David McRaney talks to neurologist Robert Burton about the feeling of knowing. He says it was difficult for him to find a common language around ideas like belief, attitudes and values. In some cultures, that phrase doesn't even exist, so there's a long history of trying to sort out what's going on in our minds.
In this episode, we sit down with neurologist Robert Burton, author of On Being Certain, a book that fundamentally changed the way I think about what a belief actually is. That’s because the book posits that conclusions are not conscious choices and certainty is not even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of “knowing” as he puts it, are "sensations that feel like thoughts, but arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that function independently of reason."
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