PROLOGUE
1. Sean Coughlan, “What Happens to the Houses of Horror?”, BBC News, April 5, 2004, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3593137.stm.
2. Although the National Association of Realtors in the United States requires its members to reveal all physical factors that might affect the desirability of a house, there is no consensus when it comes to the psychological factors that may stigmatize a home.
3. There were several reports of the security surrounding the demolition; see “Soham Murder House Is Demolished,” BBC News, April 3, 2004, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/england/
cambridgeshire/3595801.stm; and Tony Thompson, “As Day Breaks, Huntley’s House Is Turned into Dust and Rubble,” The Guardian, April 4, 2004, available at: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/
uk_news/story/0,,1185348,00.html.
4. The designers of Princess Diana’s wedding dress, David and Elizabeth Emanuel, are currently selling—for $2,000—a book with a swatch of the wedding dress that she wore during fittings; available from http://www.adressfordiana.com.
5. The word “fetish” (from the Latin facticious, for “artificial”) was originally coined by Charles de Brosses in 1757 to refer to objects believed by West African tribes to have supernatural powers.
6. James Randi discusses the cardigan stunt and tells readers about his own experience with Brother André’s relic at: http://www.randi.org/jr/2006-09/092206bad.html.
7. PanFest is a pagan festival on the prairies in Alberta, Canada held during Lammas in August.
8. Tony Blair’s superstitious shoes are reported in the Times online at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/
the_blair_years/article1969242.ece
9. J. Curl. McCain channeling as his luck toward 2008 race; Keeps assortment of talismans to ward off a Democratic win. The Washington Times, April 16th 2008.
10. I am indebted to Steven Pinker, who introduced me to Philip Tetlock’s work on sacred values that seeded the idea in my head that a supernatural sense makes such beliefs so powerful.
11. http://www.happynews.com/news/5132008/
fans-long-ashes-scattered-sporting-sites.htm
CHAPTER ONE: What Secret Do John McEnroe and David Beckham Share?
1. P. Le Loyer, introduction to IIII Livres de specters, ou, Apparitions et visions d’espirits, anges, et demons se monstrans sensiblement aux hommes, 2nd ed., translated by Zachery Jones (British Library, 1605).
2. www.ted.com/talks/view/id/22.
3. D. Clarke, “Experience and Other Reasons Given for Belief and Disbelief in the Paranormal and Religious Phenomena,” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 60 (1995): 371–84.
4. This probability is based on any two people sharing a birthday. Conversely, if you were asked how many people would need to be at a party for you to meet someone who shares your birthday at half the parties you attend, the number seems unreasonably high at 253. Those of you unconvinced by these figures can check out Ian Stewart, The Magical Maze: Seeing the World Through Mathematical Eyes (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1997). Peter Milligan from Oxford University told me about the soccer example.
5. M. Plimmer and B. King, Beyond Coincidence (Icon Books, 2005), p. 4.
6. W. James, The Varieties of Religious Experiences (Basic Books, 1902), p. 58.
7. W. James, The Varieties of Religious Experiences (Basic Books, 1902), p. 510.
8. S. Vyse, Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition (Oxford University Press, 1997) p. 60.
9. Many Christian holidays such as Christmas and Easter incorporate elements from earlier pagan ceremonies. For example, Yule logs can be traced back to Norse pagan festivals, in which they were symbols of health and productivity. Mistletoe was also used in Norse pagan ceremonies and is linked to fertility by the resemblance of the fruit’s content to semen.
10. R. Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow (Penguin Books, 2006), p. 36.
11. N. Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (Mouton, 1957), p. 15.
12. The Nobel physicist Richard Feynman once remarked that he found it easier to picture invisible angels than light rays; quoted in A. Lightman, A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit (Vintage Books, 2005): “Physics has galloped off into territories where our bodies cannot go” (p. 63).
13. This phrase was first coined by the psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby in “Origins of Domain Specificity: The Evolution of Functional Organization,” in Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture, edited by L. A. Hirschfeld and S. A. Gelman (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
14. The neurophysiologist Rudiger von der Heydt of Johns Hopkins University demonstrated the presence of “end-stopped cells” in the visual areas of the brain that are activated by such patterns as if the illusory contour were really there.
15. H. Ghim, “Evidence for Perceptual Organization in Infants: Perception of Subjective Contours by Young Infants,” Infant Behavior and Development 13 (1990): 221–48.
16. The website for the World Rock Paper Scissors Society can be found at http://www.worldrps.com.
17. A. D. Baddeley, “The Capacity for Generating Information by Randomization,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 18 (1966): 119–29.
18. A. M. Leslie, “Spatiotemporal Continuity and Perception of Causality in Infants,” Perception 13 (1984): 287–305.
19. Of all the sports, tennis seems to produce the greatest share of superstitious rituals in both men and women. Like John McEnroe, Martina Hingis also would never step on the lines between points. Marat Safin travels with an “evil eye” given to him by his sister to help ward off malevolent stares. Goran Ivanisevic follows a strict pregame regimen: eating at the same table of the same restaurant and ordering a set feast of fish soup, lamb, and ice cream with chocolate sauce.
20. The Young Ones, Episode no. 12 (“Summer Holiday”), first broadcast June 19, 1984 by BBC2. Directed by Geoff Posner and written by Ben Elton, Rik Mayall and Lise Mayer.
21. Tim Lovejoy, interview with David Beckham, broadcast on the United Kingdom’s ITV1, 2006.
22. E. J. Langer, “The Illusion of Control,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32 (1975): 311–28.
23. G. Keinan, “The Effects of Stress and Desire for Control on Superstitious Behavior,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28, (2002): 102–8.
24. T. V. Salomons, T. Johnstone, M. Backonja, and R. J. Davidson, “Perceived Controllability Modulates the Neural Response to Pain,” Journal of Neuroscience 24 (2004): 7199–7203.
25. E. Pronin, D. M. Wegner, K. McCarthy, and S. Rodriguez, “Everyday Magical Powers: The Role of Apparent Mental Causation in the Overestimation of Personal Influence,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 91 (2006): 218–31.
26. Another famous urban myth is that Galileo dropped cannonballs of different weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to demonstrate that they would land at the same time. In fact, others, such as the Flemish engineer Simon Stevin, had already published the results of experiments in 1586 on falling weights before Galileo’s appointment as professor of mathematics at Pisa in 1612.
27. A. B. Champagne, L. E. Klopfer, and J. H. Anderson, “Factors Influencing the Learning of Classical Mechanics,” American Journal of Physics 48 (1980): 1074–79.
CHAPTER TWO: Could You Wear a Killer’s Cardigan?
1. Elli Leadbeater, “Woolly Ruse Incites Irrationality,” September 4, 2006, BBC News, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5314164.stm.
2. M. Van Vugt and C. M. Hart, “Social Identity as Social Glue: The Origins of Group Loyalty,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 86 (2004): 585–98.
3. G. Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1896; reprint, Ernst Benn Ltd./Transaction Publishers, 1995), p. 148.
4. N. Ambady and R. Rosenthal, “Thin Slices of Expressive Behavior as Predictors of Interpersonal Consequences: A Meta-analysis,” Psychological Bulletin 111 (1992): 256–74; N. Ambady and R. Rosenthal, “Half a Minute: Predicting Teacher Evaluations from Thin Slices of Nonverbal Behavior and Physical Attractiveness,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64 (1993): 431–41.
5. A. Damasio, Descartes’ Error (Vintage Books, 1994).
6. D. C. Fowles, “The Three Arousal Model: Implications for Fray’s Two-Factor Learning Theory for Heart Rate, Electrodermal Activity, and Psychopathy,” Psychophysiology 17 (1980): 87–104.
7. P. Rozin, M. Markwith, and C. Nemeroff, “Magical Contagion Beliefs and Fear of AIDS,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 22 (1992): 1081–92.
8. The Festival del Burro, or Festival of the Donkey, takes place in March in the town of San Antero near Cordova in northern Colombia.
9. A. Silverman, “Sexton Admits 2000 Killing of Atsuko Ikeda. July 29th 2006.” Winooski police press release: www.winooskipolice.com/Press%20Release/Sexton.htm
10. C. Zhong and K. Liljenquist, “Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing,” Science 313 (2006): 1451–52.
