October 4, 2011 • 34 mins
What do psychologists think about your lucky rabbit's foot? In this episode, Robert and Julie break down the science of good luck rituals and charms. They look at what luck reveals about the human mind, as well as whether any of it actually works.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
here's a quick question, Uh, in coming in to do
these podcasts, do you have any kind of a ritual
and kind of like do you have any lucky items
(00:25):
you bring with you? How do you prepare in terms
of superstition science podcast? Here's something that you never wanted
to know about. I used to wear lucky underwear, Okay,
but then I realized how ridiculous that was and I
quit the practice. Huh. Yeah, not of one wearing underwear,
(00:45):
but you know, specific pair. But yeah, I mean it's
very easy to attach meaning to something, right, And I
found myself and I think I'm pretty pragmatic right in
my thinking. And I found myself. Now you're like, no
underwear out underwear, out of mind? Um, But yeah, I
mean you can't help it sometimes make those associations, I guess,
I mean I can't. I mean I I on the
(01:07):
clothing front, I don't think I've ever experienced anything like
that because I tend to think of clothing and like, well,
this pair of pants is more comfortable than the others.
Uh So in that respect, like those will be my
lucky pants and when I feel when I wear them,
my body feels better and so lucky for you is comfortable. Yeah. Yeah,
But but there are other rituals that I do have.
(01:28):
I mean, not not so much rituals, but I guess
I'm I'm kind of there's something in me that's kind
of maybe an amulant junkie, like like I would I
feel like I could adapt really easily to say, like,
you know, like thaie amulet culture um. In fact, I
carry a ganisha a genisha in my pocket like a
little figuring the the overcomer of obstacles. Yeah, the the
(01:53):
Hindu god that people may recognize as having kind of uh,
you know, well very much an elephant look um and
standing on its vehicle is like a rat. It's not
that I like rubbed the figurine before each podcast or uh,
there's something about just I have to put it in
my pocket when I leave in the morning, and if
I don't watch myself, I'll accumulate other amulets along the way.
(02:13):
It'll be like something that just doesn't make a particularly
large amount of sense. Like when we were like cleaning
out my uh, some of my father's stuff after he died,
there was this roll of silver dollars and these weren't
like dear to him or anything. I don't think I've
ever seen these silver dollars, but I ended up like
slipping one in my pocket and carried it with me
a lot for several months. And that makes sense to me, though,
(02:36):
because that's that's something that you know, it's um maybe
you're asso sitting it with your father and you wanted
to keep it close to you or you know, as
a symbol of it. But they were if I were
gonna like consciously set out to like, all right, I
will pick out an amulet that reminds me of my
father or is you know, I mean he gets into
the whole thing, the whole power of sympathy uh and
uh and the way our minds working, we ended up
(02:56):
attaching meaning to this, to an object that has come
into contact with somebody. So if I were to like
consciously say, what's an object that was dear to my
father that I could carry as an amulet, that would
not be it. Like, I don't know why that ended
up in my pocket for so long. Um, or sometimes
it will be like a particularly good day or a
good outing or you know, or a good date that
I've gone on with my wife, and I'll like pick
up a rock and it'll go in my pocket, and
(03:18):
not even a pretty rot, not like any kind of
like a fine quartz kind of thing or something that
would wind up on a geologist shelf, but I'll end
up like sticking in my pocket and it will become
kind of an amulet of that day. And so I
have to watch that and try and keep it to
just working tendencies. I don't think know if it's hoarding,
if they're um, if they're kind of like magical amulets, right, yeah, yeah,
(03:40):
And if it keepsakes, if you will, like tiny keepsakes
that remain on your person, right, that have have some
sort of power to you in some sense. Yeah, as
much as we hate to admit, these things do have
a power over us. And if you guys out there
haven't guessed it already, we're talking about that the science
of lucky pants. That's where we're coming back around to. Yeah, yeah,
that you know, we can't help but wear those lucky
(04:01):
pants or pick up that rock something that means a
lot to us, that makes us feel like, you know,
we've got some sort of control over the chaos of
our lives. Yeah, Like, what are some more that you've seen? Like,
because I like, I have a friend who does this
thing where if she is speeding through a red light,
