Winchester Skeptics: "The Idiot Brain"

Skeptics in the Pub Winchester hosts a guest speaker on the last Thursday of every month from 7.30pm (doors open from 7.00pm). There is a £3.00 donation towards the venue hire requested on the door, which also gives a chance to win a book in the evening raffle.

Skeptics in the Pub exists to provide an opportunity for people who are interested in science, skepticism, rationalism and critical thinking to socialise and discuss matters of interest. 

The meetings are open to all regardless of beliefs and each month’s talk will be followed up with a challenging Q&A session and social. Winchester SitP is part of a national and global network of SitP events and is organised by the Hampshire Skeptics Society.

The Hampshire Skeptics Society is a non-profit organisation for the promotion of science, reason and critical thinking, humanism and a secular life.

What's the talk about?

Speaker: Brian Flapping

The hugely popular Guardian Brain Flapping science blogger, Dean Burnett, returns to Winchester Skeptics to talk about his new book: The Idiot Brain.

It is a surprising, funny and mind-bending examination of how and why the brain sabotages our behaviour.

Dr Dean Burnett has spent nearly two decades studying the human brain, the most complex, mysterious object in the known universe. In the same way that flaws begin to show when you spend too much time with one person, over time Burnett has come to learn that the human brain can be quite unreliable.
The Idiot Brain explores the many ways in which the brain does things inefficiently, illogically or just plain stupidly, and how these regularly end up influencing our everyday lives and the world around us.

From attention mechanisms to memory processing, the neuroscience of sleep and the psychology of superstition, The Idiot Brain highlights all manner of ways in which the brain is flawed or shoddy, how these impact on our lives in countless ways, and how it’s OK to laugh at all this regardless.