11. The Exorcist, directed by William Friedkin (Hoya Productions, 1973).
12. R. Wiseman, Quirkology: The Curious Science of Everyday Lives (Macmillan, 2007).
13. Available from the Gallup Organization, Princeton, N.J.: http://www.gallup.com.
CHAPTER THREE: Who Created Creationism?
1. A. Forbes and T. R. Crowder, “The Problem of Franco-Cantabrian Abstract Signs: Agenda for a New Approach,” World Archaeology 10 (1979): 350–66.
2. D. Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (Thames & Hudson, 2004).
3. Gallup poll, May 2007, available from the Gallup Organization, Princeton, N, J., http://www.gallup.com.
4. Richard Black, “U.S. Approves Animal Clones as Food,” BBC News, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7190305.stm. The Pew Charitable Trusts in the United States (http://www.pewtrusts. org) have conducted a number of surveys showing that most consumers are uncomfortable with the prospect of food products from cloned animals.
5. N. Humphrey, Leaps of Faith: Science, Miracles, and the Search for Supernatural Consolation (Springer, 1999), p. 8.
6. T. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651; reprint, W. W. Norton, 1996).
7. This interview is available at BBC Radio 4, “Science: The Material World,” http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/thematerialworld _20060921.shtml. I was honored that one of the astrophysicists was Neil Turok who was greatly interested in my theory.
8. R. Dawkins, The God Delusion (Bantam Press, 2006), p. 36.
9. J. Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (AltaMira Press, 2004).
10. R. Baillargeon, J. DeVos, and M. Graber, “Location Memory in Eight-Month-Old Infants in a Non-Search AB Task: Further Evidence,” Cognitive Development 4 (1989): 345–67.
11. J. Connellan, S. Baron-Cohen, S. Wheelwright, A. Batki, and J. Ahluwalia, “Sex Differences in Human Neonatal Social Perception,” Infant Behavior and Development 23 (2000): 113–18.
12. G. Huntley-Fenner, S. Carey, and A. Solimando, “Objects Are Individuals but Stuff Doesn’t Count: Perceived Rigidity and Cohesiveness Influence Infants’ Representations of Small Groups of Distinct Entities,” Cognition 85 (2002): 203–21.
13. R. Baillargeon, A. Needham, and J. DeVos, “The Development of Young Infants’ Intuitions About Support,” Early Development and Parenting 1 (1992): 69–78.
14. A. Shtulman and S. Carey, “Improbable or Impossible? How Children Reason About the Possibility of Extraordinary Events,” Child Development 78 (2007): 1015–32.
15. D. C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Allen Lane, 2005).
16. A. Tversky and D. Kahneman, “Extension Versus Intuitive Reasoning: The Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgment,” Psychological Review 90 (1983): 293–315.
17. For details of the survey, see Zoological Society of London, “Nation’s Phobias Revealed,” October 27, 2005, available at: http://www.zsl.org/info/media/press-releases/
null,1780,PR.html.
18. J. B. Watson and R. Raynor, “Conditioned Emotional Reactions,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 3 (1920): 1–14.
19. M. E. P. Seligman, “Phobias and Preparedness,” Behavior Therapy 2 (1971): 307–20. In reviewing all the experimental data, Rich McNally concluded that while various aspects of Seligman’s theory are questionable, his one unquestionable assertion is that “most phobias are associated with threats of evolutionary significance.” R. McNally, “Preparedness and Phobias: A Review,” Psychological Bulletin 101 (1987): 283–303.
20. S. Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2002).
21. P. Boyer, Religion Explained: The Human Instincts That Fashion Gods, Spirits, and Ancestors (William Heinemann, 2001).
22. R. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (Penguin Books, 1986), p. 316.
23. L. Rozenblit and F. C. Keil, “The Misunderstood Limits of Folk Science: An Illusion of Explanatory Depth,” Cognitive Science 26 (2002): 521–62.
24. H. Spencer, Principles of Biology (Williams & Norgate, 1864).
25. E. M. Evans, “Conceptual Change and Evolutionary Biology: A Developmental Analysis,” in Handbook of Research on Conceptual Change, edited by S. Vosniadou (Taylor & Francis Group, 2008).
26. The majority of reef fish change sex at some point in their life, and in fact, those that do not are in the minority (source: Aaron Rice, Davidson College).
27. Human embryos start out as female and, in the absence of a Y chromosome, continue to develop as female.
28. Cladistics is the science of mapping the comparative genetic code of all living things to trace the tree of life. For an accessible introduction, read S. Jones, Almost Like a Whale (Doubleday, 1999).
29. For an extensive web resource on creation myths, try “Magic Tails,” available at: www.magictails.com/creationlinks.html.
30. E. M. Evans, “The Emergence of Beliefs About the Origins of Species in School-Age Children,” Merrill-Palmer Quarterly: A Journal of Developmental Psychology 46 (2000): 221–54.
31. Cited in Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 102.
32. Carnegie Commission, National Survey of Higher Education: Faculty Study (McGraw-Hill, 1969).
33. Following his recent recovery, Dennett thanked friends who prayed for him: “Thanks, I appreciate it, but did you also sacrifice a goat?”; see www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dennett06/dennett06_index.html.
34. E. H. Ecklund and C. P. Scheitle, “Religion Among Academic Scientists: Distinctions, Disciplines, and Demographics,” Social Problems 54 (2007): 289–307.
35. Jan Walsh, Living TV Paranormal Report (Consumer Analysis Group, 2002).
36. S. Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (W. W. Norton, 2004).
37. Meera Nanda has been one of the more eloquent critics of Sam Harris; see “Trading Faith for Spirituality: The Mystifications of Sam Harris” posted December 16, 2006, http://www.sacw.net/free/Trading%20Faith%
20for%20Spirituality_%20The%20 Mystifications%20of%20Sam%20Harris.html.
38. Dennett, Breaking the Spell p. 21.
39. P. Zuckerman, “Atheism: Contemporary Rates and Patterns,” in Cambridge Companion to Atheism, edited by M. Martin (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
40. E. H. Lenneberg, Biological Foundations of Language (Wiley, 1967).
41. D. S. Lundsay, P. C. Jack, and M. A. Christian, “Other-Race Perception,” Journal of Applied Psychology 76 (1991): 587–89.
42. After only about twelve hours of accumulated exposure to their own mother’s face, newborns show a preference for her face compared to other mothers; I. W. R. Bushnell, “The Origins of Face Perception,” in The Development of Sensory, Motor, and Cognitive Capacities in Early Infancy: From Perception to Cognition, edited by F. Simion and G. Butterworth. (Psychology Press/Hove, 1998).
43. D. J. Kelly, P. C. Quinn, A. M. Slater, K. Lee, L. Ge, and O. Pascalis, “The Other-Race Effect Develops During Infancy,” Psychological Science 18 (2007): 1084–89.
44. The interview with Peter and Christopher Hitchens can be found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/
ram/today4_20070619.ram.
45. T. J. Bouchard Jr., M. McGue, D. Lykken, and A. Tellegen, “Intrinsic and Extrinsic Religiousness: Genetic and Environmental Influences and Personality Correlates,” Twin Research 2 (1999): 88–98.
46. K. M. Kirk, L. J. Eaves, and N. G. Martin, “Self-transcendence as a Measure of Spirituality in a Sample of Older Australian Twins,” Twin Research 2 (1999): 81–87; L. B. Koenig, M. McGue, R. F. Krueger, and T. J. Bouchard Jr., “Genetic and Environmental Influences on Religiousness: Findings for Retrospective and Current Religiousness Ratings,” Journal of Personality 73 (2005): 471–88.
47. D. Hamer, The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes (Doubleday, 2004).
48. A. Newberg, E. D’Aquili, and V. Rause, Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (Ballantine Books, 2001).
49. Isaac Bashevis Singer, quoted by Stefan Kanfer in “Isaac Singer’s Promised City,” City Journal, Summer, 1997, http://www.city-journal.org/html/
7_3_urbanities-isaac.html.
50. M. Hutson, “Magical Thinking: Even Hard-core Skeptics Can’t Help but Find Sympathy in the Fabric of the Universe,” Psychology Today (March–April 2008). I e-mailed Lori Blanc, and she confirmed the reports in the press.