well not really a red light, let's say a an
orange light, yellow light turning, you're give a nerve break there. Yeah,
(04:22):
she'll do this thing where she hits the roof of
the car like it's some sort of like a luck
thing to not get caught by a traffic cop. There's
the rub right, the luck, this idea that we are
actually getting some sort of magical luck from the ritual. Real, Yeah,
we're doing something to influence the outcome. Yeah, I was
thinking about the speed skater Chad Hedrick. He collects fortunes
(04:44):
from fortune cookies because before the two thousands six Games
in Turn, he got a fortune cookie that said your
golden opportunity is coming, and he went on to win gold, silver,
and bronze medals And now he hangs out with fortune
cookie fortunes in his pocket at any time. He's become
(05:04):
a fortune cookie junkie. Wow, how does he say in
shape eating all that all that cookie, you know, Oh,
I'm sure you know, he just probably called up his
local take out and you know, just chops through them
and doesn't necessarily eat him. I wonder I wonder be
gets irritated with the with the fortune cookies that don't
really have fortunes per se, but they're just kind of like,
here's a little bit of good advice. Um in mangled English. Yeah,
(05:27):
I get that on my tea sometimes my my tea package,
you know, the little tag on it. And it depends
on I can always tell what sort of mood I'm
in because either I'm like, oh that's beautiful, or I'm like,
oh man, just take it somewhere else. Yeah, or it's
like that's not really cosmic insight. That's how am I gonna?
That's just good advice. That's just like saying something like
I don't know, um see, that's how devoid of feel
(05:51):
good or I end this morning. I can't think of
a of any kind of crappy little fortune cookie thing,
but but any rate, um, yeah, people do. It's early
this morning, it is kind of early. But yeah, so
so things of this nature, people collecting items, people performing
rituals people um, sticking to some sort of lucky garment.
(06:13):
And I do mean sticking to it literally because some
we know with the sports people that sometimes they don't
change their lucky socks right right, like baseball, uh baseball
sports people. How illiterate am I in in the field
of sports that I can't use the correct terminology, but
baseball people who won't change their socks, and it's terribly smelly.
(06:36):
I remember reading about there there was this pro wrestler
who wrestled by the name of Vader who it was
based out of Atlanta. I don't know if he lives
in the area or not. I think he's pretty much
retired now. But he was like this big, beefy, kind
of bull looking guy and supposedly there are people that
really hated wrestling him. Um. And you know this is
pro wrestling is all scripted violence going on with a
(06:58):
certain amount of improv But he his his shattering the illusion.
Sorry oh um, but his his lucky thing was to
not wash his wrestling outfit, his his his jumper. Yeah yeah,
And so it was a pretty horrendous at times. Well,
and that probably became a ritual that actually did start
(07:19):
to have some sort of actual effect, right, because yeah,
because you know, you don't want to get too close
to the guy or have the match go too long, right,
even if kind of punching in the face. Yeah, and
you're under his arm. Um. Okay. So there's a term
for this, and it's called apophenia, and it's seen patterns
and meaningless data. And we've talked about this before. Our
brains despised randomness. We try to organize whenever we can.
(07:43):
Whenever we see some sort of data in front of us,
we try to see patterns. We might have a grilled
cheese sandwich. We might think that it looks like the
Madonna on it. As I'm sure a lot of people know.
This was that on eBay. I think it was. I
think it was at some point, Yeah it was. I
mean it was at least after item because people thought, oh,
that looks like the Madonna burned into the grilled cheese sandwich. Yeah.
(08:05):
Our minds cannot help but make order out of chaos.
I mean, it's how we survive. It's you need to
be able to navigate this this world that we live
in and and put one in two together when in
ways that can often save a life. That can allow
us to get to work at all. Uh, you know, um,
it ends up ends up being little things like you
(08:26):
you know that that when you when you feel that
kind of weird wind coming down the train tracks at
a at a subway or train station, you're like, oh, well,
the trains about to get here. But then that's a
very logical one plus two equals three. But then in
other cases, uh, this ends up becoming what is called
a type one error where we end up um um
(08:48):
looking for signs that putting putting signs together that don't
really add up, but but we just think they do.
