On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not [Paperback]

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.

InOn Being Certain, neurologist Robert Burton shows that feeling certainfeeling that we know something--- is a mental sensation, rather than evidence of fact. 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. In other words, 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 Certainchallenges what we know (or think we know) about the mind, knowledge, and reason.

1. The Feeling of Knowing
2. How Do We Know What We Know?
3. Conviction Isn't a Choice
4. The Classification of Mental States
5. Neural Networks
6. Modularity and Emergence
7. When Does a Thought Begin?
8. Perceptual Thoughts: A Further Clarification
9. The Pleasure of Your Thoughts
10. Genes and Thought
11. Sensational Thoughts
12. The Twin Pillars of Certainty: Reason and Objectivity
13. Faith
14. Mind Speculations
15. Final Thoughts

Notes
Acknowledgements
Index

ROBERT BURTON, M.D. graduated from Yale University and University of California at San Francisco medical school. At age thirty-three, he was appointed chief of the Division of Neurology at Mt. Zion-UCSF Hospital, where he subsequently became Associate Chief of the Department of Neurosciences. His non-neurology writing career includes three critically acclaimed novels. He lives in Sausalito, CA.

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