51. D. Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (HarperCollins, 2006).
CHAPTER FOUR: Blooming, Buzzing Babies
1. W. James, Principles of Psychology (1890; reprint, Harvard University Press, 1983).
2. See also J. B. Watson, Behaviorism, rev. ed. (University of Chicago Press, 1930).
3. A. Jolly, Lucy’s Legacy: Sex and Intelligence in Human Evolution (Harvard University Press, 1999).
4. I am indebted to the neuropathologist Seth Love for confirming that there is reactivation of infantile reflexes following brain damage.
5. J. Atkinson, B. Hood, J. Wattam-Bell, S. Anker, and J. Tricklebank, “Development of Orientation Discrimination in Infancy,” Perception 17 (1988), 587–95.
6. A. J. DeCasper and M. J. Spence, “Prenatal Maternal Speech Influences Newborns’ Perception of Speech Sounds,” Infant Behavior and Development 9 (1986): 133–50.
7. P. G. Hepper, “Fetal ‘Soap’ Addiction,” The Lancet (June 11, 1988): 1347–48.
8. V. Reddy, “Playing with Others’ Expectations: Teasing and Mucking About in the First Year,” in Natural Theories of Mind, edited by A. Whiten (Oxford University Press, 1991).
9. F. J. Zimmerman, D. A. Christakis, and A. N. Meltzoff, “Associations Between Media Viewing and Language Development in Children Under Age Two Years,” Journal of Pediatrics (online press release, August 7, 2007). The Walt Disney Company has demanded that the University of Washington, where the study was conducted, retract the press release. The University of Washington has stood behind the press release. http://www.washington.edu/alumni/uwnews/
links/200709/videos.html
10. The “Mozart effect” is the claim popularized by Don Campbell in his 1997 book The Mozart Effect: Tapping the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind, and Unlock the Creative Spirit that listening to classical music increases your IQ. Such was the power of this disputed claim that Zell Miller, the governor of Georgia, announced that his proposed state budget would include $105,000 a year to provide every child born in Georgia with a tape or CD of classical music. To make his point, Miller played legislators some of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” on a tape recorder and asked, “Now, don’t you feel smarter already?”
11. The Wimmer Ferguson Infant Stim-Mobile is the black-and-white-patterned toy that has found its way into many a home, including ours. The principle behind it is valid. In the first months of life, babies are attracted to high-contrast features in the visual world, but those features don’t have to be black and white. Any area of brightness and darkness attracts their attention, such as overhead lighting, the dark curtains against a sunlit window, or your hairline if you are a brunette. When I worked on visual development, many brunette mothers used to ask me why their newborns never seemed to look them straight in the eye.
12. J. T. Bruer, The Myth of the First Three Years: A New Understanding of Early Brain Development and Lifelong Learning (Free Press, 1999).
13. “Study Reveals: Babies Are Stupid,” The Onion (1999), available at: http://www.onion.demon.co.uk/theonion/
other/babies/stupidbabies.htm. Check out some very cute babies being made fun of.
14. “Babies Are Smarter Than You Think,” Life (July 1993).
15. Minsky quoted in Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 137: “The mind is a meat machine.”
16. The story can be found all over the Internet, but I believe the most sensible consideration of the topic can be found in J. Hutchins, “The Whiskey Was Invisible: Or, Persistent Myths of MT,” MT News International 11 (1995), 17–18.
17. J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690; reprint, E. P. Dutton, 1947).
18. R. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, translated by J. Veitch (1647; reprint, Prometheus Books, 1901); I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by N. K. Smith (1781; reprint, St. Martin’s Press, 1965).
19. E. S. Spelke, “Principles of Object Perception,” Cognitive Science 14 (1990): 29–56.
20. J. B. Watson, Behaviorism (University of Chicago Press, 1930), p. 104.
21. B. F. Skinner, “Superstition in the Pigeon,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 38 (1948): 168–72.
22. The baby crib was likened to the “Skinner Boxes” that Skinner had developed for the experimental studies of the effects of rewards on animal behavior; L. Slater, Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century (Bill Daniels Co., 2004).
23. In the Ladies’ Home Journal article (October 1945), Skinner described the benefits of raising a child in a thermostatically controlled environment so that the baby only needed to wear a diaper. He noted that behavior and health seemed to thrive in the Air-Crib. An independent questionnaire evaluation by John M. Gray sent to 73 couples who raised 130 babies in the Air-Crib confirmed Skinner’s remarkable claims. All but three of these couples described the device as “wonderful.” Following the slur in Opening Skinner’s Box, Deborah Skinner wrote a scathing response to the book, “I Was Not a Lab Rat,” The Guardian, March 12, 2004.
24. H. Gardner, The Mind’s New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution (Basic Books, 1985).
25. This scenario is a philosophical issue described as “the brain in a vat” by Hilary Putnam in chapter 1 of Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 1–21.
26. C. von Hofsten, “Development of Visually Guided Reaching: The Approach Phase,” Journal of Human Movement Studies 5 (1979): 160–78.
27. J. Piaget, The Construction of Reality in the Child (Basic Books, 1954).
28. There have been literally hundreds of infant studies based on the principle of the magic trick, but the most famous is probably one of the first involving a solid block that appears to pass through another solid object. R. Baillargeon, E. S. Spelke, and S. Wasserman, “Object Permanence in Five-Month-Old Infants,” Cognition 20 (1985), 191–208.
29. K. Wynn, “Addition and Subtraction by Human Infants,” Nature 358 (1992): 749–50.
30. E. S. Spelke, “Core Knowledge,” American Psychologist 55 (2000): 1233–43.
31. D. Poulon-Dubois, “Infants’ Distinctions Between Animate and Inanimate Objects: The Origins of Naive Psychology,” in Early Social Cognition: Understanding Others in the First Months of Life, edited by P. Rochat (Erlbaum, 1999).
32. A. L. Woodward, “Infants Selectively Encode the Goal Object of an Actor’s Reach,” Cognition 69 (1998): 1–34; see also V. Kuhlmeier, K. Wynn, and P. Bloom, “Attribution of Dispositional States by Twelve-Month-Old Infants,” Psychological Science 14 (2003): 402–8.
33. A. Karmiloff-Smith, Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science (MIT Press, 1992).
34. G. L. Murphy and D. L. Medin, “The Role of Theories in Conceptual Coherence,” Psychological Review 3 (1985): 289–316.
35. A. Karmiloff-Smith, B. Inhelder, “If You Want to Get Ahead, Get a Theory,” Cognition 23 (1975): 95–147.
36. B. M. Hood, “Gravity Rules for Two- to Four-Year-Olds?” Cognitive Development 10 (1995): 577–98.
37. M. Tomonaga, T. Imura, Y. Mizuno, and M. Tanaka, “Gravity Bias in Young and Adult Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes): Tests with a Modified Opaque-Tubes Task,” Developmental Science 10 (2007): 411–21; see also B. Osthaus, A. M. Slater, and S. E. G. Lea, “Can Dogs Defy Gravity? A Comparison with the Human Infant and Nonhuman Primate,” Developmental Science 6 (2003): 489–97.
38. I. K. Kim and E. S. Spelke, “Perception and Understanding of Effects of Gravity and Inertia on Object Motion,” Developmental Science 2 (1999): 339–62.
39. M. K. Kaiser, D. R. Proffitt, and M. McCloskey, “The Development of Beliefs About Falling Objects,” Perception and Psychophysics 38 (1985): 533–39.
40. M. McCloskey, A. Washburn, and L. Felch, “Intuitive Physics: The Straight-Down Belief and Its Origin,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 9 (1983): 636–49.
41. J. Piaget, The Child’s Conception of the World (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1929).
42. D. Kelemen, “The Scope of Teleological Thinking in Preschool Children,” Cognition 70 (1999): 241–72.
43. D. Kelemen, “Are Children ‘Intuitive Theists’?” Psychological Science 15 (2004): 295–301.
44. J. Piaget, The Child’s Conception of the World (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1929).
45. D. Hume, Natural History of Religion (1757, reprint Clarendon Press, 1976).
46. J. D. Woolley, “Thinking About Fantasy: Are Children Fundamentally Different Thinkers and Believers from Adults?” Child Development 68 (1997): 991–1011; J. D. Woolley and K. E. Phelps, “Young Children’s Practical Reasoning About Imagination,” British Journal of Developmental Psychology 12 (1994): 53–67.