So Yeah. Actually, there's a Scientific American article called patternicity,
Finding Meaningful Patterns and meaning Less Noise, and Michael Shermer wrote,
our brains are involved pattern recognition machines that connect the
dots and create meaning out of the patterns that we
think we see in nature. Sometimes a really is connected
(09:10):
to be sometimes it's not. When it is, we have
learned something valuable about the environment from which we can
make predictions that aiden survival, survival, and reproduction. Unfortunately, we
did not evolve a Bologney detection network in the brain
to distinguish between true and false patterns, and I love that.
I thought, Yeah, we really do need a Bologney detection
network at this point. Yeah, I mean, it basically comes
(09:31):
down to the fact that that randomness just doesn't really
fit well with us. We don't we don't like the
idea of randomness. And ultimately, as many critics have pointed out,
like even a really chaotic system, there's there's order going
on in it, uh, And you can find order in
that system, but it's not always going to be in
in a predictive way. And this is called adventitious reinforcing. Again,
(09:52):
it's that accidental association between an outcome and whatever you're
doing at the time. Um So again you see that,
you know, people not change gene their dirty socks because
the big game is coming, and that's what they did
last time, and surely if they don't wear those same socks,
they will lose. Right. I wore dirty socks and my
team one. Therefore, my dirty socks altered physical reality, broke
(10:16):
every law of physics, and somehow made that team win. Therefore,
I need to make sure that I wear the same
dirty socks next week. But but now in these cases, well,
why not apply even more scrutiny to it and realize,
my socks need to be the same level of dirty
they are now, if they're more dirty, then maybe it'll
tip the balance. And then he ends up this like complicated. Well,
that's when it becomes a problem, because that's when you
(10:37):
can really kind of screw yourself, right, because you know,
what is first a talisman to kind of help you
through psychologically, when it becomes an obsession, then becomes obsession,
and then you could really kind of throw your your game,
so to speak. Um, I thought it was really interesting
that behaviors DF Skinner took this this up with pigeons. Yeah,
and he put a few half starved pigeons in a
(10:59):
box and put food pellets down a shoot at random intervals,
and the pigeons began to think, or at least he
thought this, because who knows what pigeons think, but he
assumed that whatever they did when the food arrives somehow
caused the food to arrive. So this is like they're
doing like little circles and stuff, right. Yeah. Yeah, he
said that one bird was conditioned to turn counter clockwise
about the cage, making two or three turns between reinforcements
(11:22):
and another repeatedly thrust its head into one of the
upper corners of the cage. A third developed a tossing response.
So it's kind of funny, like I don't like to
think of of myself as a pigeon, but you know,
looking at my past behavior and attaching meaning to things
don't necessarily have a meaning. It is sort of like
we're all pigeons, you know, in a cage making these
(11:42):
weird ritualistic turns to try to affect our environments. Um,
so it's really interesting. This is from a BBC article
Go figure why we think rituals can influence outcome? They
say the experiment might be said to demonstrate a sort
of superstition. The bird behaves as if there was a
alsal relation between his behavior and the present presentation of food,
(12:04):
although such a relation is lacking. Huh. Well, you know,
it reminds me a lot of our previous research into
build sea bows too, and certainly some of the literature
makes this correlation as well, because like it could be
something as simple as, uh, I need to be at
my mental best for this meeting that I have every week, right,
so I must have a you know, some sort of
(12:25):
an energy drink to boost me up. And then to
what extent is that energy drink actually increasing your performance?
And to what extent is it just a ritual, a
superstitious ritual that has to take place for you to
feel confident enough to go into the uh in into
the meeting, to get into the mindset. And um, and okay,
you can make an argument that yeah, you're getting a
(12:45):
caffeine boost, but now replace the energy drink with a
like a rosary or you know, or or or a
little amulet or or some sort of magical ceremony you
perform on the floor in front of the meeting room
with chalk and candles or something. Yeah, And then I'm
just thinking that. And then you're on your way to
(13:05):
O C D and you start tapping three times you
know which you know again, I'm that's it's just interesting
to see how you can take this to the nth
degree and your behavior really begins to splinter a little bit,
this little spinking of knocking and splinters. There's the whole
knock on wood thing, right, That's like a classic example.
