November 15, 2022 • 44 mins
In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert chats with Barbara Blatchley about her book “What are the Chances? Why We Believe in Luck.” (Originally published 11/04/2021)
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is
Robert Lamb and we don't normally air a vault episode
on a Tuesday like this, and it wasn't originally the plan,
but we had some scheduling issues come up with some
interviews that we were putting together here, so I'm going
to just roll out of vault episode here, but don't worry.
(00:25):
I'm putting some stuff together for Thursday, So come back
then and experience a new episode all of the show.
So here's one from the vault. I hope you enjoy.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
(00:51):
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
today we're bringing you an interview that Robert conducted with
a professor of psychology named Barbara Bletchley. Uh. Rob, I
was not here for this conversation. You recorded it while
I was out on vacation a while back. So to
tell me about the talk, what is this? Well, Barbara
came in the show to discuss her new book, What
(01:13):
Are the Chances Why We Believe In Luck? This is
um publication from Columbia University Press, and it's currently available
in hardback get it as an e book an audio book,
So anyway you consume your your books, it's an option. UM.
Barbara is a professor of psychology at Agnes Scott College, Indicator, Georgia,
(01:33):
UM and her scholarly and UH teaching interests include of
physiological psychology, neuroscience research, statistics, psychology of learning, sensation and perception.
Also the biology of depression and UH in factors both
environmental and biological influencing the development of the brain. UM
(01:54):
and of course the book in question here, which is
a delightful read I very much enjoyed. It's just all
about out about luck. Getting into UM various topics related
to luck that you might not even instantly realize are
are central to our understanding of it, such as randomness
and the difficulty in like even contemplating randomness from a
(02:14):
human perspective. Barbara also gets into the neuroscience of luck
as well as how it relates to various UH mythologies
and and so forth. Sounds great, let's jump right on in. Hi, Barbara,
can you introduce yourself to our listeners. Hi, my name
is Barbara Blushley. I'm a professor of psychology and neuroscience
(02:38):
at Agnes Scott College, and I've been there for about, oh,
this is going to be embarrassing forty years now. Your
book provides such an engrossing look at luck and and
randomness and these various um concepts that are all kind
of interwoven into the topic. Uh So, in a way,
it's kind of difficult to decide where to start first.
(02:58):
I wouldn't want to just ask you, well, what is luck,
because that is that's that entire answer is the entire
length of the book. But I thought I might start
by just asking how does luck seem to be connected
to the human unwillingness to accept randomness? Actually, that's a
very good question. I think luck is the word that
we assign to random and unpredictable events in the world.
(03:24):
We tend not to like things that are random and unpredictable.
They're very often interpreted as fearful or threatening. Randomness is
scary because it's unknowable, it's unpredictable. Um, it's unexpected. Uh
I was very fascinated to read a book by Nicholas Carlton,
(03:45):
who's a psychologist in Canada. He writes that fear of
the unknown, the fear of not having the information we
need in order to be able to answer a question,
maybe the most fundamental to basic fear that we have
and underlies every other fear that we learn. We are motivated,
(04:07):
seriously motivated to reduce that uncertainty, and we do that
in a number of different ways. We can We can
do it by being curious, by going out and trying
to find the answer to the question. We also do
it this is very human. We do it by labeling
that thing that we're afraid of. UM. The tendency to
(04:28):
label things that we don't understand, I think is another
fundamental human characteristic. It stems from our desire to control that.
Then if you can label it, then you have some
degree of control over it. Um. One of the more
interesting studies that I came across in writing the book
was a study done by H. Lieberman and the whole
(04:52):
slew of other people in two thousand and seven. They
were looking at their participants under standing emotions, and they
were doing this in an fMRI machine, So they're scanning
the brain to watch how it uh the processes the
information that's coming in. They showed their participants a series
of human faces expressing emotion about the emotions were negative
(05:16):
because that gets a really big response, and the other
were positive emotions. Or they show them just the shape,
and they asked them too, first, just observe the image,
don't do anything about it, don't label it, don't say anything.
And then they asked them to to label that image.
When they were just observing the human faces with emotional expressions,
(05:39):
it activated a part of the brain called the amygdala,
which is part of the emotion processing system in the brain.
When they labeled the emotion, the activity in the amygdala
went down. So it's almost as if being able to
apply a label to that thing reduced the anxiety literally
in the part of the brain that is processing that
(05:59):
am sational response, which I thought was just super interesting.
I did not expect that so loosely speaking, like something
unexpected happens. Uh, there's the the you know, the the unexplained,
the unexpected in life. Just by merely being able to
label it bad luck, you're kind of reducing the like
the emotional um impact of the incident. Yes, I think
(06:24):
that's how they would have interpreted it. They said that
putting your feelings into words helped regulate the negative emotions
that that particular thing unexpected or a negative emotional response
from someone else. Humans are tremendously important to other humans.
We can spend a lot of our time watching human
faces to see what they're doing. So being able to
(06:47):
label that negative emotion reduced the anxiety that that negative
emotion provoked. Fascinating. Now, speaking of of applying language to
these things. In the book, you outline four different types
of luck. M can you describe these fours? Because four
types of luck I came across in a book by
Dr James Austin, who is a neurologist and an author.
(07:11):
In fact, he wrote one of my favorite books of
all time. Um, it's called Zen and the Brain. Had
nothing to do with luck, but just to mention it
because it's a really cool book. So he writes about
these four types of luck in his book, which is
Uh Chase, Chance and Creativity, The Lucky Art of Novelty.
(07:32):
He's really writing about how luck played a role in
his own experiments that he was doing in the lab,
and he details these four different kinds of luck. Each
type of luck builds on the type that came before,
so at the at the foundation of This is what
he called type one luck, which is what most of
us probably think about when we think about luck. It's
(07:53):
random chance. It's just an unexpected, random event that happens
to you. We don't see it coming, but there it is,
and we we wind up having to deal with it.
And the example I used in the book for type
one luck is walking into the casino in Las Vegas
and betting everything you have on the outcome of one
game and walking out a winner. That's type one luck.
(08:17):
That's just random, unexpected against the odds. Look. Type two
luck is a combination of randomness and what Austin called
movement um I think of it as persistence. Really, he
uses the example of Charles Kettering, who's an American inventor
(08:39):
who very famously said, but if you want to solve problems,
you have to be persistent. You have to keep moving,
you have to keep trying. Chances are you will stumble
on something when you least expected. I've never heard of
anyone stumbling on something sitting down. So Kettering was advocating
to be luckier, Get up and move, get up and try.
(09:00):
And Type three luck is a combination then of randomness, persistence,
and preparation, and Austin uses the famous quote by Louis Pasteur.
Chance favors the prepared mind, so preparation helps you see
patterns in the events that happened to you that other
people who are less prepared might not see. And then
(09:21):
type four luck combines randomness, persistence, preparation, and our own
unique personality, our own spin on what happens in the world.
And I used the story of Sarah Kesson's and Emily
Cole and their attempt to win the two thousand and
five wood Veil Transatlantic Rowing Race, which just blows my mind.
(09:44):
I just cannot wrap my head around voluntarily getting in
a rowboat and trying to row across the Atlantic Ocean.
Just not not in my wheelhouse. So I got the
chance to talk with Sarah via email. I think she
lives in New Zealand now. Um. She told me that
(10:04):
she accidentally came across a book, so there's random chance
while she was waiting for an airplane to fly home
across the Atlantic by the way, UH and read about
the race and that was what got her interested in it.
