could conform to the work place where people have to work in cubicles. i knew that i could not do that. i would rather drive around l.a. listening to talk radio or music. >> but you started listening to rush limbaugh. >> yes. i have seen the internet, i have seen the future. i still to this day think that there is something almost to yuri about that because he is right. the internet does work the way that my brain works. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. and now from foot invest 2011, the author of the bleeding brain. he talks about how irrational beliefs are formed and reinforced. this is about 50 minutes.

>> well, good morning. i am the director of the society and publisher of sceptic magazine. we have a slight of that. ..

i invite you to go to skeptic.com and join the skeptics society. we believe in a free and rational society based on science. we live in the age of science and that is our best tool for understanding how the world works which is where i am going with this. a short talk and we will open up for q&a after a while when i tell you about the book. i should note on monday i did the colbert report. i will tell you a moment about that because people constantly ask what it was like to do the show. he is always in character. he is always in character. even the obligatory of their/guest host shot he is still in character. in new york it is near where doug stewart's film, the two most popular shows for authors to do. you will sell more books on either of these shows that on

any other show after oprah. in fact the viewership from 18-35 is greater for colbert or stewart van jay leno for that age group. in fact there is something called the colbert bob for book sales. it is hard to track immediately without a cash register on bookstores but on amazon.com live book went from no. 578 to number 19 in a matter of a couple hours after doing the show. it actually works. these are, the show's -- for john huddy -- comedy shows. they say don't be funny. leave it to the friend--the professional. that is good advice because they're very fast and they have a team of 15 full-time comedy writers who write this and he

would be foolish to try to compete with it. just try to get your message across or your point across. that is what i did. basically "the believing brain" starts off with a thought experiment. imagine you are a hominid on the plains of africa 3.5 million years ago and your name is lucy. not everybody gets that little joke. doesn't play well in the midwest. free.5 million years ago? the earth was created 6,000 years ago. right after the babylonians invented beer. that is about right. actually it reminds me of that gary larsen cartoon with the scenes and the cave party and the guy is looking at that going you are not dealers. kind of a funny bit. so you're a homicide on the plains of africa and you hear

our russell and the grass. is a dangerous predator or russell and the wind? if is just the wind but you think it is a predator you may of false positive. you connect a to be but it is an accidental correlation. there is no causal connection. that is not a particularly high cost there to make. lot of animals make them. you become more skittish and cautious and move around and you have all seen how animals are like that in the shows on the science channel or the nature channel or the learning channel where they are superskittish particularly preyed upon animals. the reason for that is on the other hand if you assume the russell in the grass is just the wind and it turned out to be a dangerous predator you are lunch. you have been given the darwin award for taking yourself out of the gene pool early without contributing to the next generation. i am arguing there was a natural selection for evolution of the propensity to make more type 1

errors than type 2 errors. more false positives and false negatives. just assumed all rustles in the grass are dangerous predators just in case. because one is a much more costly error than the other. why can't we just collect more data and get the decision right? why can't we tell the difference between russell and the grass and dangerous predators? why not just sit in the grass and collect more data? let's see how it goes. because that itself will turn you into lunch for a predator. sitting there and stalin and waiting around is also dangerous strategy. our brains have evolve the propensity to make snap decisions. rash judgments. intuitive instinctive choices. not based on evidence, not based on collecting lots of data. based on very rapid cognition. that is the propensity for believing all sorts of things. i call this pattern entity,

meaningful patterns and meaningful and meaningless noise whether it is the face of jesus in 840 or the virgin mary on a grilled cheese sandwich we have this tendency to see things like faces everywhere we look. however that is not such a bad thing because we have to find all sorts of new patterns. that is called learning. when a really is connected to be that is called association learned whether it is ringing the bell and given the dog some food with his salary for bringing the belt and he celebrates that is association learning. classical conditioning. you collected a to be and it is a real connection for him and the animal learns it. what happens in the brain is they strengthened or even grow new connections between neurons. memories are stored in these patterns of neuron firings. the more you repeat something the natural pattern gets reinforced and strengthened. the synaptic connections are stronger. for example more dopamine in them. there are a bunch of

