As he was researching his new book, Will Storr met a creationist who said there were dragons on Noahâs Ark, a climate-change denier who maintained that DDT is harmless and can be eaten âby the tablespoon,â and a past-life regression therapist who told him that in previous lives, one of her clients was a tree branch and two others were John Lennon.

Occasionally, Storr found himself frustrated. But the industrious British journalist kept his exasperation in check, deciding that he was less interested in combatting obviously flawed reasoning than in exploring how contentious notions take root in the first place. In terms of the intellectual rigor required to get the job done, Storr chose the tougher path. For this, he deserves a pat on the back.
The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science, in which Storr asks dissident ideologues to explain their unusual theories, could easily have become a crass look-at-me-Iâm-shooting-fish-in-a-barrel expedition. The jokes practically write themselves.
Instead, drawing upon his well-documented store of inquisitiveness about superstition, eccentricity, and idiosyncratic beliefs, Storr has delivered an accessible look at the brainâs capacity for adopting unconventional ideas. Along the way, he makes some convincing arguments but occasionally oversells the obvious. He also introduces us to a roster of vexing charactersâsome harmless, others quite nastyâand the subcultures in which they circulate.
Storr happens to be a connoisseur of alternative thinking. In newspaper and magazine pieces, heâs profiled occultists, doomsday fundamentalists and Big Foot-believers. Also a novelist, Storrâs last nonfiction title was about people who say theyâre in touch with ghosts.
Like a lot of his previous work, his new book emerged from his abiding fascination with groups and individuals who refuse to accept the scientific consensus on everything from the effectiveness of our medicines to the formation of the universe. In one important way, he writes, people who adopt radical philosophies arenât so different from the rest of us: âwe all secretly believe we are right about everything and, by extension, we are all wrong.â
In The Unpersuadables, his curiosity about these matters takes him first to eastern Australia, where he meets John Mackay, a creationist who says the Noahâs Ark story is a literal truth and talks of a gay conspiracy to convert heterosexuals. Storr, to his credit, calls Mackay on some of his wrongheadednessâââWhen I sat there listening to you today going on about gay people,â I tell him, âI thought you were evil.â But as theyâre about to part ways, he sounds worried that heâs embarked on a demoralizing project. âWhat can you do,â Storr wonders, âwhen common sense doesnât work? When reasonâs bullets turn out to be made of smoke?â
A couple chapters later, Storr attends a yoga confab in London hosted by Swami Ramdev, an Indian guru who says his teachings cure potentially fatal ailments. He speaks with several attendees who testify to the healing powers of the Ramdev-endorsed pranayama breathing method, and he interviews the man himself: âI begin by asking, just to confirm, that pranayama really can cure all diseases. He nods deeplyâŚâYes,â he says.â
Pondering what heâs been told, Storr concedes that the guruâs teachings appear to aid the health of some of his followers. But he suggests that whatâs at play is less a matter of respiratory cleansing than a kind of placebo effect. He talks with doctors and scientists who study cognition, and cites a raft of research that bolsters his hypothesis. The âplacebo effect is limited,â he writes. âIt cannot shrink tumors, mend broken jaws or cure diabetes. But it can have remarkable effects on pain, for example, and inflammation, ulcers and anxiety.â
This, alas, is a rather uninspired conclusion, and when, in the following chapter, he again cites the placebo effect in explaining the appeal of past-life regression therapy, one begins to wonder if Storr will spend the entirety of the book making banal observations. His subsequent consideration of confirmation biasâthe unconscious process by which we assemble evidence that supports our preconceptionsâis also fairly rote.
But as he delves deeper into knottier concepts, The Unpersuadables begins to find its footing. This is most apparent in his discussion of the many forms of confabulation. A conceptual cousin of confirmation bias, itâs a term weâve all heard, but one that, for those who study cognition, is particularly useful in explaining our predilections and beliefs. Confabulation, Storr writes, is âwhat we do when we unknowingly invent explanations for behaviors and beliefs whose causes weâ donât quite comprehend.
Though some in the scientific community will probably find his analysis to be rather superficial, Storrâs distillation of current thinking on the subject is a nice primer for the non-expert reader.
With welcome clarity, he describes the findings of many relevant studies, noting that researchers disagree on how much of conscious reasoning is confabulation. David Eagleman notes that âthe brainâs storytelling powers kick into gear only when things are conflicting or difficult to understand.â But Daniel Wegner, who died in 2013, argues that our sense of free will is a confabulation, while Jonathan Haidt says that our moral beliefs are also mostly confabulations.
This is a useful concept when trying to make sense of the ideas espoused by some of the bookâs more brazen figures, smart people who seem to be almost willfully misinformed. These include a historian who claims that Hitler didnât know about his Nazi machineâs genocidal campaign against Jews, and a far-right muckraker who says the idea of manmade climate change is hokum.
This latter fellow, a British viscount named Christopher Monckton, believes that the Hitler Youth were left wing and green, and compares 2009âs Copenhagen Climate Conference to the Nuremberg Rallies. Storr couldâve ridiculed the manâs foolhardy statements, but that wouldnât have taken much effort. Instead, he uses Monckton as a vessel for exploring how we form our opinions and attitudes. What does it mean to be card-carrying conservativeâor, for that matter, a staunch liberalâand why do so many politically-minded citizens adhere to such a rigid set of ideological positions?
âIf a personâs set of beliefs all cohere, it means that they are telling themselves a highly successful story. It means that their confabulation is so rich and deep and all-enveloping that almost every living particle of nuance and doubt has been suffocated. Which says to me, their brains are working brilliantly,â Storr writes, âand their confabulated tale is not to be trusted.â