She and her racing partner Emily Cole, had been on
the Purdue University women's skulling team, so they already were
(10:26):
familiar with and prepared for racing long distances, although nothing
like what they were about to attempt. Both thought that
this race sounded like a challenge instead of something you
would avoid at all costs uh, and it was right
up their alley, and both of them prepared like mad,
persisting despite the fact that Indiana lacks an ocean upon
(10:47):
which they could practice, so they were practicing on rivers
and ponds and and things like that, so they they
embodied kind of all four aspects of luck. They suffered, uh,
capsize in the race, as did many people, because apparently
this was just an ill fated race, but they survived
(11:08):
and tried it again. They entered again. If you can't
believe it after that, I don't think I would go
anywhere near a rowboat, but they did. I love the
various examples like this that you share in the book,
so you know, to illustrate these different views and understandings
of luck. Um. One that was particularly I don't know, alarming,
I guess you could say, if if one's not familiar
(11:30):
with the story, was that of Joan Ginther. Can you
tell us about Joan Ginther? And what her story reveals
about luck. I can't. One of the things I had
the most fun with actually in writing the book was
finding these stories of lucky people. And Joan ginther story
was one of the most fun for me because I
teach statistics, so I kind of felt the kindred bond
(11:53):
with Dr Ginther. She is a retired professor of mathematics
who won the lottery four times UM, winning a total
of I think twenty million dollars altogether UM. Her experience
is a wonderful example of a streak in a random event.
Winning the lottery is random. It's really, really, really hard
(12:14):
to predict whether you're going to or not, whether or
not the card that you've got to scratch off lottery
card that you've got is going to be a winner
or not. UM. So her experience winning the lottery four
times against all the odds and repeatedly was really remarkable.
She kind of embodies all four types of luck. She
(12:38):
was definitely prepared to understand the chances of winning the lottery.
She's a math professor, so she probably knew. She was
persistent in that she kept trying even though she knew
what the odds were. She also benefited from the fact
that random events are not necessarily patterned. Less they do
(13:01):
happen in streaks with apparent patterns. If you think about
the stars in the night sky, you can see patterns
in the placement of those stars. In fact, those patterns
are so consistent that we give them names. We've we've
labeled the patterns that we see in the night sky.
So when something happens like this, when somebody wins the lottery,
(13:24):
for example, four times in a row, we tend to think, well,
that's not that's not fair. It's not how the universe works.
It creates uncertainty, and that uncertainty is unpleasant. So we
start looking for a pattern predictability in that event. If
we can find a pattern, we can then understand that
(13:47):
event better. And sometimes that pattern we just say that's luck.
That's an example of luck. Some people insisted, however, that
it couldn't be luck because it was so unexpected, and
that she must have cheated in order to win. So
there there's a whole bunch of reporters who got attracted
(14:07):
to this story and went to try to see could
they find out how she cheated the system. For the
life of me, I can't figure out how she would
have cheated unless she had a level of control over
the creation and distribution of scratch off lottery cards. That
is impossible, and that, as far as I can tell,
she did not have. UM, I just can't see how
(14:29):
she cheated. I think she just was the beneficiary of
a streak in luck. And more power to you, Joan.
So I'm not going to run. I'm not moved to
run out and play the lottery myself because because I
know what the odds are as well. But there you go.
Thank Now. One question I came to mind as I
(14:53):
was I was reading the book. You know, is it
is luck just something? Is it just seemed like a
universal concept for all human cultures? Is it just something
that that emerges alongside language? Is it? Did you run
anything across anything that even resembled a culture without a
tradition of luck? I did not, um. And this was
(15:15):
another thing that I found fascinating. I suppose it's common
to all human cultures in that all human cultures are
created by humans, so we all share uh a tendency
in our cognition, in the way that we leave the world. UM.
I saw an interview with Richard Wiseman, who wrote a
(15:36):
book about luck as well. He said that as far
as he could tell that there it is common to
all humans all over the world. Two want to have
control over the unexpected and that often becomes a tradition
of luck and luckiness or lucky gods or lucky shoes
or lucky whatever in the world. So, if you ask
(15:58):
a cognitive science researcher, these are folks who study how
humans think, what they think about this. Is this a
universal characteristic of the way humans think? They probably would
tell you yes, in that all humans have the tendency
to see patterns in random events, and it's related to
(16:19):
another tendency in the way that we think, which is
to look for an agent for whatever caused an event
to happen. Sometimes you can easily identify the agent. If
you do something and I see you do it, you
are the agent. It's really easy for me to tell.
Sometimes you can't identify the agent, and that makes us nervous.
(16:40):
So searching for and needing an agent for any event
that happens is a pattern. It's a survival mechanism for
us humans. It goes hand in hand with our tendency
to interpret all patterns as having meaning and discounting randomness
because we can't see what cause did so we tend
(17:00):
to just say, well, that didn't happen there there must
be something causing this. If that event that happened is
beyond the capacity of humans to create, we start looking
for invisible superhuman agents. We refer to these agents very
often as gods and goddesses. They are divine, They have
control over things we don't have control over. They must
(17:22):
be the agent of whatever happened, and maybe if you
ask them, really, really nicely, they'll help you experience good
luck as well. I was a bit surprised at how
consistently we humans have insisted on and institutionalized the idea
of luck um as a force in the universe, as
something that makes things happen. I'm going to go out
(17:44):
on a on a limb here, uh, something that might
get me into trouble. I am not a cultural anthropologist.
I'm interested in this, but I'm not an expert by
any means. But what struck me was that most cultures
have an explanation of luck and how it influences us,
and most of these explanations involved the divine in some
(18:05):
way shape or form that seems to be the common
underlying factor. Humans like there to be an agent in charge,
and very often that agent is a god. Now there's
a whole section of the book where you you look
to two different cultures and you go back in history
and look at different ideas. I was. I was a
little surprised when prehistoric cave paintings came up. Can you
(18:28):
describe how prehistoric cave paintings may relate to luck after say,
going to see the cave paintings at lasco Um or elsewhere,
not just photographs of them. He's on my personal bucket list.
I would love to do that. I'm told that the
photographs of them just don't do them justice. There's an
(18:49):
entire group of researchers who study the paintings that humans
have left on the walls of the caves they lived in. Um.
They're trying to understand the apparently fundamental human need to
paint on the walls. If you're a parent and you
have children that paint on the walls, it may just
be wired into us. I don't know. There are a
(19:10):
number of explanations as to why we do this. I
personally liked the Neanderthal adolescent idea that maybe they're tagging
the caves. Some researchers think that they were simply recording
the hallucinations that they had, because there are some common
patterns in the hallucinations visual hallucinations that human beings have.
They're called a toptic images. They are created by the
(19:32):
machinery of the eye itself. So that's why they're so common,
and that's why all humans, if you're going to experience them,
probably experienced the same ones. Have you ever seen a
floating um your visual field, something that appears like it's
floating across that's probably debris in the eyeball itself. Um,
So that's an example of one of these uh a
(19:54):
toptic images. The other explanation had to do with our
answer ster's pleading to the universe for good luck. It
might be related. I've often wondered too, our modern urge
to display the head of something we've killed on the
living room all. So, maybe they were painting the results
(20:15):
of the last hunt uh and hoping that that would
be rewarded by a successful hunt the next time they
have found it. A number of these paintings seemed to
be done over and over and over again. In the
same spot, so there was some aspect of that spot
in the cave that was lucky. They had really good
(20:37):
luck with the hunt after they painted on that spot,
so they went back the next time and painted again.
It could just be bragging about what you killed the
last time, but it could also be a ritual attempt
to ask the random universe for success the next time
you go out with your spear and try to bring
them a wily mammoth seems difficult, Okay, that's fascinating. Um.
(21:01):
Now in UH in this section where you you deal
with different cultural traditions, and I must say, you get
into examples from say, you know, Greek and Roman culture
and and very various other examples. So I highly recommend
folks pick up the book and UH and read it.
But I wanted to ask about one in particular. You
(21:22):
outline three models of luck and Chinese traditions. There's I
believe min Yungu, which is one's own personal destiny on
thin faithful coincidence, and bow ying, a cosmic accounting of
one's life. And you discuss how these are, you know,
not not stand alone but interwoven. And this just got
me thinking, do do you think this is relatable to
(21:44):
sort of modern Western views um on luck that you
know that we may have several different or perhaps even
contradictory views of how luck might work in our lives. Interesting,
h I do think that we are often tradictory and
what we think in what we think about a lot
of things, not just luck. I think we're a contrary species.