neurochemical transmitters. dopamine appears to be one of the one that is deeply connected with learning and reinforcing. a reinforcement in learning is anything that causes the organism to repeat what it just did. if you are a pigeon in a box and you give them little things of food when you -- whatever your trying to get them to do. if you just randomly assign them reinforcement whatever the animal was doing before it got the reinforcement they will repeat that. that is the definition of reinforcement. let's say whether it is a rat or a pigeon catching the wall or turn around, clockwise or counterclockwise and get the reinforcement, got to remember that and repeat it. reinforcement. touch the left, go this way once or the other way half way and get it right. that is called superstition. magical thinking. superstition is connecting a to

be when there is no connection. if you think that is a bird brain problem go to the casinos to the slot machines and you will see this operation at work. they have it perfectly programs and to know exactly how much money they will make on the hour every hour 24/7 no matter how many people are sitting there you can't win and yet your brain is geared up to try to find connections and if you do you get a hit of dopamine and deposit of boost. people that are susceptible to gambling addictions get a huge hit probably of dopamine and other chemicals that cause them to get more reinforcement than the rest of us get when they get a little hat from gambling. particularly if they are less risk averse and like doing those things they get an extra little jolt. we notice from brain research on these different causal

explanations for patterns subject to shown random pattern on a computer screen are given random flashes of light or random noises in earphones almost never see randomness. they always find a pattern of some sort. our brains are designed or evolve to find meaningful patterns whether they are really there or not. it turns out that if you give subjects eldopa which is given to parkinson's patients it increases dopamine in the brain. they are more likely to see random patterns, meaningful pattern the random noise than the rest of us without the little extra hit of dopamine. but dopamine is one of these chemicals that is highly related to behavioral addictive addictions plus basic learning and this sort of process of pattern of city. we know from patient research that patterns tend to occur on the left -- in the right

hemisphere more than the left hemisphere. showing patterns and tracking where it is recorded in the green by forcing these experiments. this process of finding new patterns happens more in the right hemisphere than the left hemisphere. right hemisphere is often associated with artistic ability and musical ability and so on. let's take a moment to think about this. that is a pattern that is not a bad thing as skeptics tend to make fun of people who see the virgin mary and a grilled cheese sandwich which sold for $28,000 in a las vegas casino. that seems appropriate. we got a good chuckle about that. but this is the basis of all creativity. making a new scientific discovery, creating a new genre in art or music. it is finding a pattern and seeing a pattern or discovering up pattern no one else has seen or done before. that is a good thing. the tension here is to keep an

open mind so that you are creative and you can see something new. accept a radical new theory but not so why your brains fallout and you think everything is real. i have a discussion in "the believing brain" about the relationship between creativity and madness. there's a pretty good database, thousands of creative people have been studied and they have a disproportionate amount of manic depression and schizophrenia, paranoid schizophrenia either directly themselves or in their immediate family. these are largely genetically programmed. they get passed along genetically. so what is going on here is if you are so creative you are able to find new patterns no one else can see, perhaps you also find patterns that are not real. my favorite example use in the book is contrasting richard feynman and john nash.

richard feynman was a nobel prize in physics for his work in quantum mechanics. specifically quantum electrodynamics. house subatomic particles interact with each other. he invented as it were feynman diagrams, house subatomic particles interact with each other. they collide and interact and grow apart. these are called feynman diagrams. so powerful are these feynman diagrams they are still used today by physicists to explain these complex interactions of subatomic particles. so popular were feynman diagrams that he had feynman diagrams drawn on the side of his 1976 dodge cargo van which he drove around pasadena, california where i am from. he lived where i live. as the story goes he was driving up lake boulevard from where the roads were and somebody stop to that a light and rolled down the window and set why do you have

feynman diagrams on your van? said i am fine and? that would be a cool story to tell. possibly apocryphal but if not it is a great story. is vanik still around parked in a garage. if you ever want to see feynman diagrams i will take you there some time if you come to l a. john nash by contrast won the nobel prize in economics for his work on game theory. he discovered the mathematical relationship between subjects in a contest of any kind might be a prisoner's dilemma kind of contest or an ultimatum game or could even be corporations or nations competing in a cold war strategy. nash equilibrium is the famous concept in game theory about how subjects reach a stable state of how they compete with one another whether it is companies in a particular industry, become very competitive and end of reaching the stabilize point where price is stabilized and