I don't think of myself as being particularly superstitious. You know,
I'll be talking about something and I'll accidentally, you know,
(13:27):
mention some sort of horrible thing that has not happened yet,
and then I'll be like, knock on wood, and then
i have to find wood to knock on, like it
just makes sense. Likewise, um, the whole salt shaker thinks,
spill some salt and you have to throw some over
your shoulders. I'll find myself doing that just because I'll
have spilt a little salt, and I'll be like, well,
it doesn't hurt, right, So I'll take like one grain
(13:47):
and then ill position myself so that if I throw
it over my shoulder goes into the sink. So that
way I'm also not making a mess. I think the
roots of that are in um shamanism too, right, I
think that it's like to dispel evil spirits somehow. I
have that watched and one of one of the knooks there.
But I mean, I'm sure that many different cultures have
(14:08):
many different interpretations for the whole salt trick, but nonetheless
it's it's a ritual, right right. But but then again
I would not freak out of idea. Oh. Another one
is the of course, the stepping on a crack and
breaking your mother back, which I don't think there's ever
been a proven cause and effect with that. Like every
nobody actually believes that. I mean with anyone with a
(14:28):
with a healthy mind is not believe that they're they're
they're stepping on a crack will somehow harm the vertebrae
of their mother. But people do get been out a
shape about it if they in some cases, so I mean,
it's just if you end up letting it the um
get ahead of you. Yeah, and you see this too,
UM in extreme cases where if someone has lost a person,
they start to see signs everywhere of you know, they
(14:49):
might have I think I read something about it was, uh,
one guy who lost his son. His son committed suicide,
and he began to see signs in everything open clothes,
pin and uh, you know all these different UM like
forty five degree angle UM shapes, and he began to
think that that was pointing to the time that his
son had committed suicide. And again, this is you know,
(15:12):
this is us trying to have some sort of mastery
over what we can't control. Probably helped him a lot
to think, well, okay, there's there are signs that are
pointing just to at least tell me some aspect of this,
you know, the time that my son passed away, or
to get a better rooted feeling and what had happened. Um.
So it's interesting to see it in that way. You
(15:33):
can take that situation trying to master something you can't control,
and if you you transpose it back on some like
prehistoric setting. You know, some guy drugging through the woods, um,
and there is a predator out there that because will
eat him, or a human enemy, and your amount of
control over what is going to happen depends on your
ability to pick up signs in the world around you. Uh,
(15:57):
you know, the sound of footsteps in the dark, the
the the the silhouette of something against the moonlight, things
of that nature. Right, And so we're sort of hardwired
to air on that side, right, which is better for us,
because that's why we have gotten to the point where
we have right as a species. Because then it's a
false alarm and that's when we laugh. Right. According to
some of the theories about laughter, that laughter is a
response to say, oh, I'm not really in physical danger. Yeah,
(16:20):
it's a it's a release, yeah, and in a signal
to to other humans that oh, we're not really going
to die. It's all right. That wasn't really a savor
tooth tiger, but better to be sure are on the
side of cushion, like you said. That's right, that's I
mean behind every good joke is a is a false
savor tooth tiger in a way, right right, because it's
a benign threat. Trust no one. You heard it here? Yeah,
(16:40):
that's right. When we come back, we're going to talk
about Lady Luck and if she actually exists. This podcast
is brought to you by Intel, the sponsors of Tomorrow
and the Discovery Channel. At Intel, we believe curiosity is
the spark which drives innovation. Join us at curiosity dot
(17:02):
com and explore the answers to life's questions. All right,
and we're back. So Lady Luck LEO are not okay? Well? Uh,
Luck is not a lady tonight. I don't know. I mean,
it's it's a nice thought, right, likes a lady. She's
shining down on you. She has a bugle beat address
(17:23):
on Thank you for resisting the urge to break into song.
By the way, I mean, this podcast isn't over yet, okay. Uh.
There is an article called Apophania Definitions Analysis by Sandra L.
Hubsurance really interesting. She talks about the gambler's fallacy and
holds that in a sequence of random events, past outcomes
influence future outcomes. The off sided example is a game
(17:46):
of roulette where black has spun seven times in a row.