(22:06):
Just basically, since the book came out, I can have
been asked do I believe in luck? More times than
I can count? Which is completely expected. I wrote a
book about luck, so yeah, I guess that means people
are reading it. Uh. I'm not sure that the answer
is as binary as the question is. If you ask
(22:28):
me do I believe in luck? I would say yes
and no, which is a really wishy washy answer. I realized.
Most of the time, I don't believe in luck. I
believe in hard work, persistence, in preparation. But if I
hit the lottery tomorrow, I'm going to say something along
the lines of wow, that was really lucky. I think
(22:50):
lots of people feel that way. They share that view
when when I can see what I did to create
an outcome, when I can see how I've influenced that outcome.
When I have control, and I know I have control,
I don't need luck. I don't need it as an
explanation for what happened. But when I don't have control,
(23:11):
then I need luck. And then I believe I'm actually
somewhat embarrassed to admit that I own a pair of
lucky shoes. They became lucky when they got paired randomly
with success. I wore them to a job interview and
I got the I got the job. Um, I do
not think it was the shoes that got me the job.
(23:32):
That would be creepy and weird. I think it was
my preparation, my what I brought to the opportunity, that
sort of thing. But those shoes are still lucky for me,
and I still happen. Yeah, it's it's interesting to think of,
like I was. You bring up you know, various you know,
lucky items and charms and amulets and all, and so
it got me got made for looking around my own
(23:54):
house and recognize them some things that are I guess,
you know, technically lucky charms of some you know, or
lucky mementos. They're supposed to be items of luck. Uh.
And then I'll tend to think of them, not as
as some sort of an amulet or anything. I'll think
of like a reminder of something good. But then again,
it's just kind of linguistically dancing around, like the idea
(24:16):
of it being a lucky item. Like you know, we're
just kind of arguing about terminology at this point. I
think it comes down to semantics after a while. Lots
and lots of people carry carry lucky charms. Um, I
don't see anything particularly wrong with it. I like my
lucky shoes. They're very nice shoes, so I'm not going
(24:37):
to worry about it too much. Is it contradictory, Probably,
but I'm okay with them now. Another question that came
to mind. Do you see a link between divination practices
and the need to create randomness? I think I've seen
this discuss before, in terms of ancient bone casting, rich wolves,
or the or the eaching means of stepping outside of
(24:59):
human andy's inherent inability to grasp or produce randomness. I
actually had not heard that. I was I was intrigued
when you said that. I think human beings are bad
at creating randomness. If you ask people to create a
random display, most of the time we can't do it um.
(25:22):
This is actually a question that philosophers and mathematicians argue
about um, and I'm perfectly willing to let them have added.
I don't have a good answer for that, But I
think we're bad at generating or creating randomness because we
seem to be wired to see patterns and to interpret
(25:44):
them as meaningful. So if you ask me to abandon
that and to create a random eventum or series of events,
it's usually not random. There's usually a pattern in it,
and that's because of the way that the brain is
signed to interpret events in the world. So I think
(26:05):
what you're saying is that you've come across evidence that
in an attempt to introduce randomness, people have used casting
bones or or the each ing or something like that
to create random because we're so bad at it. Is
that what you were that is? I think that's basically
(26:25):
the the ideas i've I've read it. I want to say,
maybe it was Julian Jaynes who wrote about it. At
some point, I'll have to go look that up. Now.
Outside of any kind of scholarly attempts to understand randomness,
I enjoy board games and role playing games such as
Dungeons and Dragons, which to varying degrees, uses tables and
(26:46):
dice to generate randomness that is useful in sort of
generating an adventure or some sort of a situation for
players to engage in. UM. And some systems even have
like a luckman panic, they'll be like a luck like
some sort of numerical rating for real luck that somehow
factored into everything. UM. I don't imagine any of this
(27:09):
reveals anything about our perceptions of luck, though, does it?
I'm not sure. I think I think we're we're fascinated
by random events. UM. They can be scary, but they're interesting.
They will grab your attention. UM. How else can you
explain horror movies and how popular they are. I'm not
(27:30):
really familiar with games that I don't play Dungeons and Dragons,
so I don't really know the example you're using. But
I think that since games that we play reflect the
lives that we live, and many people think of luck
as an element in the universe that cannon does affect us,
that having some luck driven aspect of the game would
(27:54):
be completely human. I just didn't realize it was built
into the game. I did not know that thank thank you,
thank you. In your book, you write that quote luckiness
could be described as a creature of our imagination if
we could imagine something worse happening, and if that's something
(28:15):
worse is close at hand, it might have happened recently.
We had a choice of actions that lead to the
possible something worse, or we deserve that outcome, we say
we were lucky. It all seems to hinge on being
able to imagine something worse. I found that that that
really interesting as well. And and this makes complete sense,
but it also makes me wonder do you think people
(28:37):
who were inclined to engage in catastrophic thinking uh and
worst case scenarios, are they more inclined to assume luck
not probability played a role in say, um, you know,
not being bitten by a shark on a recent vacation.
I like that example. It makes me think. I had
a I had a student in my statistics class last week,
(28:59):
as a matter of fact, who asked me if something
that I said in class was true to they're listening,
that's that's good. I had been talking about the Monte
Carlo fallacy in statistics class and explaining why it's a fallacy.
The Monte Carlo fallacy is another example of how we
usually misinterpret probability. It's the belief that an event will be,
(29:24):
for example, less likely to happen if it follows a
series of similar events, or that a past event can
change the probability of a future one. It's named after
a famous streak in random events that happened at the
casino at Monte Carlo. Um The player on the roulette
wheel betting black one time after time after time, the
(29:46):
little marble kept landing on black, and as it did that,
the other players at the table started to bet more
and more heavily that the next spin would be. Read
as if the probability of the marble landing on black
was decre see as the streak went on and the
probability that it would land on red was increasing. We're
(30:07):
talking about independent events here. Each spin of the wheel
is independent of every other spin of the wheel, unless
the wheel is rigged, in which case you shouldn't be
playing there. Um. So what happened on the last spin
has no effect at all on what happens on the
next spin. It's that it will land on black every
single spin unless the universe is keeping score. Uh. And besides,
(30:31):
there's been too many landing on black events, so the
next one has to be read. Um, and I don't
think it is than what happened the last time has
no effect on what happens the next time. My student
looked shocked by this, so I asked her why, and
she said that she had always believed, like the players
at the table had believed that, to use your example
(30:54):
of being bitten by a shark, UM, that the probability
of being bitten by a shark if she goes to
the ocean would go up as the number of days
that no one had been bitten by a shark also increased.
Don't work that way, um, And we had an interesting
discussion about how it does not work that way. UM.
(31:16):
She came to class the next time kind of reconciled
to this. So, yeah, my work here is done. So UM,
I think part of the reason we do this, and
I do it myself, I have done it myself, is
that we're wired to think that the worst thing can happen,
and there's a survival component to that. If you prepare
yourself for the worst thing that can possibly happen, then
(31:38):
then you're ready for that should it happen, and if
it doesn't happen, you're still okay because you were prepared.
So the problem is that overestimating the probability of a
negative event produces anxiety, and anxiety can really change how
you process what happens next. So I think I may
(32:00):
have wandered down the garden path here, but I do
think that, uh, we do tend to think catastrophically uh,
in order to prepare for catastrophe. Uh, And that that
is related to how lucky or unlucky we feel ourselves
to be believe ourselves to be. So, speaking of of anxiety,
(32:24):
how does stress and superstition, superstition about luck and bad luck,
how do these seem to be linked together? Well, stress
and anxiety can reinforce catastrophic thinking. Anxiety tends to narrow
what psychologists call the spotlight of attention. If you're anxious,
(32:45):
that spotlight is really really narrow. You're focused on just
that one little thing and you're missing you're actually not
seeing or hearing the other things that are happening. If
you're relaxed and happy, that spotlight is wide and you're
taking in more information. So if you get stressed out,
in anxious and you're focused on that catastrophic thing and
(33:07):
only that catastrophic thing. It can make it more and
more difficult to cope, and it can make you more
likely to see the negative and less likely to see
the positive. Superstitions developed as a means of deflecting usually
something negative or fearful, UH, to keep that from happening.