quality of product stabilized for a while. cold war strategies like mutual assured destruction is the type of nash equilibrium where we reach a stable state for a while where i am not going to gain anything by changing my strategy and neither will use the we get some stability there. as you may recall john nash was in the movie a beautiful mind. he thought patterns that were not real. patterns of government cover-ups and conspiracies and secret agents and aliens talking to him and so on as played by russell crowe. john nash was of paranoid schizophrenic. if you see too many patterns that aren't real, that is called madness. madness has many causes. i am not just claiming it is another pattern but it is the process of finding patterns that are not real may also lead you to be a creative genius. that is described in the book version. the movie is different from the book. in the book is reality is

hallucinations were mostly auditory. that is the case for more schizophrenics. more auditory is -- hard to make a movie that way. it is more visual. he describes in the book why do you believe in aliens are talking to you? secret government agents are speaking to you? it is the same voice. it feels like the same source that i get my mathematical ideas from. so without some way of discriminating between true and false patterns how are any of us to know if we made an important discovery or if we are crazy? the answer is science. science gives us a systematic reliable method of giving out what is real and what is not. it is not perfect but it is the best source we have. this is what science has developed these particular tools for understanding how the world works like having your experiment blinded. they have to blind the experiment because of the subject knows the condition they will change their behavior or

act differently. if you are testing some particular drug, he has got the drug for weight-loss or whatever it is likely to change his behavior in multiple ways not related to the drug and when you get whatever it affect you get you don't know if it is caused by the drug war if he changed his diet or completed more exercises and maybe that is the cause of the affect you are measuring. it has to be double blinded because of the experimental knows what condition the subject is in the experiment her they record the data incorrectly. quite a bit of research on experimenter bias. why is this happening? because of something called a confirmation bias which is where you look for and find confirming evidence for what you already believe and ignore the other evidence. everybody does it. it is applicable to all of our beliefs. political beliefs and economic ideologies and social attitudes,

religious faith, even our scientific series and hypotheses. we all employ the confirmation by as. it is the mother of all cognitive biases. so powerful it is hard to get around it. this is why science have all these checks and balances to try to avoid this problem. if you are conservative you probably read the wall street journal and listen to conservative talk radio and filter the world through that. you only mostly here the data and evidence that support whatever particular conservative topic is of the day. unlikely that you are listening to progressive talk radio or reading the new york times which is what liberals do. nobody listens to talk radio anymore. and pr may be. to filter your sources and surround yourself with fellow conservative like here we are, libertarian's or whatever we are. or you surround yourself with liberals. everything gets filtered through them. because we are so tribal we also feel good about this.

like we are right and they are wrong. not that we are right but we are morally right. we are better than them and everybody does this. including scientists. every scientist would love his pet theory to be true. how you advance your career and get grants and move up the academic ladder and get raises. you made an important discovery. of course scientists are going to be hugely subject to the confirmation by us. we will talk about this this afternoon. it is a problem but it is a bigger problem in all other areas of life. religion, politics peterson will economics, social attitudes because science have a systematic way of getting at the truth and try to avoid those kind of cognitive biases. is not perfect but if you don't look for your confirming evidence somebody else will usually with great glee in a

public forum they will debunk your silly ideas and gain their own status and recognition to advance their careers by debunking somebody else's silly theory. i think libertarians would like conservatives because they recognize the value of competition. competition is good. it drives us forward. innovation and so on. scientific competitive enterprise. sunni grants and economic jobs and so many people can be published in the big journal. very competitive. this is of good thing because i don't understand quantum physics and string theory and global general relativity and a lot of these complex physical sciences. but i have some confidence that somebody else does and they keep each other in check. that is to save the system itself is kind of self policing. somebody is watching each other because they are very competitive. not like they meet on the weekend to get their story

straight. you know those creationist trying to do this. if you go to a scientific congress you see how invigorating the competitive is. they challenge each other constantly and there is a lot of backstabbing and behind-the-scenes machinations about whose theory is right and who has the most support. what i am not sure about like a "skeptic" magazine people send me every week some new theory about this, that or the other and most are obviously sunni bunk. some guy in his garage say newton was wrong and einstein was wrong and feynman was wrong and i figured it out and i don't know the mass yet but you can work on it. i don't do the math either. sorry. usually i don't anything with these but file them with my theories of everything door. occasionally i get something that is interesting so i will send it to my friends at caltech and go if this guy is wrong why is he wrong? i want to give him a fair answer. they will tell me because of this or that and of the other.

