Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

"The Natural History Of Truth: The Neurobiology Of Belief", Neil Greenberg

Faculty Publications and Other Works -- Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

The pursuit of truth is woven into the fabric of every organism*. Any estimate of how best to survive and thrive in the reality in which we are immersed requires a sense of self, of the world, and of their relationship to each other. I wish to explore the idea that this pursuit has at its heart two complementary modes of reality testing utilizing separate cerebral systems which deal, respectively with the correspondence of experience with the world and the coherence of the experience with previous experiences: “is it real” and “does it fit?” At multiple levels of the nervous …