47. C. N. Johnson and P. L. Harris, “Magic: Special but Not Excluded,” British Journal of Developmental Psychology 12 (1994): 35–51.
48. E. V. Subbotsky, “Explanations of Unusual Events: Phenomenalistic Causal Judgments in Children and Adults,” British Journal of Developmental Psychology 15 (1997): 13–36.
49. J. Haidt, F. Bjorkland, and S. Murphy, “Moral Dumbfounding: When Intuitions Finds No Reason,” unpublished study (August 10, 2000).
50. “Clarke’s third law,” in A. C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (Harper & Row, 1962).
51. M. Mead, “An Investigation of the Thought of Primitive Children with Special Reference to Animism,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 62 (1932): 173–90.
52. G. Bennett, Traditions of Belief: Women, Folklore, and the Supernatural Today (Pelican Books, 1987).
53. J. Pole, N. Berenson, D. Sass, D. Young, and T. Blass, “Walking Under a Ladder: A Field Experiment on Superstitious Behavior,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 1 (1974): 10–12.
54. J. M. Bering, “The Folk Psychology of Souls,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (2006): 453–98.
55. Johnson and Harris, “Magic: Special but Not Excluded.” British Journal of Developmental Psychology 12 (1994): 35–51
56. E. V. Subbotsky, “Early Rationality and Magical Thinking in Preschoolers: Space and Time,” British Journal of Developmental Psychology 12 (1994): 97–108.
57. I. Opie and P. Opie, The Lore and Language of School Children (Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 210.
58. N. Humphrey, Consciousness Regained (Oxford University Press, 1984).
CHAPTER FIVE: Mind Reading 101
1. S. Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: The Truth About the Male and Female Brain (Basic Books, 2005).
2. D. J. Povinelli and T. J. Eddy, “What Young Chimpanzees Know About Seeing,” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 61, no. 2, serial no. 247 (1996).
3. K. Lorenz, “Part and Parcel in Animal and Human Societies,” in Studies in Animal and Human Behavior, vol. 2, edited by K. Lorenz (Harvard University Press, 1971).
4. S. Goldberg, S. L. Blumberg, and A. Kriger, “Menarche and Interest in Infants: Biological and Social Influences,” Child Development 53 (1982): 1544–50.
5. M. H. Johnson, S. Dziurawiec, H. Ellis, and J. Morton, “Newborns’ Preferential Tracking for Face-like Stimuli and Its Subsequent Decline,” Cognition 40 (1991): 1–19.
6. M. H. Johnson, “Imprinting and the Development of Face Recognition: From Chick to Man,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 1 (1992): 52–55.
7. N. Kanwisher, J. McDermott, and M. Chun, “The Fusiform Face Area: A Module in Human Extrastriate Cortex Specialized for the Perception of Faces,” Journal of Neuroscience 17 (1997): 4302–11. Actually, there is now some dispute whether the area is specific to faces or any special category of well-known objects. Given that faces are the most common diverse objects we encounter, this suggests that the area probably evolved primarily for faces.
8. O. Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (Pan Books, 1998).
9. J. R. Harding, “The Case of the Haunted Scrotum,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 89 (1996): 600.
10. S. Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (Oxford University Press, 1993).
11. “‘Virgin Mary’ Toast Fetches $28,000,” BBC News, November 23, 2004, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4034787.stm. “Woman Sees Face of Jesus in Ultrasound Photo,” WKYC.com, April 11, 2005, available at: http://www.wkyc.com/news/news_fullstory.asp?id=33156.
12. Z. Wang and W. Z. Aragona, “Neurochemical Regulation of Pair Bonding in Male Prairie Voles,” Physiology and Behavior 83 (2004): 319–28.
13. G. Johansson, “Visual Perception of Biological Motion and a Model for Its Analysis,” Perception and Psychophysics 14 (1973): 201–11.
14. B. I. Bertenthal, “Perception of Biomechanical Motions by Infants: Intrinsic Image and Knowledge-Based Constraints,” in Carnegie Symposium on Cognition: Visual Perception and Cognition in Infancy, edited by C. Granrud (Erlbaum, 1993).
15. S. Johnson, V. Slaughter, and S. Carey, “Whose Gaze Will Infants Follow? The Elicitation of Gaze-Following in Twelve-Month-Olds,” Developmental Science 1 (1998): 233–38.
16. This example comes from A. N. Meltzoff and R. Brooks, “Eyes Wide Shut: The Importance of Eyes in Infant Gaze Following and Understanding Other Minds,” in Gaze Following: Its Development and Significance, edited by R. Flom, K. Lee, and D. Muir (Erlbaum, 2007).
17. B. M. Hood, J. D. Willen, and J. Driver, “Adults’ Eyes Trigger Shifts of Visual Attention in Human Infants,” Psychological Science 9 (1998): 131–34.
18. A newborn’s acuity is about one-twentieth of an adult’s and would constitute a level of legal blindness.
19. T. Farroni, G. Csibra, F. Simion, and M. H. Johnson, “Eye Contact Detection in Humans from Birth,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99 (2002): 9602–5.
20. S. M. J. Hains and D. W. Muir, “Effects of Stimulus Contingency in Infant-Adult Interactions,” Infant Behavior and Development 19 (1996): 49–61.
21. M. Scaife and J. Bruner, “The Capacity for Joint Visual Attention in the Infant,” Nature 253 (1975): 265–66.
22. Danny Povinelli believes not. See Povinelli and Eddy, “What Young Chimpanzees Know About Seeing”
23. Barbara Smuts, “What Are Friends For?”, Natural History (American Museum of Natural History) (1987): 36–44.
24. V. Kuhlmeier, K. Wynn, and P. Bloom, “Attribution of Dispositional States by Twelve-Month-Olds,” Psychological Science 14 (2003): 402–8.
25. J. K. Hamlin, K. Wynn, and P. Bloom, “Social Evaluation by Preverbal Infants,” Nature 450 (2007): 557–59.
26. D. C. Dennett, “Intentional Systems,” Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971): 87–106.
27. D. C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Penguin Allen Lane, 2006).
28. P. Bloom, Descartes’ Baby (Basic Books, 2004).
29. B. Libet, “Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will on Voluntary Action,” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 8 (1985): 529–66.
30. S. Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Viking Adult, 2002), p. 43.
31. Descartes came to this conclusion because the pineal gland seemed to be one of the only structures in the brain that was not duplicated or organized in two halves. In fact, it is.
32. V. A. Ramachandran and S. Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (William Morrow, 1998).
33. D. M. Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will (MIT Press, 2002).
34. C. N. Johnson and H. M. Wellman, “Children’s Developing Conceptions of the Mind and Brain,” Child Development 53 (1982): 222–34.
35. Robocop, directed by Paul Verhoeven (Orion Pictures, 1987).
36. Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott (Blade Runner Productions, 1982).
37. L. J. Rips, S. Blok, and G. Newman, “Tracing the Identity of Objects,” Psychological Review 113 (2006): 1–30.
38. V. Slaughter, “Young Children’s Understanding of Death,” Australian Psychologist 40 (2005): 179–86.
39. J. M. Bering and D. F. Bjorkland, “The Natural Emergence of Reasoning About the Afterlife as a Developmental Regularity,” Developmental Psychology 40 (2004): 217–33.
40. J. M. Bering, “Intuitive Conceptions of Dead Agents’ Minds: The Natural Foundations of Afterlife Beliefs as Phenomenological Boundary,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 2 (2002): 263–308.
41. V. Slaughter and M. Lyons, “Learning About Life and Death in Early Childhood,” Cognitive Psychology 46 (2002), 1–30.
42. J. M. Bering, C. Hernández-Blasi, and D. F. Bjorkland, “The Development of ‘Afterlife’ Beliefs in Secularly and Religiously Schooled Children,” British Journal of Developmental Psychology 23 (2005): 587–607.
43. J. M. Bering, “The Folk Psychology of Souls,” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (2006): 453–98.
CHAPTER SIX: Freak Accidents
1. Joseph Merrick is more commonly known as “John Merrick” owing to a mistake resulting from the publication of the memoirs of his physician, Sir Frederick Treves.