if i ask what is the status of string theory, seems like they don't have any empirical data yet so i go to my friends at caltech or berkeley and get three or four voices. here's where the field is right now. we have no data. the principal test, not as hard core science status yet but we are getting there. i know i can sense they keep track of each other. two years ago there were two books published debunking string theory saying string theory isn't even a science. by the guys in the fields themselves. this is good. it means the science is healthy. that competitive nature of science is what keeps us on track. not perfectly. still a lot of things are published that are complete bunk, nonsense like wakefield paper that allegedly connected vaccinations to artisan which is utter rubbish. the worst paper ever published in the history of medicine and somehow it got through peer

review and there it was and it caused a huge panic and thousands and thousands of parents not vaccinating their kids because of fears. there is not a shred of evidence. it is complete bunk and yet it got legs because we tend to believe anything we hear or read or see. it must be true. unfortunately when the debunking the articles are published they don't get as much attention in the media. the big stories get the attention. the debunking stories follow up studies that can find no replication. we could not duplicate it. cold fusion in 1989 got all that press. media attention. free energy too cheap -- cold fusion is the answer to the future and in two months it was completely debunked. not a single land anywhere in the world could replicate their findings. end of store. that wasn't the end of the media story because they don't follow up on that. 20 different labs could not find the same results.

that is part of the problem we face. how the data outside these findings are presented. let's go back to our fire experiment on the plains of africa at 3.5 million years ago. of russell in the grass. is a dangerous predator or just the wind? what is the difference between the wind and a dangerous predator? the wind is an inanimate force. dangerous predator is an intentional agent. there is a big difference there. our brain tends to excuse the patterns we find with an intentional agency. we think there is something hidden there, a force. not just an inanimate force but a force with some essence for being to it. a dangerous predator in tends to eat me and that can't be good. we also had a value judgment. i call this agenticity. the basis of the belief in

animism and spiritualism and ghosts, poltergeist and demons and angels and aliens and conspiracies and the afterlife. it is all part of this fact that we're national nafta-natural born duelist. we think there is pour correll and incorporeal. body and soul. brain and mind. as if they are two different things. i argue in "the believing brain" there's only one thing. just material stuff. the mind is just a word we use in a fuzzy way to describe what the brain is doing when it is doing its thing. neurons firing. swapping dopamine and other chemicals. but i am in the minority position. most people are natural born duelists. most of us think they are two things. that is why we can watch a fun movie like freaky friday and get the humor of lindsay lohan and jamie lee curtis switching bodies. if you think about it what is

switching? what is going from one thing to the other? in our minds we think it is their sole or their personality. now you have a middle-aged mom in high school talking to the girls about boys and a teenage girl in a corporate board room and laughter in sues. these make for funny movies. there are a bunch of these >> reporter: pages or 13 going on 30 wear something goes from one body to the other. what is that? we naturally say i got it. the personality somehow is not encoded here. it is out there somewhere. temporarily housed in the body and floats around. this is the basis of believe in the afterlife. it is a natural believe. we hold that propensity as well as part of the evolutionary process. you could ask subject in the experiments would you where

hitler's sweater? most people, no! there is evil in it. unless you are one of these neo-nazis that likes to collect nazi memorabilia on ebay. most people would not where hitler's whether. would you where mr. rogers's cardigans weather? oh yes. that would be nice. i would feel more moral and upstanding. as if the essence of goodness or evil exists without a person. just floating like out in the ether somewhere and got in the sweater. it is in the sweater. another one of these experiments was to put brad pitt's sweater for sale on ebay watched versus unwatched. which one got a higher price? what the essence of breads -- brad pitt. why would this be? this might have evolutionary basis. argue in "the believing brain" that the sense of smell is important for certain parts of

our lives that are important. the sense of disgust, things that smell really bad trigger a sense of disgust and most of the things that we are disgusted that smell bad are related to communicable diseases of things you should not be getting too close to. bodily excrement and things like this that carry diseases. on the positive side things that smell good like roses or very pleasant scents or the famous teacher experiment where subjects smelled the tee shirt of some one of the opposite sex or preferred one kind of smell to another and that turned out to be related to who would actually make a good genetic match for them. just subjective anecdotes about people who love the smell of their lovers or spouse's clothing and almost an essence to it. like the essence of my lover is in the clothing. and that projection, that

