Shermer's column in Scientific American

In the May 2005 issue of Scientific American, Michael Shermer wrote a column entitled Turn Me On, Dead Man where he gives an interesting explanation of why people get and believe absurd ideas. Examples of such absurd ideas are the face of the Virgin Mary on a grilled toast (see image here), an oyster shell that looks like Jesus (see image here), that clues hidden in Beatles' songs indicate that Paul McCartney was killed in 1966 and replaced by a look-alike, or that it is possible to communicate with dead people through a tape recorder in what is called Electronic Voice Phenomenon. His explanation is that our brains evolved to become pattern-recognition machines able to detect signals that enhance our every day survival. We associate for example a smiling face with hapiness, percieve a scream as a sign of danger or can recognize if a building is a bank, church, school or a residence - this capability is association learning. Shermer argues that this pattern-recognition machine often finds nonexistent signals in the background noise of life. We have a signal-to-noise problem where false associations are made; as our pattern-recognition brains scan the world around us false patterns are found in the background noise.

Michael Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and the author of a regular column in Scientific American called Skeptic.
He is a strong advocate of the skeptic point of view, although he is a historian rather than a scientist. His skepticism seems to have developed in reaction to his earlier credulity. Indeed, he was greatly involved in the religious community at a younger age and even gave Bible study courses himself. He attended the Church of Christ affiliated Pepperdine University with the intent of majoring in theology.

Links to some of the books written by Michael Shermer:
Science Friction
How We Believe
The Borderlands of Science
Why People Believe Weird Things