2. Aloa, the Alligator Boy, was really William Smith who was born in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1908. He was the last of eight children. The seventh, his sister Virginia, was also born with the same skin condition. Aloa was seen by many doctors who attributed his condition to the fright his mother had received giving birth to his sister. He was most likely born with ichthyosis, a genetically inherited skin disorder.
3. The first case of a man with two penises (diphallia) was reported by Johannes Jacob Wecker in 1609. Diphallia has been estimated to occur in around 1 in 5.5 million male births in the United States; see K. K. Sharma, R. Jain, S. K. Jain, and A. Purohit, “Concealed Diphallus: A Case Report and Review of the Literature,” Journal of the Indian Association of Pediatric Surgeons 5 (2000): 18–21.
4. S. Carey, Conceptual Change in Childhood (Bradford Books of MIT Press, 1985).
5. S. A. Gelman, The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought (Oxford University Press, 2003).
6. K. Inagaki and G. Hatano, “Vitalistic Causality in Young Children’s Naive Biology,” Trends in Cognitive Science 8 (2004): 356–62.
7. Sir Hans Adolf Krebs won the Nobel Prize in 1953 for identifying the metabolic chemical reaction that produces energy in cells.
8. J. Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford University Press, 1979).
9. G. L. Murphey and D. L. Medin, “The Role of Theories in Conceptual Coherence,” Psychological Review 92 (1985): 289–316.
10. J. M. Mandler, The Foundations of Mind (Oxford University Press, 2004).
11. P. C. Quinn and P. D. Eimas, “Perceptual Cues That Permit Categorical Differentiation of Animal Species by Infants,” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 63 (1996): 189–211.
12. S. Carey, “Sources of Conceptual Change.” In E. K. Scholnick, K. Nelson, S. A. Gelman, and P. H. Miller (Eds.) Conceptual Devlopment: Piaget’s Legacy Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum (1999): 293–326.
13. S. Carey, “Conceptual Differences Between Children and Adults,” Mind and Language 3 (1988): 167–81.
14. For example, light in the infrared and ultraviolet ranges are beyond the limits of the human visual system. Likewise, humans can hear sounds only in the 20- to 20,000-hertz range.
15. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel (Walter Wanger Productions, 1956).
16. D. L. Medin and A. Ortony, “Psychological Essentialism,” in Similarity and Analogical Reasoning, edited by S. Vosniadou and A. Ortony (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
17. The best and most accessible compilation is S. A. Gelman, The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought (Oxford University Press, 2003).
18. S. A. Gelman and H. M. Wellman, “Insides and Essences: Early Understandings of the Non-obvious,” Cognition 38 (1991): 213–44.
19. L. A. Hirschfeld, “Do Children Have a Theory of Race?”, Cognition 54 (1995): 209–52.
20. S. A. Gelman and E. M. Markman, “Categories and Induction in Young Children,” Cognition 23 (1986): 183–209.
21. F. Keil, Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development (Bradford Books, 1989).
22. J. H. Flavell, E. R. Flavell, and F. L. Green, “Development of the Appearance-Reality Distinction,” Cognitive Psychology 15 (1983): 95–120.
23. G. E. Newman and F. C. Keil, “‘Where’s the Essence?’: Developmental Shifts in Children’s Beliefs About Internal Features” (Child Development, in press).
24. In fact, the idea is not to eat the potato at all. Rather, Professor Tony Trewavas of the Edinburgh Institute of Molecular Plant Sciences developed the genetically modified potato as a marker plant that could be used to monitor the crop as a whole. Simply by sowing a couple of plants in the field, the farmer would be able to regulate watering and improve yields of the normal potatoes.
25. H. Bagis, D. Aktoprakligil, H. O. Mercan, N. Yurusev, G. Turget, S. Sekman, S. Arat, and S. Cetin, “Stable Transmission and Transcription of Newfoundland Ocean Pout Type III Fish Antifreeze Protein (AFP) Gene in Transgenic Mice and Hypothermic Storage of Transgenic Ovary and Testis,” Molecular Reproduction and Development 73 (2006): 1404–11.
26. The Fly, directed by David Cronenberg (Brooksfilms, 1986).
27. P. Savolainen, Y. Zhang, J. Luo, J. Lundeberg, and T. Leitner, “Genetic Evidence for an East Asian Origin of Domestic Dogs,” Science 298 (2002): 1610–13.
28. Stem cells come in two forms, embryonic and adult. Adult stem cell therapies are relatively uncontroversial and have been used for many years in the treatment of leukemia. In contrast, human embryonic stem cells are potentially capable of regenerative treatment for a wider variety of damaged and diseased cell conditions, but because they involve the destruction of embryos, research and practice are still highly controversial and banned in many countries.
29. The original study published by Joseph Vacanti and his colleagues in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery in 1997 caused a storm of public outrage and confused controversy. In 1999 the anti-genetic engineering group Turning Point Project took out an ad in the New York Times showing a picture of the mouse with the misleading caption, “This is an actual photo of a genetically engineered mouse with a human ear on its back.” The mouse was not genetically engineered, nor were there any human cells implanted in it. In fact, the bioframe was made from cow cartilage.
30. The belief in vital life forces and energies is found in most Eastern philosophies. For a discussion of Western notions of vitalism, see E. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought (Harvard University Press, 1982).
31. M. Roach, Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife (Cannongate, 2007).
32. D. Macdougall, “Hypothesis Concerning Soul Substance Together with Experimental Evidence of the Existence of Such Substance,” American Medicine 4 (1907): 240–43.
33. K. Inagaki and G. Hatano, Young Children’s Naive Thinking About the Biological World (Psychology Press, 2002).
34. V. Slaughter and M. Lyons, “Learning About Life and Death in Early Childhood,” Cognitive Psychology 43 (2003): 1–30.
35. “Quintessence” as a term survives today in modern theoretical physics as the name for the hypothetical dark energy that is believed to account for the energy necessary to explain the continuing expansion of the known universe.
36. For an accessible introduction to the Great Chain of Being and the emergence of the scientific method out of the age of alchemy, I recommend J. Henry, Knowledge Is Power: How Magic, the Government, and an Apocalyptic Vision Inspired Francis Bacon to Create Modern Science (Icon Books, 2002).
37. B. Woolley, The Herbalist: Nicholas Culpeper and the Fight for Medical Freedom (HarperCollins, 2004).
38. The coco de mer is a rare protected member of the palm species that grows only in the Seychelles Islands. It used to be thought to resemble a woman’s buttocks, which is reflected in one of its old botanical names, Lodoicea callipyge, in which callipyge is from the Greek for “beautiful rump.”
39. See Andrew Harding, “Beijing’s Penis Emporium,” BBC News, September 23, 2006, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/
from_our_own_correspondent/5371500.stm.
40. Tony Tysome, “Rise in Applications for ‘Soft ’ Subjects Panned as Traditional Courses Lose Out,” Times Higher Education Supplement, July 27, 2007, available at http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?
storyCode=209755§ioncode=26
41. Meirion Jones, “Malaria Advice Risks Lives,’” BBC News, July 13, 2006, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/5178122.stm.
42. M. Sans-Corrales, E. Pujol-Ribera, J. Gené-Badia, M. I. Pasarín-Rua, B. Iglesias-Pérez, and J. Casajuana-Brunet, “Family Medicine Attributes Related to Satisfaction, Health, and Costs,” Family Practice 23 (2006): 308–16.
43. P. Rozin, L. Millman, and C. Nemeroff, “Operation of the Laws of Sympathetic Magic in Disgust and Other Domains,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 50 (1986): 703–12.
44. B. Wicker, C. Keysers, J. Plailly, J. P. Royet, V. Gallese, and G. Rizzolatti, “Both of Us Disgusted in My Insula: The Common Neural Basis of Seeing and Feeling Disgusted,” Neuron 40 (2003): 655–64.
45. C. Nemeroff and P. Rozin, “The Contagion Concept in Adult Thinking in the United States: Transmission of Germs and of Interpersonal Influence,” Ethos 22 (1994): 158–86.
46. M. Mauss, A General Theory of Magic, translated by R. Brain (1902; reprint, W. W. Norton, 1972).
47. P. Rozin and A. Fallon, “The Acquisition of Likes and Dislikes for Foods,” in What Is America Eating? Proceedings of a Symposium (National Academies Press, 1986), available at: http://www.nap.edu/openbook/0309036356/html/58.html.