(33:29):
There was just very interesting study done on the superstition
of knocking on wood um, which developed by out of
the Celtic culture. The belief that trees in the forest
were inhabited by spirits that could mess with you if
they felt like it. Um, especially if you came upon
(33:52):
them unexpectedly, produced this this myth or the superstition of
knocking on wood. So you walked by the tree and
knock on it to let them know that you're here,
so that they they'll leave you alone. They won't be
surprised by your sudden appearance. It keeps bad luck away
from us. So in this study they asked people to
(34:14):
describe their level of stress. How stressed are you? And
then they gave them a difficult task to do, and
they asked them as they were doing it, how strong
is the urge to knock on wood, for example. And
what they found was that the more stressed they were,
the more they reported the urge to knock on wood.
(34:34):
Not not very many of them did it, because they're
in a psychology experiment and the psychologist is watching them.
They don't want to look superstitious. But they did report
that they felt the urge more strongly when they were
stressed out. So carrying lucky charms produces a similar effect.
Having a lucky ritual, or a lucky pen, or even
(34:56):
lucky shoes can make us feel more confident in the
face of the unknown and the unpredictable. Having that with
you reduces anxiety, and when you're less anxious, you perform better.
So you know, success breeds success. So I have to
admit that previously I did not know what the origin
(35:17):
of knocking on wood was. As a sort of good
luck practice. It's something that I I would catch myself
doing often if i'm, you know, engaging in a conversation
with somebody, like I don't think I would ever catch
myself doing it like by myself, but uh, you know,
someone would say something they knock on wood, I'd pick
up on it, and I guess the barrier to entry
(35:37):
is very low in it. You just have to have
something wooden around to knock on my desk knock. Now,
traditions of luck like like this and others that they
can be fun and they're they're often a part of
one's culture. But what do you think it's the best
way to explain these traditions to younger people, to children.
(35:57):
I often wonder about this with my own son, where
I might explain a tradition or even introduce him to one,
but then I feel like I have to really couch
it all in, sort of the fiction or the superstition
of the thing, so that he doesn't take it too seriously. Um,
But then I am I taking too much of the
magic out of it. I don't know what do you
think is the right approach? Oh, well, I will tell
you right off the bat. But I don't have children,
(36:19):
so I've never been faced with this. Probably not the
person to ask. I do think that you probably. I
don't think you would destroy the magic if you explained
it to a child. I think children are remarkably willing
to believe in magic. I mean, who but a child
would think that tying a red towel around their shoulders
(36:42):
would give them the power of flight. That's that's magic. Um,
So I don't think that you're going to, by being realistic,
explain explain away the magic. I think the magic is
there regardless. There's plenty of adult people who see magic
has sickly possible as well. I don't really have any
(37:02):
good advice for how to how to explain this to
your child because I don't have any. I have three
step children, but they were pretty much beyond that stage
by the time I came around. So yeah, I guess
I'll just have to have to keep wrestling with it here. Yeah,
basically you mentioned the red cape is actually a similar
(37:25):
situation where my son knows that red is often considered
a you know, a good luck color, and so they'll
be we'll be playing a game or something and he'll say,
oh wait, let me go get a red shirt on
for this part, you know, to get really geared up. Yeah,
And so I, you know, when he does that, I
don't want to say no, don't do that, you know,
don't engage in superstition, but I also want to explain
(37:47):
to him what, you know, this is not actually going
to have an impact on what happens. But yeah, but
then it's keep explaining, Yeah, just keep explaining. Okay. Now,
another question, this is something you get into in the book.
Are people who believe in luck generally happier? Well, that's
an easy one, yes. Um. Psychology used to think of
(38:10):
luck as being a sign that you were focused in
the wrong direction, that there was a sign of not
processing things appropriately. But lots of studies more recently have
shown that people who believe themselves to be lucky people
are more hopeful, they're happier, they perform better. It even
(38:30):
affects something called executive function, which is the function of
the frontal lobe, how you pay attention to the world,
how you um. There are several aspects to executive function.
One is paying attention, uh, and all of those aspects
can be affected by belief in luck, because I think
because you're happier, you're just a happier person, and that
(38:51):
change is how you work, how you function. Um. There's
a study that showed in two thousand and nine that
less happy people, people who were unhappy had a stronger
belief in external luck, that it was out there, not
them that was lucky, but that it was a force
out there in the universe that dictated your fate, whether
(39:15):
it was good or bad. They're blaming luck for what
happens to them, and that tends to make you feel
as though you don't have personal agency, that what you
do isn't going to have an effect. Um diminishes their
sense of purpose and their overall happiness. So seeing luck
(39:38):
as external to you might be associated with being more unhappy,
but seeing luck as personal, as something that's an aspect
of you, tends to be associated with people being happier. Uh.
It's a I suppose a variant of optimism, and optimism
(39:59):
always makes a feel better. Uh. It breeds, it breeds hope,
it breeds self acceptance. Uh, connection with other people and
with positive experiences. So people who see themselves as lucky
may be more willing to try something new, to be
inspired to go out and try to be a helper
(40:22):
out in the world two help other people because they
feel that life has been kind to them and so
they can then extend that to the rest of us. So, yeah,
people who see themselves as lucky are generally speaking happier.
So in that case, can we learn to be lucky?
Can we make that change in our in our lives. Yeah.
(40:44):
The same psychologist in the UK that I was talking about,
Richard Wiseman, has been studying luck and UH other factors
that are related to it for the last twenty years.
He used to run I don't know if he's still
running it or not, but he used to run a
luck school where he would teach you how to be lucky.
I don't know if it's still operating or not. He
(41:05):
had details in his book. He has a book out
called The lux Actorum, and he details in that book
several ways several things you can do to try to
improve your your feeling of personal luckiness. Try to be
more open to new experiences, be more social, make more
connections with other human beings. Pay attention to your intuition,
(41:29):
your gut feeling about something UH. Expect good fortune as
opposed to expecting disaster UH, and develop your resiliency, your
ability to come back even from a disaster, come back
from that. Still looking for the positive in life. I
(41:51):
think the most practical bit of advice that he had
was to begin a gratitude diary to track the positive
in your life. So every day you would write down
a positive thing that happened to you. It makes you
focus on the positive more. It tends to make us happier. Uh,
that widens our attentional spotlight. That makes us more likely
(42:16):
to notice random things that come up, et cetera. So,
as I said, success bread success, So if you can
do that, that might be the first step in learning
how to be a luckier person. Excellent. Well, there's some
some some words of wisdom there. Remind everybody that the
book again is what are the Chances why we Believe
(42:37):
in Luck? And yeah, we we We didn't even get
into I think half of the material you discussed in there.
There's there's stuff in there about about curses, the curse
of the Mummy. Um, it's certainly a lot of neuroscientific
information that's worth reading as well. So I encourage everyone
to go out there and pick it up. Thank you,
Thanks for taking time out of your day to chat
(42:57):
with me, Barbara. Thank you, this was fun all right. Well,
thanks once more to Barbera for taking time out of
her day to chat with me about the book. The
book again is what are the Chances Why we Believe
in Luck? Currently available and I think pretty much any
format you might be desiring, and that is out from
Columbia University Press. In the meantime, if you would like
(43:19):
to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
you'll find us in the Stuff to Blow your Mind
podcast feed. We have four episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
Artifact on Wednesday, listener Mail on Monday, and on Friday's
we do a little uh, a little bit of content
called Weird House Cinema. That's our time to set aside
most of the serious concerns and just discuss a weird film,
huge things. As always to our wonderful audio producer Seth
(43:42):
Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hi,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
(44:03):
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my
Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is
Robert Lamb and we don't normally air a vault episode
on a Tuesday like this, and it wasn't originally the plan,
but we had some scheduling issues come up with some
interviews that we were putting together here, so I'm going
to just roll out of vault episode here, but don't worry.