The players around the table begin to all the players right.
They all begin to feel that their luck is running
out and that the red is due soon or um,
that they're having a streak in black will continue to appear,
when in actuality, the probability of the next spin being
read or black is the same as ever. And this
(18:08):
you see this all the time at gambling. Right, there's
this idea that you know you've got good luck tonight. Um,
but that's kind of what gets us in trouble. And
according to psychology today, luck really actually wouldn't exist without
the following conditions. Okay, rabbit foot, rabbit foot, troll. You
(18:29):
have to take a chance in order to have a chance,
which is kind of a thing. It's like if you
don't play the lottery, you cannot win the lottery exactly. Um.
But it Studies show that when outcomes are in certain
pessimistic people tend to avoid these situations and are averse
to to risk, right, whereas optimistic people don't. So optimism
is actually necessary to take a chance. So not only
(18:51):
you have to take a chance, but you kind of
have to be like, yeah, hey, I'm taking a chance, right, Okay,
So it goes back to that optimism boost we're talking about. Yeah,
guy walks in to a casino. Guy feels confident enough
to play roulette because he has uh, you know, a
statue of in his pocket. Well, and even just map
back to other times in your life where you felt lucky, Um,
(19:13):
something happened. The sequence of events. I always think about this,
always feels like something builds up to something happening, and
always like, oh, yeah, there's this pattern here. But the
fact of the matter is is that I happened to
be in the right place at the right time, But
not only that I was open to the experience and
had put myself out there or whatever it was. So
that's kind of how I think about it. You've got
the gambler, Yes, who's who. Yeah, they did it. They gambled,
(19:36):
so therefore you know they got a fifty percent chance
whether or not they're going to make good on it.
But that's about the same for anything that you try
to do in your life. Right, more or less, I think, yeah,
I guess what you're trying to do. Sometimes there's like
ten percent, sometimes seventy five percent, but still there's there's
a chance. There's a chance. Yeah. Uh. The second thing
is unexpected actions come from the subconscious. Your unconscious brain
(19:58):
may actually see what you need to see before your
conscious brain knows. This is called preemptive perception, and it's
thought to be subserved by part of the prietal lobe
of the brain. Yeah. This reminds me of of priming memory,
which is one of the types of memory that we've
talked about in the past, where you're not consciously aware
of it, but your brain is forming this, uh, this pattern.
(20:19):
It's associating one thing with the other. Yeah. And it
actually reminds me too of the free Will podcast that
we did when we talked about this the eye of ourselves,
the conscious that we are the last person to actually
learn what our decision is because all of these other
things are taking place in our brain that could have
been culminating there for an hour, year, or even ten years,
(20:42):
and so there's things going on under the surface that
are really helping to inform you. So we're like the
false memory, where we pointed out that some experiments have
have suggested that our brain knows when even though we
think a false memory is true, deep down our brain
knows of that false memory is false. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah,
(21:03):
it's it's there's somewhere there's a center there in our
brains that can sniff out the difference. So at conscious level,
we're not putting one in two together about what's about
to happen. But below the surface, our brain already knows
or thinks it knows what's going to happen. And this
has been observed in studies in m r I, which
is really fascinating. So the psychology today is basically saying
when you next sense something that you should actually take
(21:24):
it seriously before you discard it, because there is some
sort of basis that instinct coting in right exactly. The
third is to tap into your empathy. Oh yes, this
is of course, especially when you're dealing with other people.
You're playing a game poker or even something like you know,
scrabble or words with friends or or anything where there
is a human intellect on the other side. You're in
(21:45):
a hot water situation to write now that we're advocating
hot water situations. Yeah, like don't play scrabble in a
hot tube or be a jewel thief and then get caught.
Yeah okay, but but yeah, there's a there's a it's
a of cat and mouse and uh, and so you're
you're inevitably thinking about trying to think, what is the
(22:06):
other guy or gal? Uh, thinking about let me try
and put myself in their shoes so I can outsmart them.
