Dr. Steven Novella

Whereas I conclude I'm missing something, right?

The humility comes into, I must be missing something.

I don't understand this.

And when you do that, you find out I am missing.

So always you are missing something because you're not an expert.

You know, the expertise is, you know, is a thing for a reason because they know things.

Another aspect of that, you know, at some point I realized like, oh, all this science outside of my specialty, right?

Outside of medicine, right?

All the things I think I know, like about astrophysics or whatever, is really just a metaphor that the experts are telling us to help us wrap our non-expert brains around it.

But unless you know 12-dimensional, whatever, the math and all that stuff, unless you are speaking that language, you don't know.

You don't know what a black hole is.

You have a metaphor that somebody told you, and you think you're going to outthink the people who came up with the metaphor because you can't understand what's really going on?

That's like super arrogance when you think you're going to overturn science because you're just such a freaking genius.

Well, that's another good question.

There's good neuroscience behind that as well.

We're basically evolved to surrender our critical thinking to charismatic leaders within our own tribe, right?

And there's an fMRI study of now probably five to 10 years ago, whatever, where functional MRI scan looks at the brain functioning in real time, right?

And they did fMRI people's brains while they were listening to a public speaker from within their belief system and from outside their belief system.

And they were different.

When it was from within their belief system, the frontal lobe circuitry that engages in reality testing was not functioning.