Culture & Religion — June 12, 2012

How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane: Matthew Hutson LIVE on Big Think

What is so special about touching a piano John Lennon once owned? Why do we yell at our laptops? What drove the Yankees to dig up the Red Sox jersey secretly buried beneath their new stadium? And what’s up with the phrase “Everything happens for a reason”?

Matthew Hutson, author of The Seven Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane, argues that superstition has been so evolutionarily advantageous to our species that our brains are hardwired to persist in irrational beliefs against all evidence to the contrary.

Here he talks with Big Think’s Jason Gots about crazy cat ladies, Siri, and the Beanie Baby he slept with for eight years.

Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd

Interview by Jason Gots

a computer generated image of a human brain.

Thinking

The great free will debate featuring Michio Kaku and Steven Pinker

Who — or what — really controls your mind?

Building destroyed by the Halifax Explosion. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

The Past

The largest accidental explosion of all time

More than a century ago, Halifax suffered an accidental blast one-fifth the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

a collage of photos of a man with a hat and a book.

High Culture

6 great books with wildly unreliable narrators

Dive into the twisted truths and concealed realities told by literature’s most unreliable narrators.

a group of five matches on a pink background.

The Well

Signs you’re burned out — and how to bounce back

If you don’t feel better after the weekend, the “burnout paradox” could explain why.

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7 min

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with

Laurie Santos

Starts With A Bang

The trick to instantly identifying JWST images

If you can identify a foreground star, the spike patterns are a dead giveaway as to whether it’s a JWST image or any other observatory.

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