L'autore da solo fa bene quello che in tre non sono riusciti a fare nel sopravvalutato "Nati per credere".
Ampliando le domande e la prospettiva, dando parecchie risposte circostanziate e diversi riferimenti interessanti alla letteratura scientifica. Con uno stile un po' scanzonato, che non guasta.
Mi sarebbe piaciuta una bibliografia ragionata, alla fine, ma nessuno è perfetto. ( )

Certainly gave some ideas of why the brain creates weird things like feelings of ghosts and being stared at. Will likely read more about the concept in the future. ( )

This is a fairly interesting book about the nature and origin of irrational or supernatural belief - taking these terms not necessarily in a derogatory sense, but as representing a spectrum of non-scientifically verifiable views from mainstream religious beliefs, through belief in ghosts and fortune telling, to customary beliefs such as believing in luck, not walking under ladders, and even common or garden phenomena like believing we can tell when someone behind us is looking at us. His central thesis is that such beliefs are not necessarily taught as part of culture, but sometimes arise from our instinctive thinking as babies and young children. It's interesting stuff, albeit rather repetitive and this could probably have been rather shorter, though it is enlivened by some interesting experiments, for example offering people money to wear a cardigan, then challenging them by saying it belonged to a murderer - society's instinctive conventions prevent most people from wearing it knowing this, even though it's still the same garment. 3.5/5 ( )

Abandoned. Seems like a nice enough book, but a bit wordy and short on new insights.

This is a book that I was initially dissatisfied with, but found more interesting as I went along, so I would urge persisting if the first few chapters don't strike the reader.

This is more hypothesis than theory, and Hood is forced to collect a rather scattered collection of facts to support it, and is, I think, perhaps a little too eager to find supporting information. Not that this is all bad: a theory often starts off with hypotheses and requires refining and further research. These are indeed very interesting subjects, and worth study.

Hood's premise is that we almost all engage in magical thinking that does not correspond to reality and that we believe that subtle essences can be past through physical objects, such as his favorite, the cardigan belonging to a serial killer. Most people will refuse wear it, as if some tinge of evil might be passed by it. Much of this comes from our tendency to perceive patterns, even where they don't exist.

My problem is that some of his arguments are unnuanced, and fail to consider other explanations. “[C]onsider how you would feel if you had to shake hands with a mass murderer […]. Why do we recoil at the thought? Why do we treat their evil as something contagious?” This ignores the social symbolism of shaking hands which confers at least some sense of social acceptability. On the other hand, therapists might shake the hand of such a person in order to establish a useful bond, and certain religious people might shake the hand in order to demonstrate the endless forgiveness both required and offered by their god.

He also notes the belief that lighter things fall more slowly than heavy things. This is one of my pet peeves: in both physics and philosophy thinkers jump from the real to the ideal without much thought. Certainly, in a vacuum, a leaf may fall as fast as a cannon ball, but we don't live in a vacuum, and leaves often fall very slowly, so the belief isn't as ridiculous as he paints it. Even though it is wrong, I fail to see how it is supernatural.

In the case of the cardigan, would you continue to wear the cardigan if you later found out that the person who gave it to you was a murderer? If I suddenly learned that someone had been murdered 20 years ago in the bed that I have been sleeping in for the last 15 years, I don't know that I would get rid of the bed.

On the whole, I would recommend this as a look at a subject of study that has a lot of potential for fascinating insights in the future. ( )