The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [190]
11. Peter Krummenacher, Christine Mohr, Helene Haker, and Peter Brugger, “Dopamine, Paranormal Belief, and the Detection of Meaningful Stimuli,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 22, no. 8 (August 2010): 1–12.
12. J. K. Seamans and C. R. Yang, “The Principal Features and Mechanisms of Dopamine Modulation in the Prefrontal Cortex,” Progress in Neurobiology 74, no. 1 (September 2004): 1–58.
13. Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (New York: Ballantine Books, 1977).
14. P. Brugger, A. Gamma, R. Muri, M. Schäfer, and K. I. Taylor, “Functional Hemispheric Asymmetry and Belief in ESP: Towards a ‘Neuropsychology of Belief,’” Perceptual and Motor Skills 77, no. 3 (December 1993): 1299–308.
15. Ibid., 1299.
16. Personal correspondence, January 13, 2010. See also Andrea Marie Kuszewski, “The Genetics of Creativity: A Serendipitous Assemblage of Madness” (METODO Working Papers, no. 58, 2009), http://ssrn.com/abstract=1393603.
17. Anna Abraham, Sabine Windmann, Irene Daum, and Onur Güntürkün, “Conceptual Expansion and Creative Imagery as a Function of Psychoticism,” Consciousness and Cognition 14, no. 3 (September 2005): 520–34.
18. Personal correspondence, January 13, 2010.
19. Ibid.
20. Kary Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (New York: Random House, 1998), 5.
21. As I was finishing up this chapter I saw Kary at the TED 2010 conference and asked his permission to include our exchange, which he kindly granted, adding that my skepticism hadn’t fazed his confidence in his beliefs in the least!
22. Michael Shermer, In Darwin’s Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
23. The historian of science Richard Milner offers this insight from Wallace that he applied to Mullis: “Alfred Russel Wallace, the great Victorian naturalist and evolutionist, wrote in his 1874 Defense of Spiritualism that indeed ‘the pure dry air of California’ was known to produce ‘powerful and … startling manifestations.’” See Richard Milner, Darwin’s Universe: Evolution from A to Z (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 309–10. Of course, brain pattern filters have to operate in an environment, and as a native Californian firmly ensconced in L.A., I can attest that this is, indeed, La La Land.
24. M. I. Posner and G. J. DiGirolamo, “Executive Attention: Conflict, Target Detection, and Cognitive Control,” in The Attentive Brain, ed. Raja Parasuraman (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998).
25. C. S. Carter, T. S. Braver, D. M. Barch, M. M. Botvinick, D. Noll, and J. D. Cohen, “Anterior Cingulate Cortex, Error Detection, and the Online Monitoring of Performance,” Science 280, no. 5364 (1998): 747–49.
26. Daniel H. Mathalon, Kasper W. Jorgensen, Brian J. Roacha, and Judith M. Forda, “Error Detection Failures in Schizophrenia,” International Journal of Psychophysiology 73, no. 2 (August 2009): 109–17. Although their data showed decreased error detection in schizophrenics compared to healthy subjects, they did not find decreased activity in the ACC of the schizophrenic patients. Some neuroscientists believe that the ACC is involved in a lot of cognition, not just error detection. See M. F. Rushworth, M. E. Walton, S. W. Kennerley, and D. M. Bannerman, “Action Sets and Decisions in the Medial Frontal Cortex,” Trends in Cognitive Science 8, no. 9 (September 2004): 410–17; M. F. Rushworth, T. E. Behrens, P. H. Rudebeck, and M. E. Walton, “Contrasting Roles for Cingulate and Orbitofrontal Cortex in Decisions and Social Behaviour,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 4 (April 2007): 168–76.
27. Paul Bloom, Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human (New York: BasicBooks, 2004). See also Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).
28. “Natural-Born Dualists: A Talk with