Why are conspiracy theories a natural output of the brain? And what does this have to do with

Roswell, New Mexico, or John F. Kennedy, or the Great Fire of Rome? What do conspiracy theories

have to do with brains and puzzle solving and cognitive dissonance

and in groups and outgroups and storytelling? If you hear an unlikely explanation for something,

what are good and bad ways to assess it?

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford,

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

to understand why and how our lives look the way they do.

Okay. our lives look the way they do. Today's episode is about conspiracy theories.

Now, the point of today's podcast is not to assess the truth value of any particular theory, but instead my interest is in why

they happen in the brain and why they are so sticky in society. Okay, so for definition,

the idea of a conspiracy theory is this. Although all the available facts seem to indicate X,

there is an alternative story that reveals

a different truth. There are a million examples of this, but let's just take a couple of

examples to get the ball rolling. So in 1947, in Roswell, New Mexico, an object falls from the

sky. The examiners conclude that it is a weather balloon, but that confirmation

did nothing to stem the tide of a conspiracy theory that space aliens had crashed in Roswell.

The alternative explanation suggested it was a spaceship and no one wanted to admit it.

Now, this is an example of a conspiracy theory

because it requires that some people know the truth, in this case, that there's evidence of an

extraterrestrial civilization, and in fact one that has vehicle troubles like we do. But the conspiracy

...