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all causes), it is inevitable that some of those 54.7 billion remembered dreams will be about some of these 2.4 million deaths among the 300 million Americans and their 45 billion relationship connections. In fact, it would be a miracle if some death premonition dreams did not come true! Here is a television talk show episode you will never see: “Next, we have a very special guest who has experienced a number of vivid dreams about the deaths of prominent people, not one of which has come true. But stay tuned because you never know when the next one will be confirmed.” Instead, of course, television talk shows focus on the million-to-one events and ignore the rest of the noise.

These examples show the power of what I call folk numeracy, a form of patternicity. Folk numeracy is our natural tendency to misperceive probabilities, to think anecdotally instead of statistically, and to focus on and remember short-term trends and small-number runs. We notice a short stretch of cool days and ignore the long-term global warming trend. We note with consternation a downturn in the housing and stock markets, forgetting the half century upward-pointing trend lines. Sawtooth data trend lines, in fact, are exemplary of folk numeracy, where our senses are geared to focus on each tooth’s up or down angle while the overall direction of the blade is nearly invisible to us. Folk numeracy is just one of many cognitive biases that influence and often distort the way that we process information, and together these biases reinforce our intuitively derived belief systems.

How Our Brains Convince Us That We Are Always Right

Once we form beliefs and make commitments to them, we maintain and reinforce them through a number of powerful cognitive heuristics that guarantee they are correct. A heuristic is a mental method of solving a problem through intuition, trial and error, or informal methods when there is no formal means or formula for solving it (and often even when there is). These heuristics are sometimes called rules of thumb, although they are better known as cognitive biases because they almost always distort percepts to fit preconceived concepts. Beliefs configure perceptions. No matter what belief system is in place—religious, political, economic, or social—these cognitive biases shape how we interpret information that comes through our senses and mold it to fit the way we want the world to be and not necessarily how it really is; once again, the basis of belief-dependent realism.

I call this general process belief confirmation. There are a number of specific cognitive heuristics that operate to confirm our beliefs as true. When integrated into the processes of patternicity and agenticity, these heuristics support my thesis that beliefs are formed for a variety of subjective, emotional, psychological, and social reasons, and then are reinforced, justified, and explained with rational reasons.

The Confirmation Bias: The Mother of All Cognitive Biases

Throughout this book I have referenced the confirmation bias in various contexts. Here I would like to examine it in detail, as it is the mother of all the cognitive biases, giving birth in one form or another to most of the other heuristics. Example: as a fiscal conservative and social liberal I can find common ground whether I am talking to a Republican or a Democrat. In fact, I have close friends in both camps, and over the years I have observed the following: no matter what the issue is under discussion, both sides are equally convinced that the evidence overwhelmingly supports their position. I’m sure it does because of the confirmation bias, or the tendency to seek and find confirmatory evidence in support of already existing beliefs and ignore or reinterpret disconfirming evidence. The confirmation bias is best captured in the biblical wisdom Seek and ye shall find.

Experimental examples abound.2 In 1981, psychologist Mark Snyder tasked subjects to assess the personality of someone whom they were about to meet, but only after they reviewed a profile of the person. Subjects in one