dualistic projection, an essence that exists may have a basis in physical reality. smell is important to us from an evolutionary perspective. but our brains are definitely wired to do that. you can stimulate the temporal lobe which located above your ears and trigger all sorts of spiritualist type experiences. people hear voices out of angels or god speaking to them. they have a sense of connectedness to the universe. you probe deeper through the temple loads into the limbic system in the brain where emotions are controlled, deep religious experiences. the subject of these experiments are done with epileptic patients your getting the corpus, as the cut between the two hemisphere is to stop seizures from spreading from one hemisphere to the other. we have two brain that are head. if you cut it the seizures can

spread. before they go in the u.s. to sign a waiver to say is it ok if we poke around and wake you up in the middle of surgery and ask what is going on while we poke around? amazingly they say yes and this is how much of this brain mapping data has been gathered over the last half century. we know a lot what happens where in the brain. we know these kind of experiences happen in different conditions. there is a send presents effect that can be triggered any number of ways. the sense that there's somebody else here in the room may be right next to me. lindberg describe this in the spirit of st. louis power after 46 hours of sleep deprivation, every graduate student has that. that he said there were angelic beings in the cabin of the plane with him that he spoke to and they spoke back to him. the l.a. and climbers often report especially when they are alone that there's somebody else on the rope with them that

they're talking to. and talking to them. this might be oxygen deprivation. might be cold. on the other hand solo sailors and arctic explorers who are at sea level and maybe not even cold. maybe they are in the south pacific and they often report there is somebody else with them. people who try to go around the world a sailboat by themselves often report sensing somebody else with them. a jerrod dog sledders, significant percentage of them, fantastic hallucinations of sitting on a sled and talking to them. i had some of these experiences when i was transcontinental bike racer going hours and hours or days without sleep and all sorts of weird hallucinations. the brain is capable of doing this under different conditions. projecting out from ourselves something else that is not

material. i argue that this is entirely in the brain. 100% a product of neurons firing and nothing else. i am in the minority position. a friend of mine would argue it is just a software running on the hardware. software exists out there in the matrix somewhere. i am not going to adjudicate that debate here but i argue that as the brain dies from tumors or brain damage injury, especially from senility and dementia and alzheimer's that as the neurons die cell by cell, the memories and personality of the person fade away. gone. where did it go? i claim it goes nowhere because it is stored there in the system. the only way to achieve immortality would be through better science and technology. download those natural patterns into some substrate that can be carried on into the far future

because it is better substrate than the electric meat of are proteins which doesn't last very long. this is scientific -- ray kurzweil stuff. i enjoy that allowed the we are not there yet. all that is going to happen right after i die. i am going to be so upset if these guys achieve immortality just after i am gone. i am going to come back and haunt them. i do think this is the basis of the belief in the afterlife. i am not a believer myself. maybe i am biased and you should not believe the skeptic. the answers that is right. you should. this is the problem. i am as subject to the confirmation by a 71. i read reason magazine and cato institute stuff. i don't ever listen to progressive talk radio. i can hardly stand it. the new york times is biased and wall street journal fair and balanced. but i can't help but think maybe

i am subject to my own bias. sometimes it is good read the other side and talk to those liberals if you must. just kidding. i would actually love to see a presidential debate coming up in 2012 in which they have to take the other guy's side. just for five minutes you defend that particular issue whether it is abortion or gun control or whatever it is. just to see what that would be like. it forces you to think these guys actually do have good arguments and they do have good data. everybody has got data. how do we adjudicate the issue. in politics we do it through elections. in science we do it in a different way. there is a consensus that goes on in science. it is a little bit of a democracy. there is a community of experts who attend the same conferences. they're very competitive which is a good thing but with their checks and balances this is why i would argue the american

experiment is a kind of scientific experiment. it is when the founders set up the country's a said we don't know how to run a country. nobody does. we have to set it up in a way that is like an experiment. we will run it for a while and change the conditions, variables and we will run it for a while longer and see how it goes. these are called elections. throw the bums out and bring two bums in to try this or that and collect the data and see how it goes. that is in a way how science works. i argue it is more cumulatively progressive than politics but on the other hand things are better. immeasurably objectively better now than they were 500 years ago in terms of the number of people who have freedom and prosperity around world. there were a zero liberal democracies in 1900. not one. even america wasn't a liberal democracy. women could vote until 1920. now there is something like 120 or 130 liberal democracies around the world.

