The Heretics by Will Storr: review F Scott Fitzgerald said that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. This exploration of the irrational and the zany versus the rational and materialist is journalist Will Storr's attempt to test Fitzgerald's theory out, chiefly on himself. Heretics is essentially a book about belief written by a sceptic questioning his own scepticism. Storr's method is total oddball immersion. He takes himself off to meet the innocuous - alien abductees, past life regressors - and the sinister - Holocaust denier David Irving - trying to make head and tail of their beliefs. At first glance Storr covers much the same territory as those other explorers of the outer realms of belief, Jon Ronson and Louis Theroux, but his tone is both less sneery and more genuinely exploratory than either. Science, argues Storr, provides facts about the world, but "belief is at the heart of who we are and how we live our lives." Using psychological research to back his argument, Storr illustrates how we recruit "facts" to bolster our own views, a process called confirmation bias, while ignoring contradictory evidence, known as cognitive dissonance. Some of the more shocking episodes in Heretics involve arch-materialists inflexibly and arrogantly defending their positions (cue biologist Lewis Wolpert: "An open mind is a very bad thing - everything falls out") while, in some cases, launching vicious, personal attacks against those in their own academic circles who hold divergent views. Storr himself is too clever and too questing for any of that. He's also too aware of his own foibles and prejudices. As the book proceeds, so Storr's own journey leads us back to Fitzgerald's aphorism. Plagued by "delusional jealousy, pathological drinking and theft," Storr just about retained the ability to function in his own life, but clung none the less to the presumption that people live "rationally." It's a common delusion among smart boys in possession of expensive classical educations and in this Storr was no exception. Glancing references to his rebellion against his father's religiosity hint at a young man's attempts to find his own place in the world, but for a writer whose journey involves a growing appreciation of the narratives we tell ourselves in all their irrational and self-serving glory, Storr remains frustratingly sketchy about his own. This is a humane and generous book and in the face of those ultra-rationalists and materialists who wish to rob us of the wonder of human existence, its insightful exploration of lives lived "beyond the facts" is to be celebrated. The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science Will Storr Picador, £16.99, 450pp