(00:25):
I'm putting some stuff together for Thursday, So come back
then and experience a new episode all of the show.
So here's one from the vault. I hope you enjoy.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
(00:51):
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
today we're bringing you an interview that Robert conducted with
a professor of psychology named Barbara Bletchley. Uh. Rob, I
was not here for this conversation. You recorded it while
I was out on vacation a while back. So to
tell me about the talk, what is this? Well, Barbara
came in the show to discuss her new book, What
(01:13):
Are the Chances Why We Believe In Luck? This is
um publication from Columbia University Press, and it's currently available
in hardback get it as an e book an audio book,
So anyway you consume your your books, it's an option. UM.
Barbara is a professor of psychology at Agnes Scott College, Indicator, Georgia,
(01:33):
UM and her scholarly and UH teaching interests include of
physiological psychology, neuroscience research, statistics, psychology of learning, sensation and perception.
Also the biology of depression and UH in factors both
environmental and biological influencing the development of the brain. UM
(01:54):
and of course the book in question here, which is
a delightful read I very much enjoyed. It's just all
about out about luck. Getting into UM various topics related
to luck that you might not even instantly realize are
are central to our understanding of it, such as randomness
and the difficulty in like even contemplating randomness from a
(02:14):
human perspective. Barbara also gets into the neuroscience of luck
as well as how it relates to various UH mythologies
and and so forth. Sounds great, let's jump right on in. Hi, Barbara,
can you introduce yourself to our listeners. Hi, my name
is Barbara Blushley. I'm a professor of psychology and neuroscience
(02:38):
at Agnes Scott College, and I've been there for about, oh,
this is going to be embarrassing forty years now. Your
book provides such an engrossing look at luck and and
randomness and these various um concepts that are all kind
of interwoven into the topic. Uh So, in a way,
it's kind of difficult to decide where to start first.
(02:58):
I wouldn't want to just ask you, well, what is luck,
because that is that's that entire answer is the entire
length of the book. But I thought I might start
by just asking how does luck seem to be connected
to the human unwillingness to accept randomness? Actually, that's a
very good question. I think luck is the word that
we assign to random and unpredictable events in the world.
(03:24):
We tend not to like things that are random and unpredictable.
They're very often interpreted as fearful or threatening. Randomness is
scary because it's unknowable, it's unpredictable. Um, it's unexpected. Uh
I was very fascinated to read a book by Nicholas Carlton,
(03:45):
who's a psychologist in Canada. He writes that fear of
the unknown, the fear of not having the information we
need in order to be able to answer a question,
maybe the most fundamental to basic fear that we have
and underlies every other fear that we learn. We are motivated,
(04:07):
seriously motivated to reduce that uncertainty, and we do that
in a number of different ways. We can We can
do it by being curious, by going out and trying
to find the answer to the question. We also do
it this is very human. We do it by labeling
that thing that we're afraid of. UM. The tendency to
(04:28):
label things that we don't understand, I think is another
fundamental human characteristic. It stems from our desire to control that.
Then if you can label it, then you have some
degree of control over it. Um. One of the more
interesting studies that I came across in writing the book
was a study done by H. Lieberman and the whole
(04:52):
slew of other people in two thousand and seven. They
were looking at their participants under standing emotions, and they
were doing this in an fMRI machine, So they're scanning
the brain to watch how it uh the processes the
information that's coming in. They showed their participants a series
of human faces expressing emotion about the emotions were negative
(05:16):
because that gets a really big response, and the other
were positive emotions. Or they show them just the shape,
and they asked them too, first, just observe the image,
don't do anything about it, don't label it, don't say anything.
And then they asked them to to label that image.
When they were just observing the human faces with emotional expressions,
(05:39):
it activated a part of the brain called the amygdala,
which is part of the emotion processing system in the brain.
When they labeled the emotion, the activity in the amygdala
went down. So it's almost as if being able to
apply a label to that thing reduced the anxiety literally
in the part of the brain that is processing that
(05:59):
am sational response, which I thought was just super interesting.
I did not expect that so loosely speaking, like something
unexpected happens. Uh, there's the the you know, the the unexplained,
the unexpected in life. Just by merely being able to
label it bad luck, you're kind of reducing the like
the emotional um impact of the incident. Yes, I think
(06:24):
that's how they would have interpreted it. They said that
putting your feelings into words helped regulate the negative emotions
that that particular thing unexpected or a negative emotional response
from someone else. Humans are tremendously important to other humans.
We can spend a lot of our time watching human
faces to see what they're doing. So being able to
(06:47):
label that negative emotion reduced the anxiety that that negative
emotion provoked. Fascinating. Now, speaking of of applying language to
these things. In the book, you outline four different types
of luck. M can you describe these fours? Because four
types of luck I came across in a book by
Dr James Austin, who is a neurologist and an author.
(07:11):
In fact, he wrote one of my favorite books of
all time. Um, it's called Zen and the Brain. Had
nothing to do with luck, but just to mention it
because it's a really cool book. So he writes about
these four types of luck in his book, which is
Uh Chase, Chance and Creativity, The Lucky Art of Novelty.
(07:32):
He's really writing about how luck played a role in
his own experiments that he was doing in the lab,
and he details these four different kinds of luck. Each
type of luck builds on the type that came before,
so at the at the foundation of This is what
he called type one luck, which is what most of
us probably think about when we think about luck. It's
(07:53):
random chance. It's just an unexpected, random event that happens
to you. We don't see it coming, but there it is,
and we we wind up having to deal with it.
And the example I used in the book for type
one luck is walking into the casino in Las Vegas
and betting everything you have on the outcome of one
game and walking out a winner. That's type one luck.
(08:17):
That's just random, unexpected against the odds. Look. Type two
luck is a combination of randomness and what Austin called
movement um I think of it as persistence. Really, he
uses the example of Charles Kettering, who's an American inventor
(08:39):
who very famously said, but if you want to solve problems,
you have to be persistent. You have to keep moving,
you have to keep trying. Chances are you will stumble
on something when you least expected. I've never heard of
anyone stumbling on something sitting down. So Kettering was advocating
to be luckier, Get up and move, get up and try.
(09:00):
And Type three luck is a combination then of randomness, persistence,
and preparation, and Austin uses the famous quote by Louis Pasteur.
Chance favors the prepared mind, so preparation helps you see
patterns in the events that happened to you that other
people who are less prepared might not see. And then
(09:21):
type four luck combines randomness, persistence, preparation, and our own
unique personality, our own spin on what happens in the world.
And I used the story of Sarah Kesson's and Emily
Cole and their attempt to win the two thousand and
five wood Veil Transatlantic Rowing Race, which just blows my mind.
(09:44):
I just cannot wrap my head around voluntarily getting in
a rowboat and trying to row across the Atlantic Ocean.
Just not not in my wheelhouse. So I got the
chance to talk with Sarah via email. I think she
lives in New Zealand now. Um. She told me that
(10:04):
she accidentally came across a book, so there's random chance
while she was waiting for an airplane to fly home
across the Atlantic by the way, UH and read about
the race and that was what got her interested in it.
