Conscious Thought

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The vast majority of things occur beneath thought and then they're projected into consciousness. If you drive a home on autopilot, you feel nothing. On the other hand, there are a whole separate area of the brain to give us some idea of what is going on. And this feeling that things are right or wrong can be stimulated in the absence of any thought at all.

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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