48. L. R. Kass, “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” The New Republic (June 2, 1997): 17–26.
49. J. Haidt, S. H. Koller, and M. G. Dias, “Affect, Culture, and Morality, or Is It Wrong to Eat Your Dog?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65 (1993): 613–28.
50. J. Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” Psychological Review 108 (2001): 814–34.
CHAPTER SEVEN: Would You Willingly Receive a Heart Transplant from a Murderer?
1. S. Schachter and J. E. Singer, “Cognitive, Social, and Physiological Determinants of Emotional States,” Psychological Review 69 (1962): 379–99.
2. D. G. Dutton and A. P. Aron, “Some Evidence for Heightened Sexual Attraction Under Conditions of High Anxiety,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 30 (1974): 510–17.
3. “Untouchables” refers to the lowest castes in several different societies, including “Baekjeong” (Korea), “Burakumin” (Japan), “Khadem” (Yemen), and similar castes in many African countries. Although Western countries may have abandoned official social segregation, seating arrangements on some forms of public transport and in arenas of public entertainment retain the legacy of maintaining a physical distance between the upper and lower classes.
4. D. Rothbart and T. Barlett, “Rwandan Radio Broadcasts and Hutu/Tutsi Positioning,” in Conflict and Positioning Theory, edited by F. M. Moghaddam and R. Harré (Springer, 2007).
5. R. T. McNally, Dracula Was a Woman: In Search of the Blood Countess of Transylvania (McGraw-Hill, 1987). For a rebuttal of this theory, see E. Miller, Dracula: Sense and Nonsense (Parkstone Press, 2000).
6. T. Thorne, Countess Dracula: The Life and Times of the Blood Countess, Elisabeth Báthory (Bloomsbury, 1997).
7. Peta Bee, “Naturally Dangerous?”, The Times, July 16, 2007, available at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/
features/article2073171.ece.
8. “Ask Hugh,” available at River Cottage website: http://www.rivercottage.net/askhugh.
9. “She’s Her Own Twin,” ABCNews, August 15, 2006, available at: http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=2315693.
10. C. Ainsworth, “The Stranger Within,” New Scientist 180 (2003): 34.
11. N. Yu, M. S. Kruskall, J. J. Yunis, J. H. M. Knoll, L. Uhl, S. Alosco, M. Ohashi, O. Clavijo, Z. Husain, and E. J. Yunis, “Disputed Maternity Leading to Identification of Tetragametic Chimerism,” New England Journal of Medicine 346 (2002): 1545–52.
12. W. Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (Oxford University Press, 1979); see also G. Obeyesekere, Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas (University of California Press, 2005). For a rebuttal, see T. White, Prehistoric Cannibalism at Mancos 5Mtumr-2346 (Princeton University Press, 1992).
13. Carlton Gajdusek received the 1976 Nobel Prize for Medicine for his discovery of the prion disease pattern Kuru in the Fore tribe.
14. R. L. Klitzman, M. Alpers, and D. C. Gajdusek, “The Natural Incubation Period of Kuru and the Episodes of Transmission in Three Clusters of Patients,” Neuroepidemiology 3 (1984): 3–20.
15. R. A. Marlar, B. L. Leonard, B. R. Billman, P. M. Lambert, and J. E. Marlar, “Biochemical Evidence of Cannibalism at a Prehistoric Puebloan Site in Southwestern Colorado,” Nature 407 (2000): 74–78.
16. Different reasons are given for ceremonial cannibalism and the practices associated with it. Most of these interpretations are based on interviews with surviving tribe members, since cannibalistic practices have generally been outlawed since the 1960s. For an account of the Wari of South America and funerary cannibalism, read Beth Corkin, Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in Amazonian Society (University of Texas, 2001). The practices of the Melanesian Kukukukus are documented in Jens Bjerre, The Last Cannibals (Michael Joseph, 1956).
17. Luke Harding, “Victim of Cannibal Agreed to Be Eaten,” The Guardian, December 4, 2003, available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/germany/
article/0,2763,1099477,00.html. Transcripts of the trial are available in G. Stampf, “Interview mit einem Kannibalen,” Gebundene Ausgabe (2007).
18. “Interview with a Cannibal,” RDF Media/Stampfwerk coproduction for Five (2007).
19. I first came across the Gammons’ case in “Help! I’m Turning into My Wife,” Daily Mail, November 9, 2006, available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/
article.html?in_article_ id=415584&in_page_id=1879. I have since spoken by phone with Ian, who verifies the account reported in the paper.
20. Y. Inspector, I. Kutz, and D. David, “Another Person’s Heart: Magical and Rational Thinking in the Psychological Adaptation to Heart Transplantation,” Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences 41 (2004): 161–73.
21. C. Sylvia and W. Novak, A Change of Heart: A Memoir (Grand Central Publishing, 1998).
22. J. V. McConnell, “Memory Transfer Through Cannibalism in Planarians,” Journal of Neurophysiology 3 (1962): 42–48.
23. G. Ungar, L. Galvan, and R. H. Clark, “Chemical Transfer of Learned Fear,” Nature 217 (1968): 1259–61.
24. B. Frank, D. G. Stein, and J. Rosen, “Interanimal Memory’ Transfer: Results from Brain and Liver Homogenates,” Science 169 (1970): 399–402.
25. P. P. Pearsall, The Heart’s Code (Broadway, 1999).
26. C. Dyer, “English Teenager Given Heart Transplant Against Her Will,” British Medical Journal 319, no. 7204 (1999): 209.
27. M. A. Sanner, “People’s Feelings and Ideas About Receiving Transplants of Different Origins: Questions of Life and Death, Identity, and Nature’s Border,” Clinical Transplantation 15 (2001): 19–27; M. A. Sanner, “Exchanging Spare-Parts or Becoming a New Person? People’s Attitudes Toward Receiving and Donating Organs,” Social Science Medicine 52 (2001): 1491–99; M. A. Sanner, “Giving and Taking—to Whom and from Whom? People’s Attitudes Toward Transplantation of Organs and Tissue from Different Sources,” Clinical Transplantation 12 (1998): 515–22; M. A. Sanner, “Living with a Stranger’s Organ: Views of the Public and Transplant Recipients,” Annals of Transplantation 10 (2005): 9–12.
28. B. M. Hood, K. Donnelly, and A. Byers, “Moral Contagion and Organ Transplantation,” unpublished paper.
29. “New Rules on Organ Donation,” BBCNews, February 22, 2000, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/651270.stm.
30. R. M. Veatch, Transplantation Ethics (Georgetown University Press, 2000).
31. M. Sanner, “Transplant Recipients’ Conceptions of Three Key Phenomena in Transplantation: The Organ Donation, the Organ Donor, and the Organ Transplant,” Clinical Transplantation 17 (2003): 391–400.
32. Barbarella, directed by Roger Vadim (Dino de Laurentiis Cinematografica, 1968).
33. As reported June 4th 2008. http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/
06/04/cathedral.sex/index.html
34. M. Earl-Taylor, “HIV/AIDS, the Stats, the Virgin Cure, and Infant Rape,” Science in Africa (April 2002), available at: http://www.scienceinafrica.co.za/2002/april/virgin.htm.
35. G. J. Pitcher and D. M. Bowley, “Infant Rape in South Africa,” The Lancet 359 (2002): 274–75.
36. C. H. Legare and S. A. Gelman, “Bewitchment, Biology, or Both: The Coexistence of Natural and Supernatural Explanatory Frameworks Across Development,” Cognitive Science (in press).
37. C. MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841; reprint, Wordsworth, 1995).
38. L. R. Alton, The Bizarre Careers of John R. Brinkley (University Press of Kentucky, 2002).
39. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/
0,9171,727231,00.html
40. R. V. Short, “Did Parisians Catch HIV from Monkey Glands?”, letter to Nature 398 (1999): 659.
41. This account of the execution comes from the memoirs of a clergyman, Philip Henry (1631–96). However, no other account mentions this crowd response.
42. See the Auld Sod Export Company Ltd. website at: http://89.234.45.183/index.htm.
43. See “About Claridge’s” at: http://www.claridges.co.uk/about_ claridges/history.
CHAPTER EIGHT: Why Do Traveling Salesmen Sleep with Teddy Bears?