She and her racing partner Emily Cole, had been on
the Purdue University women's skulling team, so they already were
(10:26):
familiar with and prepared for racing long distances, although nothing
like what they were about to attempt. Both thought that
this race sounded like a challenge instead of something you
would avoid at all costs uh, and it was right
up their alley, and both of them prepared like mad,
persisting despite the fact that Indiana lacks an ocean upon
(10:47):
which they could practice, so they were practicing on rivers
and ponds and and things like that, so they they
embodied kind of all four aspects of luck. They suffered, uh,
capsize in the race, as did many people, because apparently
this was just an ill fated race, but they survived
(11:08):
and tried it again. They entered again. If you can't
believe it after that, I don't think I would go
anywhere near a rowboat, but they did. I love the
various examples like this that you share in the book,
so you know, to illustrate these different views and understandings
of luck. Um. One that was particularly I don't know, alarming,
I guess you could say, if if one's not familiar
(11:30):
with the story, was that of Joan Ginther. Can you
tell us about Joan Ginther? And what her story reveals
about luck. I can't. One of the things I had
the most fun with actually in writing the book was
finding these stories of lucky people. And Joan ginther story
was one of the most fun for me because I
teach statistics, so I kind of felt the kindred bond
(11:53):
with Dr Ginther. She is a retired professor of mathematics
who won the lottery four times UM, winning a total
of I think twenty million dollars altogether UM. Her experience
is a wonderful example of a streak in a random event.
Winning the lottery is random. It's really, really, really hard
(12:14):
to predict whether you're going to or not, whether or
not the card that you've got to scratch off lottery
card that you've got is going to be a winner
or not. UM. So her experience winning the lottery four
times against all the odds and repeatedly was really remarkable.
She kind of embodies all four types of luck. She
(12:38):
was definitely prepared to understand the chances of winning the lottery.
She's a math professor, so she probably knew. She was
persistent in that she kept trying even though she knew
what the odds were. She also benefited from the fact
that random events are not necessarily patterned. Less they do
(13:01):
happen in streaks with apparent patterns. If you think about
the stars in the night sky, you can see patterns
in the placement of those stars. In fact, those patterns
are so consistent that we give them names. We've we've
labeled the patterns that we see in the night sky.
So when something happens like this, when somebody wins the lottery,
(13:24):
for example, four times in a row, we tend to think, well,
that's not that's not fair. It's not how the universe works.
It creates uncertainty, and that uncertainty is unpleasant. So we
start looking for a pattern predictability in that event. If
we can find a pattern, we can then understand that
(13:47):
event better. And sometimes that pattern we just say that's luck.
That's an example of luck. Some people insisted, however, that
it couldn't be luck because it was so unexpected, and
that she must have cheated in order to win. So
there there's a whole bunch of reporters who got attracted
(14:07):
to this story and went to try to see could
they find out how she cheated the system. For the
life of me, I can't figure out how she would
have cheated unless she had a level of control over
the creation and distribution of scratch off lottery cards. That
is impossible, and that, as far as I can tell,
she did not have. UM, I just can't see how
(14:29):
she cheated. I think she just was the beneficiary of
a streak in luck. And more power to you, Joan.
So I'm not going to run. I'm not moved to
run out and play the lottery myself because because I
know what the odds are as well. But there you go.
Thank Now. One question I came to mind as I
(14:53):
was I was reading the book. You know, is it
is luck just something? Is it just seemed like a
universal concept for all human cultures? Is it just something
that that emerges alongside language? Is it? Did you run
anything across anything that even resembled a culture without a
tradition of luck? I did not, um. And this was
(15:15):
another thing that I found fascinating. I suppose it's common
to all human cultures in that all human cultures are
created by humans, so we all share uh a tendency
in our cognition, in the way that we leave the world. UM.
I saw an interview with Richard Wiseman, who wrote a
(15:36):
book about luck as well. He said that as far
as he could tell that there it is common to
all humans all over the world. Two want to have
control over the unexpected and that often becomes a tradition
of luck and luckiness or lucky gods or lucky shoes
or lucky whatever in the world. So, if you ask
(15:58):
a cognitive science researcher, these are folks who study how
humans think, what they think about this. Is this a
universal characteristic of the way humans think? They probably would
tell you yes, in that all humans have the tendency
to see patterns in random events, and it's related to
(16:19):
another tendency in the way that we think, which is
to look for an agent for whatever caused an event
to happen. Sometimes you can easily identify the agent. If
you do something and I see you do it, you
are the agent. It's really easy for me to tell.
Sometimes you can't identify the agent, and that makes us nervous.
(16:40):
So searching for and needing an agent for any event
that happens is a pattern. It's a survival mechanism for
us humans. It goes hand in hand with our tendency
to interpret all patterns as having meaning and discounting randomness
because we can't see what cause did so we tend
(17:00):
to just say, well, that didn't happen there there must
be something causing this. If that event that happened is
beyond the capacity of humans to create, we start looking
for invisible superhuman agents. We refer to these agents very
often as gods and goddesses. They are divine, They have
control over things we don't have control over. They must
(17:22):
be the agent of whatever happened, and maybe if you
ask them, really, really nicely, they'll help you experience good
luck as well. I was a bit surprised at how
consistently we humans have insisted on and institutionalized the idea
of luck um as a force in the universe, as
something that makes things happen. I'm going to go out
(17:44):
on a on a limb here, uh, something that might
get me into trouble. I am not a cultural anthropologist.
I'm interested in this, but I'm not an expert by
any means. But what struck me was that most cultures
have an explanation of luck and how it influences us,
and most of these explanations involved the divine in some
(18:05):
way shape or form that seems to be the common
underlying factor. Humans like there to be an agent in charge,
and very often that agent is a god. Now there's
a whole section of the book where you you look
to two different cultures and you go back in history
and look at different ideas. I was. I was a
little surprised when prehistoric cave paintings came up. Can you
(18:28):
describe how prehistoric cave paintings may relate to luck after say,
going to see the cave paintings at lasco Um or elsewhere,
not just photographs of them. He's on my personal bucket list.
I would love to do that. I'm told that the
photographs of them just don't do them justice. There's an
(18:49):
entire group of researchers who study the paintings that humans
have left on the walls of the caves they lived in. Um.
They're trying to understand the apparently fundamental human need to
paint on the walls. If you're a parent and you
have children that paint on the walls, it may just
be wired into us. I don't know. There are a
(19:10):
number of explanations as to why we do this. I
personally liked the Neanderthal adolescent idea that maybe they're tagging
the caves. Some researchers think that they were simply recording
the hallucinations that they had, because there are some common
patterns in the hallucinations visual hallucinations that human beings have.
They're called a toptic images. They are created by the
(19:32):
machinery of the eye itself. So that's why they're so common,
and that's why all humans, if you're going to experience them,
probably experienced the same ones. Have you ever seen a
floating um your visual field, something that appears like it's
floating across that's probably debris in the eyeball itself. Um,
So that's an example of one of these uh a
(19:54):
toptic images. The other explanation had to do with our
answer ster's pleading to the universe for good luck. It
might be related. I've often wondered too, our modern urge
to display the head of something we've killed on the
living room all. So, maybe they were painting the results
(20:15):
of the last hunt uh and hoping that that would
be rewarded by a successful hunt the next time they
have found it. A number of these paintings seemed to
be done over and over and over again. In the
same spot, so there was some aspect of that spot
in the cave that was lucky. They had really good
(20:37):
luck with the hunt after they painted on that spot,
so they went back the next time and painted again.
It could just be bragging about what you killed the
last time, but it could also be a ritual attempt
to ask the random universe for success the next time
you go out with your spear and try to bring
them a wily mammoth seems difficult, Okay, that's fascinating. Um.
(21:01):
Now in UH in this section where you you deal
with different cultural traditions, and I must say, you get
into examples from say, you know, Greek and Roman culture
and and very various other examples. So I highly recommend
folks pick up the book and UH and read it.
But I wanted to ask about one in particular. You
(21:22):
outline three models of luck and Chinese traditions. There's I
believe min Yungu, which is one's own personal destiny on
thin faithful coincidence, and bow ying, a cosmic accounting of
one's life. And you discuss how these are, you know,
not not stand alone but interwoven. And this just got
me thinking, do do you think this is relatable to
(21:44):
sort of modern Western views um on luck that you
know that we may have several different or perhaps even
contradictory views of how luck might work in our lives. Interesting,
h I do think that we are often tradictory and
what we think in what we think about a lot
of things, not just luck. I think we're a contrary species.
