesis is that, through evolution or fiat, our brains are disposed - wired, if you like - to think this way, and along with the blindingly irrational proclivities that so exercise Richard Dawkins come many useful survival strategies. To throw out the bathwater risks losing the baby, Hood implies, and I think he would say the bath doesn't have a plug in any case: We couldn't change this aspect of our cognitive faculties even if we wanted to. For all its intriguing premise it's a somewhat laboured book which sets its premise out early and then takes an inordinate amount of time to move beyond it, and in the mean time Hood allows himself to be sidetracked too easily, at one point indulging in a lengthy but granted interesting disquisition on the historical antecedents of the Dracula story, to no obvious point. There is much to be mined in the observation that, for all our enlightened rationalist protestations, collectively and individually we still behave bizarrely most of the time - so perhaps there is something to be said for leavening the will to rationality that has been behind much modern economics, biology and sociology - and while this book glances in that direction it never really casts a longing stare there, and ultimately is of passing interest rather than genuine clout.