Hood, Bruce - Supersense

Society needs sacred values – anything that we hold to be special and unique beyond any given sum. You can’t put a price on a sacred value, or at least you should not willingly do so. Because they cannot be reduced to any scientific or rational analysis, sacred values represent a common set of beliefs that bind together all the members of a group and apply to all of them. Without sacred values, society would deteriorate into a free-for-all in which individuals are only out for themselves. When our societies have sacred values, we are all bound to acknowledge and conform to the group consensus that there are some things that simply should not be bought, owned, or controlled by another group member. Sacred values confirm our willingness to be part of the group and share beliefs even when such beliefs lack good evidence.

Over the coming chapters I hope to show you how our supernatural beliefs can make sense of our sacred values. Don’t take my word for it. That would be storytelling. Rather you, the reader, need to come up with your own opinion based on the evidence presented in the following pages. So that you can navigate the path ahead more clearly, let me show you the roadmap.

In the opening chapter, I begin with the notion of ‘mind design’ – something organized in the way we interpret the world around us – and how it produces some surprising beliefs. Most of us willingly accept that our minds can make mistakes, but we all think we can overcome these errors if given the right information. That’s because we all think that we are reasonable. Have you ever heard anyone admit that he or she is unreasonable? Despite our confidence in our own reason, sometimes our capacity to be reasonable is undermined by our gut reactions, which can kick in so fast that it’s hard to rein them in with reason. Take the example of evil and our belief that it can be physically real. If you don’t believe me, consider how you would feel if you had to shake hands with a mass murderer such as I discuss in chapter 2. Why do we recoil at the thought? Why do we treat their evil as something contagious?

I then want to turn your attention to origins. Tracing the first evidence of supernatural beliefs to the beginnings of culture, I show that, while science has made considerable strides over the last four hundred years, supernaturalism is still very common. Then I want you to consider origins within the individual and the development of belief in the growing child. One of the main points I want to make in the book is that children naturally reason about the unseen aspects of their world, and doing so sometimes leads them to beliefs that form the basis of later adult supernatural notions. In particular, the ways in which young children reason about living things and about what the mind is and can do clearly show the beginnings of ideas that become the basis for adult supernatural beliefs. These are emerging long before children are told what to think, which brings me back to one of the major themes of the book: supernatural beliefs are a product of natural thinking.

Over the next couple of chapters, I examine this natural thinking and how children organize the world into different kinds of categories. In doing so, they must be thinking that the physical world is inhabited by invisible stuff or essences. Science may be able to teach children about real stuff that makes up the world, such as DNA and atoms, but our childish essential reasoning continues to influence the way we reason and behave as adults. This is no more obvious than in the case of our attitudes toward sacred objects. Sacred objects are deemed to be special by virtue of their unique essence, which people believe connects them to significant other people. These can be parents, lovers, pop stars, athletes, kings, or saints – anyone with whom we feel a need to make a connection.

The remaining chapters of the book focus on sentimentality and the irrational fears that we can so easily detect in others but often fail to recognize in our own reasoning. Before concluding the book, I examine the latest thoughts about a brain basis for individual differences in the supersense. Some people are much more willing to entertain supernatural beliefs even when they are highly educated. How can we understand this? Here we consider the brain mechanisms that may be responsible for generating and controlling beliefs and how these can change over the course of a lifetime or during an illness.

By the time you get to the end of this book, I hope you will appreciate that the development of a child’s mind into that of an adult is not simply a case of learning more facts about the world. It also involves learning to ignore childish beliefs, which requires mental effort. Education helps, but it’s not the whole story. We need to learn to control our childish beliefs. I also briefly consider why there may be a connection between the supersense and creativity. Maybe creativity depends on our capacity to leap over logic and generate new ways of looking at old problems. In which case, creativity and the supersense may be stronger in those of us who are less anchored to reality and more inclined to sense patterns and connections that the rest of us miss or simply dismiss. They are always there in the background of our minds, pushing us toward the supernatural.

In the final pages, I bring these issues together and return to the supersense and the notion of sacred values with an explanation for why human society needs to believe that there are some things in life that must be considered unique and profound. Not only is there room for such beliefs in the modern mind, but they may be unavoidable.

What people choose to do with their beliefs is another matter. Whether religions are good or bad is a heated debate that I will leave to others. I just think that supernatural beliefs are inevitable. At least knowing where they come from and why we have them makes it easier to understand belief in the supernatural as part of being human.

So let’s begin that scientific search for the supersense.

CHAPTER ONE

WHAT SECRET DO JOHN MCENROE AND DAVID BECKHAM SHARE?

WEIRD STUFF HAPPENS all the time. Some years ago, before we were married, Kim and I travelled to London. It was our first trip to the capital, and we decided to use the Underground. London’s Underground train system transports more than three million passengers every single day, and so we were relieved to find two seats together inside one of the crowded carriages. As we settled down, I looked up to read the various advertisements, as one does to avoid direct eye contact with fellow passengers, but I noted that the young man seated opposite seemed vaguely familiar. I nudged Kim and said that the man looked remarkably like her brother, whom we last heard was travelling in South America. It had been years since we last saw him. Kim stared at the man, and at that instant the man looked up from the paper he was reading and returned the stare. For what seemed a very long time, the two held each other’s gaze before the quizzical expression on the man’s face turned to a smile and he said, ‘Kim?’ Brother and sister could not believe their chance encounter.

Most of us have experienced something similar. At dinner parties, guests exchange stories about strange events and coincidences that have happened either to them or, more typically, to someone else they know. They talk about events that are peculiar or seem beyond reasonable explanation. They describe examples of knowing or sensing things either before they happen or over great distances of time and space. They talk of feeling energies or auras associated with people, places, and things that give them a creepy sensation. They talk about ghosts and sensing the dead. It is precisely because these experiences are so weird that they are brought up in conversation. Pierre Le Loyer captured this notion well four hundred years ago in writing about spirits and the supernatural when he said: ‘It is the topic that people most readily discuss and on which they linger the longest because of the abundance of examples, the subject being fine and pleasing and the discussion the least tedious that can be found.’ 1