Supersense by Bruce Hood

It took me ages to read this. Puzzling as it’s a fascinating subject and an argument I agree with but the book was really hard to read.

The book is basically about how our minds have developed to be primed to believe in supernatural phenomenon to explain the world around us. This leads on to the idea that religions are just fit this already existing structure rather than are imposed brain washing forced on the young. This way of thinking goes a long way to explaining why religion persists and is believed by intelligent people despite evidence that it is not logical. It showed me the debate about god / atheism will not be resolved as belief is, although illogical, intuitively correct.

Most of that summary is actually gleamed from the New Scientist special edition on God I’ve just read. This condensed all the best ideas I read in the book to eight easy pages without reference to supersense. Clearly lots of people are working in this area and I was unfortunate to find the one book I found hard to get along with.

To me the book was just a jumbled mess of anecdotal evidence with a hotchpotch of well-known experiments, conjecture and ramblings. I was hard pressed to follow any narrative even though there were summaries at the end of each chapter. I found a few gens of wisdom but it was a hard slog to get to the end.

My advice would be to save time and read New Scientist 17 March 2012 issue as that, to me, is the best way to engage with these new ideas.