I mean, this is basic. This is a basic h
principle of our cognitive architecture because so much of our
of our of our brain activity is devoted to trying
to determine how, say a prey animal is going to react,
how an adversary is going to react, how even how friends, enemies,
(22:31):
loved ones, uh, etcetera, how they're going to react, and
so so that we can tailor our behavior to reach
the most desired outcome. That's right. And this is theory
of mind. And we talked about it and I Don't
Eat the Panda podcast, which is basically like here, you know,
the ability to anticipate someone else's actions also necessitates empathy,
which in that case is why you sometimes feel bad
(22:51):
about eating an animal. Right, that's the really boiled down
point there. But when when you're trying to sway your luck,
you have to be able to, like you say, inhabit
the other person's mind, and your brain can actually mirror
the intentions of people automatically. It's able to do this right,
and we already know this through mirror neurons. Of course. Yeah,
(23:12):
then it's going to be i don't know, five ten
years out before they can really you know, tinker without
to make it exact. But people who are more empathetic
may be better at doing this, and doing so may
accurately read what another person is going to do. And
again this could come in really handy with poker um.
On the flip side too, you can actually influence the
outcome of a situation by not radiating something like nervousness,
(23:36):
which would tip off the other person that they need
to observe you closer and they need to search for
a threat. So if you affect a sense of calm,
you're essentially faking it until you make it, which might
feel like luck to you, you know, if the other
person is buying into it, when in fact it's just
this complex symphony of functions in your brain that's being
(23:56):
carried out and you feel like you just got luck now.
And when it comes to uh, to thinking about our
brain's ability to perceive connections and make connections between um
sometimes diverse ideas, I can't help but think of creativity.
Which so much creativity, especially in the world where everything
has been done before, A lot of it boils down
(24:17):
to can I create new patterns? Um? You know, such as, oh, I, well,
the Exorcist has been done, Madman has been done. But
what if you combine the two and you have an
exorcist whose whole job is to remove advertising demons from
you know something that Draper is the exorcist or the demon?
(24:37):
Is he Reagan the child or both? I don't know this,
This idea hasn't been We'll get back to that. Yeah, well,
we don't want to give away the seekers who haven't
pitched it yet. But but yeah, so, so our creativity
works on establishing new patterns and new connections. So I
can't help but make the comparison here between that and
(24:58):
un luck. Yeah years uh. Peter Bruger as a neurobiologist,
and he's actually talked about this before and He says that, UM,
this this ability of creative people to link and associate
UM and prefer remote over close associations to the heart
of it really gets to the heart of UM creative thinking,
but also paranormal and delusional thinking. UM. And you know,
(25:24):
not that do you have to be delusional in order
to be creative and make all these patterns, but certainly
there is a parallel there, right in both instances that
person is willing to really sort of run with the
pattern recognition that they see and spin off even more patterns,
which is, you know, one of the hallmarks of creativity
(25:44):
is we've have researched before, right, and not just fiction
based creativity, which is an easy model to turn to,
but creativity, say in a business setting where one is
seeing patterns in the in the marketplace and in consumer reactions,
so that kind of thing. Bruger also found a connect
and with dopamine actually and levels of dopamine and people.
(26:04):
He found that people with high levels dopamine are more
likely to find significance and coincidence and pick out meaning
and patterns where there are none. In one trial in
which skeptics and paranormal believers were both given the drug
el dopa, which increases dopamine. The skeptics began to perform
much more like the believers in the studies, which I
(26:25):
think is fascinating. Wow. So huh, that's that's really fascinating. Yeah,
because and I mean I instantly think of like pumping
this into say a church environment, right, temple or environment
to just to sort of give people a little extra
boost to get superstitious about things. It also makes I
can't help but think of like someone going into see
a priest and uh and being like, father, um, I'm
(26:48):
having a crisis of faith, and then the the priest saying,
we'll hear, take take three of these. The should boost
dopamine levels and then you'll be good. You know. Wow,
Can I mean, can it get down to that level? Maybe?
I mean, I mean not not that you could take
a pill and it would I think, you know, completely
change the way you view the world. But what we're
talking about here does underline some of those connections though
between between the chemical us. At a chemical level, it
(27:13):
does inform our perception, right. Yeah, So it's kind of fascinating.