we are making progress. you can measure of the and scientifically measure the difference between a dictatorship and a democracy by looking at north korea ever since south korea. you can see it on a map that night of the light. you can see it in the height of north korea versus south koreans. para four inches shorter. you can measure their gdp which is an order of magnitude smaller than north korea versus south korea. these i claim are -- scientists are not supposed to pretend politics are science but that is wrong. we can cross that barrier and say there are measurable objective scientific arguments we can make and the american experiment was set up by a bunch of scientists. franklin and pain and jefferson were natural scientist. that word wasn't used until the late 1800'ss. wasn't invented until 1845. so of course they didn't call themselves scientists. they were natural philosophers. that is what we mean today by science. the way they were running a

scientific experiment. this is not a venue that talks about politics. that is a good way to think of it. let's run some experiments. let's try this system or that set of laws and see our goes and collect the data and think of it that way. think of ourselves as scientists and look at that. i will end with reading the last two paragraphs of my book and then take a few questions. so here i am wrapping up the power of science and believe. of the many mysteries we have uncovered and questions we tried to answer one in particular stands out. homo rationalis. and species of human who weighs all decisions through cold hard logic and rational analysis is not only extinct but never existed. mr spock is science-fiction. it is a good thing because people who have suffered brain damage to the emotional networks in their brain particularly the limbic system find it nearly

impossible to make even the simplest of decisions about the most mundane places in life. which toothpaste to buy for example. with so many brands and sizes and quality than prices to consider reason alone will leave you standing in the store aisle frozen in in decision. analysis paralysis. and emotionally of faith beyond reason is often required to go through the day let alone make big decisions in life. in the end all of us are trying to make sense of the world and major gifted us with a double-edged sword that -- on one edge our brain are the most complex and sophisticated information processing machines in the universe. capable of understanding not only the universe itself but the process of understanding. on the other edge are the very same processes of orting beliefs about the universe and ourselves. we are more capable than any other species of self the section and illusion. of fooling ourselves even when trying to avoid being fooled by

nature. in the end i want to believe but i also want to know. the truth is out there and although it might be difficult to find, science is the best tool we have for and covering it. thank you. [applause] we have a few minutes for questions. yes, sir? hello? there we go. >> understanding the brain as you walk through here today how can you leave yourself into the brain of a liberal to attack -- to provide them light? >> probably not the and coulter approach where you call them idiots. that is our conversation stopper for most people. liberals -- ideal a lot with pseudoscience. nobody thinks they are

pseudosciences. i am going to my pseudo lab to collect pseudo faq and the fed buys pseudoscientific theories. nobody thinks that. liberals don't think that either. the value of being a libertarian is we are fiscally conservative and socially liberal. you can find common ground and shift them over. it is the same principle you see here that applies over here. for freedom, you should be for freedom not only in this area but this area over here and you nudge them that way. part of the problem we run into here is i discuss in my chapter on politics in "the believing brain" that liberals and conservatives tend to emphasize different moral values. one of them is better than the other, it is like i believe in helping the poor and that it is government's job to take care of the needy and so on and the people who fall through the cracks. conservatives want to emphasize

a group value, rule of law, patriotism and so on. how are these related? you have to find common ground. i believe we should take care of the poor too. i am my brother's keeper. we are a group together. we have to band together and help each other. the question is what is the best way to do this? is government the best way to do this? religion is pretty good at this. this is where i run into trouble with my atheist friends down the road at the other conference. oh no, religion. religion does a lot of good things. they man the soup kitchens and 02 new orleans after katrina. they are way better than fema. that was a disaster. is government the best way to help people? you nudge them that way. >> would you say in the skeptic movement what is the most pervasive and dangerous bias that you see?

>> skeptics have a strong bias against religion. just a knee-jerk if it is religious it has got to be bad. they have very little subtlety in looking at that. the liberal bias is the other biggest one. if you do a show of hands like i did this weekend it is 85% liberal, 14.9% libertarian and 0.0001% conservative. there's one guy in the back. why is that? we are all pro science. we love science and scientists are almost all academic and academics are pretty much liberal. they have been inculcated in the liberal world view because academia is so biased that way. i am sure you have seen the studies. places like berkeley. you won't find a single conservative republican in any of the social sciences or humanities. not one. when i challenge them on this

how can you think you're giving students a balanced education when all they get is the liberal perspective? their answer is because we are actually right and we are helping counter what they are going to get out in the real world. that is not helping anybody. those two things, against religion and pro liberalism are strong. >> i wonder if you could comment on the climate science. >> i thought that might come up to date. i will save most of my comments for when i am on this afternoon with lundberg about bias in science. i am sure this will come up. of course i think obviously climate science is no less biased than any other science that is related to a political or economic or social issue which is to say most of the social sciences have the same problem but not just climate science.

