The unpersuadables
Subtitle: adventures with the enemies of science
By: Will Storr
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2014
Language: eng
Number of pages: 355
ISBN-13: 9781468308181
Subjects: Holocaust denial; Psychology; Science; Pseudoscience; Heresy in science; Scientific Errors; Miscellanea; Recovered memory; Belief and doubt; Parapsychology; Homeopathy; Creationism
Work titles: Heretics
Description: While excavating fossils in the tropics of Australia with a celebrity creationist, Will Storr asked himself a simple question. Why don't facts work? Why, that is, did the obviously intelligent man beside him sincerely believe in Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden and a six-thousand-year-old Earth, in spite of the evidence against them? It was the start of a journey that would lead Storr all over the world-from Texas to Warsaw to the Outer Hebrides-meeting an extraordinary cast of modern "heretics" whom he tries his best to understand. Storr tours Holocaust sites with famed denier David Irving and a band of neo-Nazis, experiences his own murder during "past life regression" hypnosis, discusses the looming One World Government an iconic climate skeptic, and investigates the tragic life and death of a woman who believed her parents were high priests in a baby-eating cult. Using a unique mix of highly personal memoir, investigative journalism, and the latest research from neuroscience and experimental psychology, Storr reveals how the stories we tell ourselves about the world invisibly shape our beliefs, and how the neurological "hero maker" inside us all can so easily lead to self-deception, toxic partisanship and science denial.
Notes: "First published in hardcover in the United States in 2014 by The Overlook Press"--Title page verso.

Previously published under title: The heretics : adventures with the enemies of science.  London : Picador, 2013.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [318]-345) and index.