Why does changing your mind sometimes feel like losing a part of yourself?

If beliefs are supposed to track truth, why do they so often track our tribe instead?

Why does a challenged belief feel like a personal attack? What does your brain think

it's defending when it defends an idea? What if beliefs didn't evolve to be true, but to be useful?

What if your strongest convictions are solving social problems, not intellectual ones?

Today, we'll speak with public intellectual and neuroscientist Sam Harris about the topic of our beliefs.

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford,

and in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe

to understand how we see the world.

And importantly, today, what we take to be true about it.

This isn't I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed human.

Your brain has a lot of beliefs about what is true or false.

So if I ask you, is Paris the capital of France, your brain immediately judges the truth value of that statement.

Is it accurate or inaccurate?

How about if I ask you, is 10 plus 10, 21?

Your brain has to take in the auditory information and compare it against what it knows and make a decision. And most people would probably agree with your judgments on these questions. But this can, of course, get more complex when it involves other kinds of beliefs, like Muhammad was a holy

prophet chosen by Allah to deliver a message to humanity. Some people think that's a true

statement. Others think that's false. Or the statement, early abortion should be supported. Or Trump is on balance a good president, or whatever.

I'm not suggesting how you should evaluate these sentences.

I'm just pointing out there are lots of sentences I can say that you might find true or false.

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