(22:06):
Just basically, since the book came out, I can have
been asked do I believe in luck? More times than
I can count? Which is completely expected. I wrote a
book about luck, so yeah, I guess that means people
are reading it. Uh. I'm not sure that the answer
is as binary as the question is. If you ask
(22:28):
me do I believe in luck? I would say yes
and no, which is a really wishy washy answer. I realized.
Most of the time, I don't believe in luck. I
believe in hard work, persistence, in preparation. But if I
hit the lottery tomorrow, I'm going to say something along
the lines of wow, that was really lucky. I think
(22:50):
lots of people feel that way. They share that view
when when I can see what I did to create
an outcome, when I can see how I've influenced that outcome.
When I have control, and I know I have control,
I don't need luck. I don't need it as an
explanation for what happened. But when I don't have control,
(23:11):
then I need luck. And then I believe I'm actually
somewhat embarrassed to admit that I own a pair of
lucky shoes. They became lucky when they got paired randomly
with success. I wore them to a job interview and
I got the I got the job. Um, I do
not think it was the shoes that got me the job.
(23:32):
That would be creepy and weird. I think it was
my preparation, my what I brought to the opportunity, that
sort of thing. But those shoes are still lucky for me,
and I still happen. Yeah, it's it's interesting to think of,
like I was. You bring up you know, various you know,
lucky items and charms and amulets and all, and so
it got me got made for looking around my own
(23:54):
house and recognize them some things that are I guess,
you know, technically lucky charms of some you know, or
lucky mementos. They're supposed to be items of luck. Uh.
And then I'll tend to think of them, not as
as some sort of an amulet or anything. I'll think
of like a reminder of something good. But then again,
it's just kind of linguistically dancing around, like the idea
(24:16):
of it being a lucky item. Like you know, we're
just kind of arguing about terminology at this point. I
think it comes down to semantics after a while. Lots
and lots of people carry carry lucky charms. Um, I
don't see anything particularly wrong with it. I like my
lucky shoes. They're very nice shoes, so I'm not going
(24:37):
to worry about it too much. Is it contradictory, Probably,
but I'm okay with them now. Another question that came
to mind. Do you see a link between divination practices
and the need to create randomness? I think I've seen
this discuss before, in terms of ancient bone casting, rich wolves,
or the or the eaching means of stepping outside of
(24:59):
human andy's inherent inability to grasp or produce randomness. I
actually had not heard that. I was I was intrigued
when you said that. I think human beings are bad
at creating randomness. If you ask people to create a
random display, most of the time we can't do it um.
(25:22):
This is actually a question that philosophers and mathematicians argue
about um, and I'm perfectly willing to let them have added.
I don't have a good answer for that, But I
think we're bad at generating or creating randomness because we
seem to be wired to see patterns and to interpret
(25:44):
them as meaningful. So if you ask me to abandon
that and to create a random eventum or series of events,
it's usually not random. There's usually a pattern in it,
and that's because of the way that the brain is
signed to interpret events in the world. So I think
(26:05):
what you're saying is that you've come across evidence that
in an attempt to introduce randomness, people have used casting
bones or or the each ing or something like that
to create random because we're so bad at it. Is
that what you were that is? I think that's basically
(26:25):
the the ideas i've I've read it. I want to say,
maybe it was Julian Jaynes who wrote about it. At
some point, I'll have to go look that up. Now.
Outside of any kind of scholarly attempts to understand randomness,
I enjoy board games and role playing games such as
Dungeons and Dragons, which to varying degrees, uses tables and
(26:46):
dice to generate randomness that is useful in sort of
generating an adventure or some sort of a situation for
players to engage in. UM. And some systems even have
like a luckman panic, they'll be like a luck like
some sort of numerical rating for real luck that somehow
factored into everything. UM. I don't imagine any of this
(27:09):
reveals anything about our perceptions of luck, though, does it?
I'm not sure. I think I think we're we're fascinated
by random events. UM. They can be scary, but they're interesting.
They will grab your attention. UM. How else can you
explain horror movies and how popular they are. I'm not
(27:30):
really familiar with games that I don't play Dungeons and Dragons,
so I don't really know the example you're using. But
I think that since games that we play reflect the
lives that we live, and many people think of luck
as an element in the universe that cannon does affect us,
that having some luck driven aspect of the game would
(27:54):
be completely human. I just didn't realize it was built
into the game. I did not know that thank thank you,
thank you. In your book, you write that quote luckiness
could be described as a creature of our imagination if
we could imagine something worse happening, and if that's something
(28:15):
worse is close at hand, it might have happened recently.
We had a choice of actions that lead to the
possible something worse, or we deserve that outcome, we say
we were lucky. It all seems to hinge on being
able to imagine something worse. I found that that that
really interesting as well. And and this makes complete sense,
but it also makes me wonder do you think people
(28:37):
who were inclined to engage in catastrophic thinking uh and
worst case scenarios, are they more inclined to assume luck
not probability played a role in say, um, you know,
not being bitten by a shark on a recent vacation.
I like that example. It makes me think. I had
a I had a student in my statistics class last week,
(28:59):
as a matter of fact, who asked me if something
that I said in class was true to they're listening,
that's that's good. I had been talking about the Monte
Carlo fallacy in statistics class and explaining why it's a fallacy.
The Monte Carlo fallacy is another example of how we
usually misinterpret probability. It's the belief that an event will be,
(29:24):
for example, less likely to happen if it follows a
series of similar events, or that a past event can
change the probability of a future one. It's named after
a famous streak in random events that happened at the
casino at Monte Carlo. Um The player on the roulette
wheel betting black one time after time after time, the
(29:46):
little marble kept landing on black, and as it did that,
the other players at the table started to bet more
and more heavily that the next spin would be. Read
as if the probability of the marble landing on black
was decre see as the streak went on and the
probability that it would land on red was increasing. We're
(30:07):
talking about independent events here. Each spin of the wheel
is independent of every other spin of the wheel, unless
the wheel is rigged, in which case you shouldn't be
playing there. Um. So what happened on the last spin
has no effect at all on what happens on the
next spin. It's that it will land on black every
single spin unless the universe is keeping score. Uh. And besides,
(30:31):
there's been too many landing on black events, so the
next one has to be read. Um, and I don't
think it is than what happened the last time has
no effect on what happens the next time. My student
looked shocked by this, so I asked her why, and
she said that she had always believed, like the players
at the table had believed that, to use your example
(30:54):
of being bitten by a shark, UM, that the probability
of being bitten by a shark if she goes to
the ocean would go up as the number of days
that no one had been bitten by a shark also increased.
Don't work that way, um, And we had an interesting
discussion about how it does not work that way. UM.
(31:16):
She came to class the next time kind of reconciled
to this. So, yeah, my work here is done. So UM,
I think part of the reason we do this, and
I do it myself, I have done it myself, is
that we're wired to think that the worst thing can happen,
and there's a survival component to that. If you prepare
yourself for the worst thing that can possibly happen, then
(31:38):
then you're ready for that should it happen, and if
it doesn't happen, you're still okay because you were prepared.
So the problem is that overestimating the probability of a
negative event produces anxiety, and anxiety can really change how
you process what happens next. So I think I may
(32:00):
have wandered down the garden path here, but I do
think that, uh, we do tend to think catastrophically uh,
in order to prepare for catastrophe. Uh, And that that
is related to how lucky or unlucky we feel ourselves
to be believe ourselves to be. So, speaking of of anxiety,
(32:24):
how does stress and superstition, superstition about luck and bad luck,
how do these seem to be linked together? Well, stress
and anxiety can reinforce catastrophic thinking. Anxiety tends to narrow
what psychologists call the spotlight of attention. If you're anxious,
(32:45):
that spotlight is really really narrow. You're focused on just
that one little thing and you're missing you're actually not
seeing or hearing the other things that are happening. If
you're relaxed and happy, that spotlight is wide and you're
taking in more information. So if you get stressed out,
in anxious and you're focused on that catastrophic thing and
(33:07):
only that catastrophic thing. It can make it more and
more difficult to cope, and it can make you more
likely to see the negative and less likely to see
the positive. Superstitions developed as a means of deflecting usually
something negative or fearful, UH, to keep that from happening.