this is a particular issue for people into economic like us because it has political and economic ramifications of public policy. all the social sciences have the same bias. i am no longer a climate scientist on one level. i think of it as five questions. is the earth getting warmer? yes. is in human cause? probably. some of it if not most of it. from there i start to get off -- the climate bandwagon. how much warmer is it going to get? when? ten years from now? 50? 500 years? the farther out you go the error bars widen. that makes predictions harder. therefore, what will the consequences be of it getting warmer? it depends. if it is have the degree centigrade not so much. 5 degrees centigrade probably more. even that, where? africa? not so good. canada may be much better.

it is a complicated -- what should we do about it? i am pretty much down a libertarian barrel of letting market forces operate. if you want to get people to drive better cars, top-down government controls are not going to do the trick. if the price of gas goes up, people will start -- there is a market incentive particularly for inventors to innovate better batteries like the niece on leave for some of these. we have a ways to go. not sure about the battery problem. i live in l.a.. 100 mile range is problematic for much of driving in los angeles without constant flood in stations and that takes too long but market forces will help. >> thank you for coming. could you describe how it takes longer to reject false claims than to except true ones?

i asked that backwards. >> you got it right. you got it correct. >> implications for policy. >> brain research shows if you scan subject brain on an mri scanner when they're pushing buttons, they believe something or not. the process of believing something like pushing a button is true. i think that is false. i am not sure. i think that is true happens much faster. the cognitive process happens much faster than i am not sure and i am doubting. it takes longer. and doubting something starts in the limbic system associated with discussed, that negative emotion. being a skeptic is an unpleasant process. true and false things you have to take track of those.

flying takes more cognitive processing. cognitive lie-detector they're trying to do brain scan measures because when you are telling the truth you only have to remember one thing. i was there with my friends. if you are lying you have to remember the story you told and what actually happened and that takes more processes. those lie-detector is are not reliable but that is -- the principle is doubting something takes more processing and that is a measurable thing. public policy, most people -- when they vote they are not voting base the reason or rationality or who has the better argument. we vote tribally. i am voting my tribe. that is it. now i am encouraged by matt welch and the gillespie's book the rise of the independent. this is the biggest voting bloc now. we are getting there. a little like herding cats. let's all drink -- we are our own tribe.

the nonbeliever tribe. same problem with skeptics. the nuns are the biggest religious group in america. it is hard to organize them into anything. we are not well organized. but here we are so it is possible. there's a policy. one more question. >> this thing about conspiracy theories. is it true that in the middle east people tend to believe rumors and conspiracy theories more and is very political or historical basis for that? >> yes they do. if we think conspiracy theories are big here they are huge in the middle east because there's less education and less critical thinking taught. is more a theocracy that democracy in these countries. that is part of it. i am constantly amazed what people believe in america. i was on my book tour after jesse ventura was touring with his book. the 63 documents they don't want

you to read. they are on the internet for free. come on. he has never met a conspiracy he didn't like. this is the problem. if everything is a conspiracy that nothing is a conspiracy. something must be conspiratorial by definition. i tend to be skeptical of the big conspiracy theories. if it involves world domination, 12 guys a room called the alumina audie it is probably not true. watergate was a conspiracy. that makes sense. lincoln was assassinated by conspiracy. jfk probably not. almost certainly not in my opinion. i did have a moment of pause watching that hbo film too big to fail based on the book too big to fail. there is that seen in the movie will describe in the book in september of 2008 when paulson and ben bernanke call in the top ten bankers, citibank ceo and banc of america guys and so on.