I did want to make another um mentioned about creativity. Again.
This is from Sandra Hupture's article. She was talking about
creative innovation, and she was saying, you know again, it's
the ability to understand and express novel orderly relationships, and
that in fact, Leonardo da Vinci advised his students to quote,
(27:35):
look at walls covered with many stains, with the idea
of imagining some scene you will see in its similarity
to landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, broad
valleys and hills of all kinds, also battles and figures
with lively gestures and strange faces and costumes, in an
infinity of things which you can reduce to separate and
(27:55):
complex forms. Well it This, of course brings to mind constellations.
The pattern of the stars, of course intensely complicated, as
we discussed in the Shark episode. You know, NASA has
has complicated algorithmic programs designed to look at the night
sky and uh and make sense of it all, But
(28:16):
constellations very ancient form of looking at the stars and
making sense of it by at times desperately forming patterns
amid those stars to create something like a big dipper
or a guy with a bow and arrow, or or
you know, or some sort of an animal. Uh, and
I think you can. You can definitely make the case
that as out there, some of those connections are those
(28:37):
connections allowed have allowed us to more easily make sense
of a very complicated system in the sky up. Well,
and once you name it, don't you feel some sort
of level of comfort to mean? Um, I'm sure that
Again it's that trying to master your environment and feel
some sort of sense of control. Um. And it's not
all bad, right, I mean patterns again, that's that's that's
(28:58):
what's scotten is so far here. Yeah, it's a there's
we we live in a chaotic system, but one where
there are patterns. So it's just to the extent that
we can avoid overcompensating and and just finding um, unreal
patterns everywhere. Um. Then I think I think of it
as the continental drift theory. Like this is a good
(29:20):
example of why patterns are important. People looked at maps
and they said, hey, wouldn't that piece fit here? I
bet those two places we're joined together. Yeah. Alfred Wagner,
who's actually the person who recognized the puzzle piece like
fit of a continents and came up with this theory
in part because of this pattern recognition, and of course
that sat around like thirty years or so before someone
(29:41):
was able to corroborate it with you know, other information.
But again, I mean, this is this is stuff that
can lead to breakthroughs if harnessed right, or it can
lead to cravy conspiracy theories that seriously damaged ones reputation.
It's yeah, yeah, it's a it's a power. You just
have to learn to use it, right. All right, Well,
let's see if any of our listeners got lucky and
(30:03):
I drew their listener mail. Here, let me turn it. Oh,
here we go. Let me grab this one, all right,
This one is from Lisa. Lisa says, may I start
off by saying that I absolutely love this podcast and
all the others from how Stuff Works. So see that
one was kind of like, oh, and then she likes
all of them stuff. I mean, but they're all great, Yeah,
they are awesome. Um, I like it would have been
(30:25):
different if she said, let me say that I absolutely
love this podcast and all other podcasts, then it feels
a little less special. But but no, no, yeah, we
take it and take your complict. I wouldn't be able
to make my quarter five minute drive to from work
every day without it. I recently listened to your podcast
on miss aphonia, and I was rather surprised this is
an actual diagnosed problem. I have never been to the doctor,
(30:47):
nor have I ever seen the need to be checked out,
because it has never really bothered me, bothered my day
to day life. But every time I hear someone's fingernails
scratching a car, I definitely react to it. I do
not simply cramp like you would if you heard a
chalkboard being scratched. Instead, it makes me feel like I
am going to turn inside out. We did a podcast
on that too, cry having done on a yet uh
(31:11):
and or gag, I think that's coming up all At
the same time, my younger brother used to do this
just a mess with me, and I would suddenly become
insanely in rage and start screaming for him to stop. Obviously,
this isn't a normal sound you hear when you were
around others, so it is never really interfered with my life.
I have always thought it was just a strong reaction
to a bad sound, but now I can't help but wonder.