(33:29):
There was just very interesting study done on the superstition
of knocking on wood um, which developed by out of
the Celtic culture. The belief that trees in the forest
were inhabited by spirits that could mess with you if
they felt like it. Um, especially if you came upon
(33:52):
them unexpectedly, produced this this myth or the superstition of
knocking on wood. So you walked by the tree and
knock on it to let them know that you're here,
so that they they'll leave you alone. They won't be
surprised by your sudden appearance. It keeps bad luck away
from us. So in this study they asked people to
(34:14):
describe their level of stress. How stressed are you? And
then they gave them a difficult task to do, and
they asked them as they were doing it, how strong
is the urge to knock on wood, for example. And
what they found was that the more stressed they were,
the more they reported the urge to knock on wood.
(34:34):
Not not very many of them did it, because they're
in a psychology experiment and the psychologist is watching them.
They don't want to look superstitious. But they did report
that they felt the urge more strongly when they were
stressed out. So carrying lucky charms produces a similar effect.
Having a lucky ritual, or a lucky pen, or even
(34:56):
lucky shoes can make us feel more confident in the
face of the unknown and the unpredictable. Having that with
you reduces anxiety, and when you're less anxious, you perform better.
So you know, success breeds success. So I have to
admit that previously I did not know what the origin
(35:17):
of knocking on wood was. As a sort of good
luck practice. It's something that I I would catch myself
doing often if i'm, you know, engaging in a conversation
with somebody, like I don't think I would ever catch
myself doing it like by myself, but uh, you know,
someone would say something they knock on wood, I'd pick
up on it, and I guess the barrier to entry
(35:37):
is very low in it. You just have to have
something wooden around to knock on my desk knock. Now,
traditions of luck like like this and others that they
can be fun and they're they're often a part of
one's culture. But what do you think it's the best
way to explain these traditions to younger people, to children.
(35:57):
I often wonder about this with my own son, where
I might explain a tradition or even introduce him to one,
but then I feel like I have to really couch
it all in, sort of the fiction or the superstition
of the thing, so that he doesn't take it too seriously. Um,
But then I am I taking too much of the
magic out of it. I don't know what do you
think is the right approach? Oh, well, I will tell
you right off the bat. But I don't have children,
(36:19):
so I've never been faced with this. Probably not the
person to ask. I do think that you probably. I
don't think you would destroy the magic if you explained
it to a child. I think children are remarkably willing
to believe in magic. I mean, who but a child
would think that tying a red towel around their shoulders
(36:42):
would give them the power of flight. That's that's magic. Um,
So I don't think that you're going to, by being realistic,
explain explain away the magic. I think the magic is
there regardless. There's plenty of adult people who see magic
has sickly possible as well. I don't really have any
(37:02):
good advice for how to how to explain this to
your child because I don't have any. I have three
step children, but they were pretty much beyond that stage
by the time I came around. So yeah, I guess
I'll just have to have to keep wrestling with it here. Yeah,
basically you mentioned the red cape is actually a similar
(37:25):
situation where my son knows that red is often considered
a you know, a good luck color, and so they'll
be we'll be playing a game or something and he'll say,
oh wait, let me go get a red shirt on
for this part, you know, to get really geared up. Yeah,
And so I, you know, when he does that, I
don't want to say no, don't do that, you know,
don't engage in superstition, but I also want to explain
(37:47):
to him what, you know, this is not actually going
to have an impact on what happens. But yeah, but
then it's keep explaining, Yeah, just keep explaining. Okay. Now,
another question, this is something you get into in the book.
Are people who believe in luck generally happier? Well, that's
an easy one, yes. Um. Psychology used to think of
(38:10):
luck as being a sign that you were focused in
the wrong direction, that there was a sign of not
processing things appropriately. But lots of studies more recently have
shown that people who believe themselves to be lucky people
are more hopeful, they're happier, they perform better. It even
(38:30):
affects something called executive function, which is the function of
the frontal lobe, how you pay attention to the world,
how you um. There are several aspects to executive function.
One is paying attention, uh, and all of those aspects
can be affected by belief in luck, because I think
because you're happier, you're just a happier person, and that
(38:51):
change is how you work, how you function. Um. There's
a study that showed in two thousand and nine that
less happy people, people who were unhappy had a stronger
belief in external luck, that it was out there, not
them that was lucky, but that it was a force
out there in the universe that dictated your fate, whether
(39:15):
it was good or bad. They're blaming luck for what
happens to them, and that tends to make you feel
as though you don't have personal agency, that what you
do isn't going to have an effect. Um diminishes their
sense of purpose and their overall happiness. So seeing luck
(39:38):
as external to you might be associated with being more unhappy,
but seeing luck as personal, as something that's an aspect
of you, tends to be associated with people being happier. Uh.
It's a I suppose a variant of optimism, and optimism
(39:59):
always makes a feel better. Uh. It breeds, it breeds hope,
it breeds self acceptance. Uh, connection with other people and
with positive experiences. So people who see themselves as lucky
may be more willing to try something new, to be
inspired to go out and try to be a helper
(40:22):
out in the world two help other people because they
feel that life has been kind to them and so
they can then extend that to the rest of us. So, yeah,
people who see themselves as lucky are generally speaking happier.
So in that case, can we learn to be lucky?
Can we make that change in our in our lives. Yeah.
(40:44):
The same psychologist in the UK that I was talking about,
Richard Wiseman, has been studying luck and UH other factors
that are related to it for the last twenty years.
He used to run I don't know if he's still
running it or not, but he used to run a
luck school where he would teach you how to be lucky.
I don't know if it's still operating or not. He
(41:05):
had details in his book. He has a book out
called The lux Actorum, and he details in that book
several ways several things you can do to try to
improve your your feeling of personal luckiness. Try to be
more open to new experiences, be more social, make more
connections with other human beings. Pay attention to your intuition,
(41:29):
your gut feeling about something UH. Expect good fortune as
opposed to expecting disaster UH, and develop your resiliency, your
ability to come back even from a disaster, come back
from that. Still looking for the positive in life. I
(41:51):
think the most practical bit of advice that he had
was to begin a gratitude diary to track the positive
in your life. So every day you would write down
a positive thing that happened to you. It makes you
focus on the positive more. It tends to make us happier. Uh,
that widens our attentional spotlight. That makes us more likely
(42:16):
to notice random things that come up, et cetera. So,
as I said, success bread success, So if you can
do that, that might be the first step in learning
how to be a luckier person. Excellent. Well, there's some
some some words of wisdom there. Remind everybody that the
book again is what are the Chances why we Believe
(42:37):
in Luck? And yeah, we we We didn't even get
into I think half of the material you discussed in there.
There's there's stuff in there about about curses, the curse
of the Mummy. Um, it's certainly a lot of neuroscientific
information that's worth reading as well. So I encourage everyone
to go out there and pick it up. Thank you,
Thanks for taking time out of your day to chat
(42:57):
with me, Barbara. Thank you, this was fun all right. Well,
thanks once more to Barbera for taking time out of
her day to chat with me about the book. The
book again is what are the Chances Why we Believe
in Luck? Currently available and I think pretty much any
format you might be desiring, and that is out from
Columbia University Press. In the meantime, if you would like
(43:19):
to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
you'll find us in the Stuff to Blow your Mind
podcast feed. We have four episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
Artifact on Wednesday, listener Mail on Monday, and on Friday's
we do a little uh, a little bit of content
called Weird House Cinema. That's our time to set aside
most of the serious concerns and just discuss a weird film,
huge things. As always to our wonderful audio producer Seth
(43:42):
Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hi,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
(44:03):
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my
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