1. Pamela Wiggins, “Top Eight Celebrity Collectibles and Who Collects Them,” available at: About.com, http://antiques.about.com/od/showntell/tp/aa012807.htm.
2. B. N. Frazier, S. A. Gelman, A. Wilson, and B. M. Hood, “Picasso Paintings, Moon Rocks, and Handwritten Beatle Lyrics: Adults’ Evaluations of Authentic Objects,” Journal of Culture and Cognition (in press).
3. Mariusz Lodkowski, “Battle over a Suitcase from Auschwitz,” Sunday Times, August 13, 2006, available at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/
world/article607646.ece.
4. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA) protects Native American burial sites and also enables Native Americans to repossess ancestral remains held by museums and other scientific institutions.
5. The Lascaux caves were discovered in 1940, but by 1955 the carbon dioxide of visitors had visibly destroyed the paintings, and so it was closed to the public in 1963. In 1983 Lascaux II, a reconstruction, was opened two hundred meters from the actual caves.
6. F. Wynne, I Was Vermeer: The Forger Who Swindled the Nazis (Bloomsbury, 2006).
7. Chris Gray, “Bloody Hell: A Headache for Saatchi as Prize Artwork Defrosts,” The Independent, July 4, 2002, available at: http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article182737.ece.
8. Jenny Booth and Nico Hines, “We Can Save the Cutty Sark After Blaze, Say Ship’s Owners,” The Times, May 21, 2007, available at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1817806.ece.
9. D. G. Hall, “Continuity and Persistence of Objects,” Cognitive Psychology 37 (1998): 28–59.
10. Nicholas Wade, “Your Body Is Younger Than You Think,” New York Times, August, 2, 2005, available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/02/science/
02cell.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1.
11. “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” lyrics and music by Fergie and Toby Gad (A&M Records, 2007).
12. M. Hobra, “Prevalence of Transitional Objects in Young Children in Tokyo and New York,” Infant Mental Health Journal, 24, (2003): 174–191.
13. Travelodge press release, March 13, 2007, available at: http://www.travelodge.co.uk/press/article.php?id=222.
14. L. M. Krauss, The Physics of “Star Trek” (HarperCollins, 1996).
15. B. M. Hood and P. Bloom, “Children Prefer Certain Individuals over Perfect Duplicates,” Cognition (2008): 455-462.
16. C. N. Johnson and M. G. Jacobs, “Enchanted Objects: How Positive Connections Transform Thinking About the Nature of Things,” poster and presentation at the symposium “Children’s Thinking About Alternative Realities” (C. Johnson, chair), biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Minneapolis, Minn., April 19, 2001.
17. The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan (Newmarket Productions, 2006).
18. Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) was a Serbian responsible for inventing alternating electrical current.
19. B. M. Hood and P. Bloom, “Do Children Think That Duplicating the Body Also Duplicates the Mind?,” unpublished paper.
20. J. Capgras and J. Reboul-Lachaux, “L’Illusion des soles dans un delire systematise chronique,” Bulletin de Society Clinique de Medicine Mentale 11 (1923): 6–16.
21. G. Blount, “Dangerousness of Patients with Capgras Syndrome,” Nebraska Medical Journal 71 (1986): 207.
22. V. A. Ramachandran and S. Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (William Morrow, 1998).
23. A. Ghaffari-Nejad and K. Toofani, “A Report of Capgras Syndrome with Belief in Replacement of Inanimate Objects in a Patient Who Suffered from Grandmal Epilepsy,” Archives of Iranian Medicine 8 (2005): 141–43.
24. T. Feinberg, Altered Egos: How the Brain Creates the Self (Oxford University Press, 2000).
25. R. T. Abed and W. D. Fewtrell, “Delusional Misidentification of Familiar Inanimate Objects: A Rare Variant of Capgras Syndrome,” British Journal of Psychiatry 157 (1990): 915–17.
26. H. D. Ellis and M. B. Lewis, “Capgras Delusion: A Window on Face Recognition,” Trends in Cognitive Science 5 (2001): 149–56.
CHAPTER NINE: The Biology of Belief
1. This example is taken from R. Sheldrake, The Sense of Being Stared At: And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind (Arrow Books, 2004).
2. C. G. Gross, “The Fire That Comes from the Eye,” The Neuroscientist 5 (1999): 58–64.
3. This discovery was first articulated experimentally by the Arabic scholar Alhazen, who invented the pinhole camera and explained why the image was inverted because of the optics of light entering the eye.
4. Red eye is due to the reflection of blood vessels that cover the surface of the back of the eye. The light-sensitive surface of the back of the eye, known as the retina, is actually organized back to front, with light having to pass through the blood supply before reaching the light receptors.
5. G. A. Winer, J. E. Cottrell, V. Gregg, J. S. Fournier, and L. A. Bica, “Fundamentally Misunderstanding Visual Perception: Adults’ Belief in Visual Emissions,” American Psychologist 57 (2002): 417–24.
6. S. Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921; reprint, W. W. Norton, 1975).
7. T. Depoorter, “Madame Lamort and the Ultimate Medusa Experience,” Image and Narrative: Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative, issue 5: “The Uncanny” (January 2003), available at: http://www.imageandnarrative.be/uncanny/treesdepoorter.htm. “It is noteworthy that in different versions of the ancient myth of Medusa, it is sometimes the sight of her—her ‘being gazed at’ by a spectator, while at other times it is the gaze of Medusa herself, her ‘looking at’ a spectator that petrifies.”
8. In February 2008, the appropriately named Third Penal Division of the Rome court ruled it a criminal offense for Italian men to touch their genitals in public. The ban did not just apply to brazen crotch-scratching, but also to the superstitious practice to ward off evil. See John Hooper, “Touch Your Privates in Private, Court Tells Italian Men,” The Guardian, February 28, 2008, available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/
feb/27/italy1.
9. B. Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, translated by C. Singleton (1528; reprint, Anchor Books, 1959).
10. C. Russ, “An Instrument Which Is Set in Motion by Vision or by Proximity of the Human Body,” The Lancet 201 (1921): 222–34.
11. E. B. Titchener, “The Feeling of Being Stared At,” Science (new series) 308 (1898): 23.
12. This comes from an unpublished study I conducted with 219 first-year students who had taken courses in perception and vision at the University of Bristol. In addition to filling out a standard questionnaire that measured paranormal beliefs (T. M. Randall, “Paranormal Short Inventory,” Perceptual and Motor Skills 84 [1997]: 1265–66), they were asked to rate the statement, “People can tell when they are being watched even though they cannot see who is watching them” on a scale of 1 (strong disagreement) to 6 (strong agreement). Only 4 percent rated “strong disagreement,” and 9 percent rated “disagreement.” The remainder of the students agreed with this statement to some extent, even though, as a group, they scored lower than other large samples for paranormal beliefs.
13. This example is taken from R. Sheldrake, The Sense of Being Stared At: And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind p. 178.
14. P. Brugger and K. I. Taylor, “ESP: Extrasensory Perception or Effect of Subjective Probability?”, Journal of Consciousness Studies 10 (2003): 221–46.
15. J. Colwell, S. Schröder, and D. Sladen, “The Ability to Detect Unseen Staring: A Literature Review and Empirical Tests,” British Journal of Psychology 91 (2000): 71–85.
16. The phrase is attributed to Carl Sagan, though he was paraphrasing a statement originally made by David Hume. For discussion, see M. Pigliucci, “Do Extraordinary Claims Really Require Extraordinary Evidence?”, The Skeptical Inquirer (March–April 2005).
17. J. H. Flavell, “Development of Knowledge About Vision,” in Thinking and Seeing: Visual Metacognition in Adults and Children, edited by D. T. Levin (MIT Press, 2004).
18. A. A. di Sessa, “Towards an Epistemology of Physics,” Cognition and Instruction 10 (1993): 105–225.
19. J. E. Cottrell and G. A. Winer, “Development in the Understanding of Perception: The Decline of Extramission Perception Beliefs,” Developmental Psychology 30 (1994): 218–28.
20. S. Einav and B. M. Hood, “Children’s Use of Temporal Dimension of Gaze to Infer Preference,” Developmental Psychology 42 (2006): 142–52.
