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True Believers 15

BELIEFS MADE REAL

Why do we commit to certain business ideas and not others? How
do our beliefs become so rock solid that they are virtually impossible
to dislodge? Most businesspeople think of commitment as an intan-
gible force. They know it when they feel it, but don’t see any under-
lying mechanisms to explain how something so “soft” actually works.
But research into how the brain works sheds considerable light on
the fact that such mechanisms not only exist at a neurological level,
they exert great power as well.

In a 2007 study, neurologist Sam Harris and two collaborators in-
vestigated the role of various brain regions and structures in mediating
our beliefs. They measured how long it took people to judge written
statements as “true,” “false,” or “undecidable,” and they scanned their
subjects’ brains during the process using functional magnetic reso-
nance imaging (fMRI). They found that people assessed statements
as believable more quickly than they judged statements to be false or
undecidable, and that the different types of statements were processed
in distinct regions of the brain. In short, new information that matches
our existing perceptions gets an “express lane” treatment, whereas
contradictory information takes a longer, more tortuous processing
path. “Because the brain appears to process false or uncertain state-
ments in regions linked to pain and disgust,” the researchers wrote,
“this research supports [the seventeenth century philosopher] Spin-
oza’s conjecture that most people have a low tolerance for ambiguity
and that belief comes quickly and naturally, whereas skepticism is slow
and unnatural.”6

Researchers have also found that deep levels of passion create sig-
nificant changes in the brain, changes that, in turn, reinforce the very
beliefs that created them. Andrew Newberg, M.D., director of the
Center for Spirituality and the Mind at the University of Pennsylva-
nia, has studied the brain’s role in spirituality and written extensively
about the topic. He and his collaborators have scanned the brains of
hundreds of religious practitioners (Franciscan nuns engaged in
prayer, meditating Buddhists, Pentecostal followers speaking in
tongues), documenting how beliefs become neurologically real in the

American Management Association • www.amanet.org