I got a last minute request to take the ticket of a friend who could not make it to the BrainWave series lecture on SuperSense,  a conversation between Neuroscientist Bruce Hood with author Peter Matthiessen.

Here are the marketing notes:

Why do we believe in the unbelievable? Neuroscientist Bruce Hood explores with author Peter Matthiessen how our brains may be pre-wired with a “SuperSense” that shapes our intuitions, superstitions, and social interactions. Hood is the director of the Bristol Cognitive Development Centre in the Experimental Psychology Department at the University of Bristol. Matthiessen recently won the National Book Award for a second time for his Shadow Country. His first award was for The Snow Leopard (1980).

Here’s my notes – bear in mind I wrote them on my iPhone and had to re-edit to get rid of typos and add hyperlinks and extra tags.

Examples of artifacts that are steeped in ritual and people don’t trust scientists. Our brain generates experience; the brain creates a version of reality.

Children are Pre-disposed to see life as a mind body dualism, wishful thinking and rituals with sacred values and supernatural components.

We all have many experiences we can’t explain and it’s important to recognize the power of belief. Doing an experiment for “the hell of it” stimulates creativity. However has been used to argue that if you have a belief you must have evidence supporting it,

Peter Matthiessen goes on to drink his wine and the audience laughed.

For many of us, we have a notion of “essences” that are imbued to common objects.

There is a notion that beliefs can “inoculate us” from the worst cases of uncertainty in our lives.

Bruce mentions one of the co-founders of Microsoft is now circling the globe in space in the Russian space capsule, the height of achievement, yet on the way to enter the space capsule, before launch, astronauts urinate on the back of the wheels of the bus they are in, for good fortune.

As a matter of fact, Bruce mentions, our “superstitious beliefs” innoculate us against the uncertainity of our lives, and without those beliefs, we would not do as well.

As I’m writing this, I’m trying to bring this post full circle, back to Analytics.

In a way, the notion that we can “measure” data and provide meaning, based on what we can collect via Site Analytics and Social Media, is itself, a belief, that we need, to do our work better, yet we can’t always prove this is really true.

For example, how often have we been on projects and teams, dedicated to providing insight, and yet, due to the uncertainty of the organizations we function within, can’t be totally effective.

Yet we need this belief, that we can explain any business process and any website, and yet, no matter how much we think we can, there are aspects of our lives, including our work, that have elements we can’t fully control or explain.