This book examines the foundations of personal belief by conducting a review of classical and contemporary thought about beliefs, by experimenting with new and innovative ways to conceptualize beliefs and by presenting new evidence about beliefs from empirical studies. Beliefs, although often vaguely defined in discourse, can be conceptualized in many different ways: as associative memories; as coactivations between multiple neural assemblies; as functional cognitive instruments; as self- propagating entities that parasitize minds; as the firings of a certainty module in the brain;...