On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not | 
 enlarge | Author: Robert Burton
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 8860
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.8 x 1.2
ISBN: 0312359209
Dewey Decimal Number: 153.4
EAN: 9780312359201
ASIN: 0312359209
Publication Date: February 5, 2008
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Product Description
You recognize when you know something for certain, right? You "know" the sky is blue, or that the traffic light had turned green, or where you were on the morning of September 11, 2001--you know these things, well, because you just do. In On Being Certain, neurologist Robert Burton challenges the notions of how we think about what we know. He shows that the feeling of certainty we have when we "know" something comes from sources beyond our control and knowledge. In fact, certainty is a mental sensation, rather than evidence of fact. Because this "feeling of knowing" seems like confirmation of knowledge, we tend to think of it as a product of reason. But an increasing body of evidence suggests that feelings such as certainty stem from primitive areas of the brain, and are independent of active, conscious reflection and reasoning. The feeling of knowing happens to us; we cannot make it happen. Bringing together cutting edge neuroscience, experimental data, and fascinating anecdotes, Robert Burton explores the inconsistent and sometimes paradoxical relationship between our thoughts and what we actually know. Provocative and groundbreaking, On Being Certain, will challenge what you know (or think you know) about the mind, knowledge, and reason.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
 Entertaining and Interesting, but... August 12, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I am always slightly annoyed when a book is not about what is is supposed to be about. A few chapters of this book - those towards the end - are on why the feeling of certainty is just that: a feeling. This leads the author to some interesting discussions about how the 'feeling of certianty (a feeling though it is) is something that tends not to be subject to reason, but owes more to emotion. The author also goes into some really interesting thoughts about evolutionary reasons why the feeling of certainty as a tool to help us survive in an uncertain world (where we have to act, so we might as well act with conviction).
Unfortunately, this only happens well into the second half of the book (maybe 2/3rds of the way through). The first many chapters are stage setters. There are chapters about distinguishing what is meant by "mental states," "feeling" and "sensation," chapters describing how we know that emotions like fear, deja vu, and religious experience are chemical in nature, and how the "mind" is an emergent property tying together several components of the brain into a unity.
The author also spends quite a bit of time talking about what neuroscientists term the "hidden layer." That is, when we make decisions, the brain "surveys" a whole host of things - past experiences, attitudes one has acquired, things one has learned, etc. - to come to a conclusion, but this is all "hidden" form our consciousness. Thus, the author concludes that while we may feel like our deliberations are conscious, often the bulk of our deliberation is unconscious.
All of this, the author tells us, supports the thesis (that he eventually gets to) suggesting that certainty is a feeling,, and not always one subject to rationality as we generally assume. Since we have seen that attitudes like fear, deja vu, and sense of purpose are feelings like any other, and we have seen that feelings like these are often not subject to rationality (try convincing a clinically depressed person that the feeling of purposelessness is only a chemical "illusion"), and we know that much of our thought is unconcious, we can also infer that the feeling of certianty is subject to all of these. (Try convincing a young-earth creationist that the earth is more than 6,000 years old and that their certainty is not due to the strength of the idea.)
Really, I don't have any huge qualms with this. We've all seen people be so certain of something that is (to us) obviously wrong, and know all to well that people's attachment to ideas often has not a thing to do with rationality. (And we all, if we are honest, realize that we have been the 'dummy' in this scenario as well.)
My biggest problem, from a literary standpoit, is that the author takes a very long time to get to his point, beginning many chapters with something like: "I want to talk about the feeling of certainty. But first, let's..." Once that happens too many times, I begin to lose patience, particularly when some chapters (like that reviewing the difference between "feelings" and "sensations") simply go on longer than they should.
My philosophical beefs with the book is: the author, who suggests may times that we cannot step beyond our feelings of certainty if they are strong enough, would be well served to have included a chapter on examples where people DO change their minds about things they were once deeply certain about. The fact that this happens - albeit happens only with difficulty and pain - gives empirical lie to this thesis.
Really, this is a quite interesting book with an interesting case that simply takes the author too many pages to make. I resisted the urge to skip ahead numerous times (and did skip half a chapter that seemed to veer frequently off topic). I wish the author would have discussed the issue of 'certainty' more than the tertiarilly related matter of brain states like fear and deja vu.
In the end, I would reccomend this book to people as a follow-up read to books like "Mistakes Were Made," which give a much more direct discussion of our brain's tendency to fall into illusions of certainty. This book does that, but simply tries to do so much more that it may better have been written as a collection of loosely related essays.
On Being Certain August 7, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
A fun and informative read. Robert Burton informs,presenting factual and ironic detail of the brain an our behavoral responses to external and internal memory. Recomended for students of psychycolgy, marketing and those interest in broadening their understanding of human behavior.
It's Not What You Know it's Whether You Really Know It July 16, 2008
I think my title above gets to the substance of Dr. Burton's narrative. How do we know what we know? Dr. Burton posits that the feeling of knowing is a necessary biological function required to allow humans to contemplate thought and take action. In other words, there has to be some reward for a person to think about and know what they are concluding and this reward comes in the feelings of knowing, certainty and correctness. The problem is that the feeling is not always corroborated by the facts. How many times have you been dead certain of something, only to be later proven wrong? And of those times, how many are followed by hindsight reframing of the situation to maintain your correctness?
Burton delves into the physioligical details, philosophical ramifications and cultural and social implications of the reality that we may never be able to grasp 100% certainty on any subject. The subject poses conundrums about issues like free will, religious beliefs and other areas, and Burton explores these in his text.
My concerns are that Burton starts out by stating that some of what he discusses is his own speculation, but never clearly tells us where that occurs. In addition, he is guilty of his own bent towards certainty when he states that the case for evolution is air-tight (it's not). Finally, someone once said that the seeds of destruction of a false belief are contained in that fasle belief's own logic. So, if the conclusion is that we can never be 100% right, then that very conclusion can never be 100% right, so maybe it's wrong and we can be 100% right. Kapeesh?
That being said, there is a lot of interesting material about how the brain works, and a lot of food for thought about how it is that we know what we know.
Certainly Interesting July 14, 2008
A readily readable and thoughtful look at how our minds work in relation to things our minds produce like thoughts and ideas. It goes on to raise important questions about the implications of "the feeling of knowing" for philosophy, psychology and indirectly politics. It is a worthwhile read. It might have been improved by a more extensive look at the neurology of this erstwhile affect.
 One of three recent great books on our weird minds June 15, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I rank this second among my favorite three books this year on the topic of the oddities of normal human thinking - right after How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of "Intangibles" in Business and just above Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions.
How Burton treats the issue of certainty is an interesting compliment to how Hubbard treats uncertainty in How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of "Intangibles" in Business. Burton looks at situations where we can feel certain but be wrong. Likewise, Hubbard looks at how we can be "statistically overconfident" and will usually underestimate our uncertainty if we attempt to assign odds to uncertain events. Hubbard seems to offer more empirical data on this topic and, more importantly, how to adjust for this error.
There seem to be more and more books in the genre of quirks in human reasoning and perception - specifically, how we feel certain or uncertain. But these are among the very few I would recommend. Save your money on the rest.
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