12 guys in a room and they are saying we control 70% of the world's finances and if we don't fix this problem we won't have an economy on monday. holy crack! 12 guys in a running world! maybe i am wrong! the libertarian, it is not just government that makes me nervous. these kinds of huge power -- any power block in which people are doing the things in closed rooms that i don't know about makes me nervous. it makes me wonder. we need some control over parts of the economy because people can pull off conspiracies. are often. thank you so much for coming. i appreciate that. [applause] >> every weekend booktv offers 48 hours of programming focused on nonfiction authors and books. watch it here on c-span2. >> you were talking about

fundamentals, confusions. if you think about what a warrior is. a warrior is a person who first of all chooses a side. the warrior clearly knows that these are my people and those are my enemies and he will risk his life and limb to use violence to try to stop the people who are trying to do violence against his people. that is a warrior. a policeman will also risk life and limb but they cannot choose sides. they have to be on the side of the law. if a policeman chooses sides it is called corruption. we have confused the role of warriors with the role of police and we have put warriors who are

trained to oppose another side into a situation to act as police men where there is no agreed upon law. they have to be on the side of the law. if you go to the state than in any state in the union the people who are inside will all tell you if you say is it bad to kill or against the law? they all agree. there is an agreement on the law. we put people who are trained as warriors into a situation where there is no agreement. it is perfectly justifiable to cut a woman's years off if she humiliated her husband in some way. what are we dealing with? the second saying is you have police men who are trained. they are generally more mature. infantrymen are young. take a 19-year-old and send him to a troubled neighborhood with an automatic weapon? not likely he is going to do a very good job. send him to go up against the

enemy and he clearly knows who they are he will do a magnificent job. that is what 19-year-olds do. if we don't get over this fundamental confusion we will be finding ourselves in situations time and time again where we are putting people who are trained one way into a role and has none of the requirements to make that successful. >> clarity of purpose in battle is a real force multiplier. in the middle of matterhorn you have a devastating moment when a u.s. officer suddenly realizes and begins worrying over the fact that the north vietnamese army units he is opposing are in fused with a sense of purpose and mission and you offer a devastating observation for the americans. that kind of clarity was a thing of the past. the marines circling people with no objective beyond killing itself. that left a hollow feeling milady tried to ignore by doing his job which was killing

people. the cycle of this dynamic can quickly detect itself from larger strategic missions especially missions with ambiguities and counterinsurgency. >> it is an absolutely interesting parallel between vietnam and the current war in afghanistan because think about world war ii. my father and my uncle all fought, are we making progress? yes. we took guadalcanal and hit the mariannas, we were clear what we were doing. you go to vietnam's and it is becoming a nuclear so how do we measure success? it devolved into body counting. i am clear in my own mind that body count is a bad measure of success. first of all is the moral. the warrior's job is to stop the other side from using violence. when the other side stops doing

it you are done. the job is not to kill the other side. you sometimes have to kill people on the other side to dissuade them doing what they are doing. that is the bad part of it. the objective should not be killing people. that is not a proper objective. it is inhumane. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. this weekend a three day holiday weekend on booktv on c-span2. from katrina secrets former new orleans mayor ray nagin's account of the storm after the storm. on afterwards harvard law professor randall kennedy looks at the influence of racial politics on the first african-american president. live sunday three hours in depth. former editor and columnist for newsweek magazine ellis coats on race and the media. look for the complete booktv schedule at booktv.org. sign up for booktv alert. weekend schedule in your in box.

>> what are you reading this summer? booktv wants to know. >> i am reading the book about "the coldest winter: america and the korean war". quite frankly i have held on to this book not wanting to open up the pages to it. it goes over the korean war and for most people familiar with the korean war said you don't want to know. what do they mean by that? i was in korea when the chinese actually surrounded the eighth army. it was a nightmare. 60 years ago, to the best of my knowledge i haven't suffered psychologically about that war. it pains me when i think of the

number of americans dead. who died in korea. it becomes more difficult when people ask me to explain my heroic actions. i have no idea where i was or why i was there. so i thought it would be better not to expose myself to this nightmare. i have six different copies of this book. all of them say that their worst thoughts about what happened was

triggered by this book. as to why we got involved. did we know what we were doing? was it successful? i feel secure enough that 80 years old to take a look at what happened over 60 years ago and see where this actually takes me. i know one thing. in june of 1950 i was 20 years old. i was in the second infantry division and was told we were going to stop the communist invasion of south korea. i don't know if i said this publicly but i had no clue where korea was or what invasion they were talking about. even when i came back home one of the most tragic things was i

couldn't properly explain where i was. now i can see out of the actions of a broken down community that had been crushed to the ground that out of all of this came the greatest democracy in their region and a longtime friend of the united states. those are good sox. i was in korea in 1950 and i helped to preserve and continue the expansion of a democracy. quite frankly i may not want to know why i was there. if it does happen and have an adverse effect -- the house of representatives. >> tell us what you are reading this summer. send us a