21. S. Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness (MIT Press, 1995).
22. R. B. Adams, H. L. Gordon, A. A. Baird, N. Ambady, and R. E. Kleck, “Effects of Gaze on Amygdala Sensitivity to Anger and Fear Faces,” Science 300 (2003): 1536.
23. K. Nichols and B. Champness, “Eye Gaze and the GSR,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 7 (1971): 623–26.
24. M. Argle and M. Cook, Gaze and Mutual Gaze (Cambridge University Press, 1976).
25. This explanation first was suggested by Titchener, “The Feeling of Being Stared At.”
26. R. Sheldrake, A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance (Park Street Press, 1981).
27. According to Sheldrake’s theory, any system, including minds, can assume a particular shape or configuration. “Morphic” means shape. A change in the shape of any one system affects the collective shape of all related systems. This is the resonance part of the theory. Subsequent systems resonate with other systems, enabling information to travel across space and time. The effect is stronger the more systems are involved and the more similar the future system is to the systems that generated the field. In 1989 the experimental psychologist Zoltan Dienes undertook research to investigate morphic resonance by testing it with remote viewing of repetition priming. In repetition priming, people respond more quickly and accurately with repeated presentation. He wanted to know if people trained on word recognition tasks influenced a different group of people through the effects of thought transference. Initially, he found a significant effect. Unfortunately, when he ran the study another two times, there was no effect. Dienes explains in mathematical detail why some theories should be tested and why others should not. More importantly, he explains the importance and difficulty of establishing truth in his new book, Understanding Psychology as a Science: An Introduction to Scientific and Statistical Inference (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
28. G. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel (Secker & Warburg, 1949).
29. M. Milinski, D. Semmann, and H. J. Krambeck, “Reputation Helps Solve ‘Tragedy of the Commons,’” Nature 415 (2002): 424–26.
30. M. Bateson, D. Nettle, and G. Roberts, “Cues of Being Watched Enhance Cooperation in a Real World Setting,” Biology Letters 2 (2006): 412–14.
31. J. M. Bering, K. A. McLeod, and T. K. Shackelford, “Reasoning About Dead Agents Reveals Possible Adaptive Trends,” Human Nature 16 (2005): 360–81.
32. J. M. Bering, “The Folk Psychology of Souls,” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (2006): 453–98.
33. S. Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (Oxford University Press, 1993).
34. K. Conrad, Die beginnende Schizophrenie: Versuch einer Gestaltanalyse des Wahns (Thieme, 1958).
35. T. C. Manschreck, B. A. Maher, J. J. Milavetz, D. Ames, C. C. Weisstein, and M. L. Schneyer, “Semantic Priming in Thought Disordered Schizophrenic Patients,” Schizophrenia Research 1 (1988): 61–66.
36. M. Eckblad and L. J. Chapman, “Magical Ideation as an Indicator of Schizotypy,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 51 (1983): 215–25.
37. B. E. Brundage, “First-Person Account: What I Wanted to Know but Was Afraid to Ask,” Schizophrenia Bulletin 9 (1983): 583–85, 584.
38. R. Montague, Why Choose This Book? How We Make Decisions (Dutton, 2007).
39. G. Fénelon, F. Mahieux, R. Huon, and M. Ziégler, “Hallucinations in Parkinson’s Disease,” Brain 123 (2000): 733–45.
40. R. King, J. D. Barchas, and B. A. Huberman, “Chaotic Behavior in Dopamine Neurodynamics,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 81 (1984): 1244–47; see also A. Shaner, “Delusions, Superstitious Conditioning, and Chaotic Dopamine Neurodynamics,” Medical Hypothesis 52 (1999): 119–23.
41. P. Brugger, “From Haunted Brain to Haunted Science: A Cognitive Neuroscience View of Paranormal and Pseudoscientific Thought,” in Hauntings and Poltergeists: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, edited by J. Houran and R. Lange (McFarland & Co., 2001).
42. S. Blackmore and T. Troscianko, “Belief in the Paranormal: Probability Judgments, Illusory Control, and the Chance Baseline Shift,” British Journal of Psychology 76 (1985): 459–468.
43. P. Krummenacher, P. Brugger, M. Fathi, and C. Mohr, “Dopamine, Paranormal Ideation, and the Detection of Meaningful Stimuli,” Paper presented at the Zentrum fur Neurowissenschaften, Zurich (2002).
44. It is still a matter of dispute whether Neanderthals had relatively less well-developed frontal lobes in comparison to modern man. In terms of size it is likely that Neanderthal frontal lobes were just as big [See H.J. Jerison, “Evolution of the Frontal Lobes” in The Human Frontal Lobes: Functions and Disorders, 2nd Edition, edited by B. L. Miller and J. L. Cummings (Guilford Press, 2007)]. However, others argue that size was not enough and that their frontal lobes did not support the same mental operations [e.g. E. Massad and A. F. Rocha, “Meme-Gene Coevolution and Cognitive Mathematics” in Advances in Logic, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, edited by J. M. Abe and J. J. da Silva Filho (IOS Press, 2002)].
45. P. Goldman-Rakic, “Working Memory and the Mind,” in Mind and Brain: Readings from Scientific American (W. H. Freeman & Co., 1993).
46. A. Baddeley, Working Memory (Oxford University Press, 1986).
47. J. Emick and M. Welsh, “Association Between Formal Operational Thought and Executive Function as Measured by the Tower of Hanoi-Revised,” Learning and Individual Differences 15 (2005): 177–88.
48. J. R. Stroop, “Studies of Interference in Serial Verbal Reactions,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 18 (1935): 643–62. This test is usually done with words printed in different colors, but my publishers warned me that the cost of printing just a few words in color could not be justified. Luckily for me, Steve Pinker presumably encountered the same issue in his latest book, The Stuff of Thought (2007, p. 332), where he also describes the Stroop effect. I have used his solution in overcoming the use of colored ink to achieve the same demonstration.
49. A. Diamond, The Development and Neural Bases of Higher Cognitive Functions (New York Academy of Sciences, 1990).
50. K. Dunbar, J. Fugelsang, and C. Stein, “Do Naive Theories Ever Go Away?” in Thinking with Data: Thirty-third Carnegie Symposium on Cognition, edited by M. Lovett and P. Shah (Erlbaum, in press).
51. In fact, it is the right dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex which is active when adults are actively suppressing the urge to respond with the intuitive response. Wim De Neys, Oshin Vartanian, Vinod Goel (2008) Smarter Than We Think: When Our Brains Detect That We Are Biased, Psychological Science 19 (5), 483–489
52. T. Lombrozo, D. Kelemen, and D. Zaitchik, “Teleological Explanation in Alzheimer’s Disease Patients,” Psychological Science 18 (2007): 999–1006.
53. D. Zaitchik and G. Solomon, “Animist Thinking in the Elderly and in Patients with Alzheimer’s Disease,” Cognitive Neuropsychology (in press).
54. J. S. B. T. Evans, “In Two Minds: Dual Process Accounts of Reasoning,” Trends in Cognitive Science 7 (2003): 454–59.
55. S. Epstein, R. Pacini, V. Denes-Raj, and H. Heier, “Difference in Intuitive-Experiential and Analytical-Rational Thinking Styles,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71 (1996): 390–405.
56. L. A. King, C. M. Burton, J. A. Hicks, and S. M. Drigotas, “Ghosts, UFOs, and Magic: Positive Affect and the Experiential System,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92 (2007): 905–19.
57. M. Lindeman and K. Aarnio, “Superstitious, Magical, and Paranormal Beliefs: An Integrative Model,” Journal of Research in Personality 41 (2007): 731–44; M. Lindeman and M. Saher, “Vitalism, Purpose, and Superstition,” British Journal of Psychology 98, no. 1 (2007): 33–44; M. Lindeman and K. Aarnio, “Paranormal Beliefs: Their Dimensionality and Psychological Correlates,” European Journal of Personality 20 (2006): 585–602.
CHAPTER TEN: Would You Let Your Wife Sleep with Robert Redford?
1. P. E. Tetlock, “Thinking the Unthinkable: Sacred Values and Taboo Cognitions,” Trends in Cognitive Science 7 (2003): 320–24.
2. W. Styron, Sophie’s Choice (Random House, 1979).