(31:33):
Obviously I'm not going to try to diagnose myself. I'll
leave that up to a doctor. Thank you guys for everything. Oh,
thank you. Yeah. We received a lot of cool comments
regarding that episode we did, and it was really interesting
to hear people's take some of the things that really
bother them. And so many people have discovered that, yeah,
they could put a name to this, whether or not
you know it was actually dignified doctor yet or And
(31:56):
it opened up the door for a lot of listeners
to write in just tell us about annoying things in
their life, like my uncle as the worst cough let
me tell you so specific, like the one about the
socks in the carpet, And even though I'm like a person,
I'm like, wow, that doesn't annoy me at all, But
it definitely makes sense when you look at the at
(32:18):
the overall issue in the overall condition. Yeah. Um. We
also heard from Don. Don writs and says, I'm so
glad you did a podcast on misophonia. My whole life,
I've been told I have sensitive innards because of my
aversion to all sorts of sounds. I have always thought
that my husband was just a loud person. While he
(32:39):
does suffer from with allergies, of which causes him to
sometimes chew with his mouth opens a snort and breathe loudly.
My reaction is to want to run away or punch
him in the face. I am absolutely guilty of looking
him right in the eye to mock him with obnoxious
chewing and slurping noises so embarrassing. Funnily enough, when my
children were very small, I love the tiny sounds made
(33:00):
while eating as they ate. However, the sounds are becoming,
for lack of a better word, irritating. I also can't
stand the sound of water running out of a faucet,
which is probably why I allow my husband to be
in charge of the issues. It's nice to put a
name to the weirdness, thank you. Indeed, it is nice
to be able to put a name to the weirdness.
And as we discuss, I think that's the first step,
at least with with sort of normal, uh you know,
(33:22):
non clinical cases of this. That's the first step to
being able to control it, to be able to say, well,
this is you know, this is a this is what's
going on. This is at least some form of misophonia perhaps,
and this is how my brain is processing It is
how my brain is processing information. And if we're aware
of that, then we're in a better position to be like, well,
let's not let let me not get that, let they
get out of hand, let me not yell at someone
(33:43):
right again. You get to name it and then you
can control it to an extent. So yeah, if you
want to share anything with us, feel free to contact
is on Facebook or Twitter. We are blow the Mind
on both of those and we update those feeds regularly
with all sorts of cool stuff, and you can always
drop us an email at blow the Mind at how
stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our
(34:04):
new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Staff
Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing
possibilities of tomorrow.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
here's a quick question, Uh, in coming in to do
these podcasts, do you have any kind of a ritual
and kind of like do you have any lucky items
(00:25):
you bring with you? How do you prepare in terms
of superstition science podcast? Here's something that you never wanted
to know about. I used to wear lucky underwear, Okay,
but then I realized how ridiculous that was and I
quit the practice. Huh. Yeah, not of one wearing underwear,
(00:45):
but you know, specific pair. But yeah, I mean it's
very easy to attach meaning to something, right, And I
found myself and I think I'm pretty pragmatic right in
my thinking. And I found myself. Now you're like, no
underwear out underwear, out of mind? Um, But yeah, I
mean you can't help it sometimes make those associations, I guess,
I mean I can't. I mean I I on the
(01:07):
clothing front, I don't think I've ever experienced anything like
that because I tend to think of clothing and like, well,
this pair of pants is more comfortable than the others.
Uh So in that respect, like those will be my
lucky pants and when I feel when I wear them,
my body feels better and so lucky for you is comfortable. Yeah. Yeah,
But but there are other rituals that I do have.
(01:28):
I mean, not not so much rituals, but I guess
I'm I'm kind of there's something in me that's kind
of maybe an amulant junkie, like like I would I
feel like I could adapt really easily to say, like,
you know, like thaie amulet culture um. In fact, I
carry a ganisha a genisha in my pocket like a
little figuring the the overcomer of obstacles. Yeah, the the
(01:53):
Hindu god that people may recognize as having kind of uh,
you know, well very much an elephant look um and
standing on its vehicle is like a rat. It's not
that I like rubbed the figurine before each podcast or uh,
there's something about just I have to put it in
my pocket when I leave in the morning, and if
I don't watch myself, I'll accumulate other amulets along the way.
(02:13):
It'll be like something that just doesn't make a particularly
large amount of sense. Like when we were like cleaning
out my uh, some of my father's stuff after he died,
there was this roll of silver dollars and these weren't
like dear to him or anything. I don't think I've
ever seen these silver dollars, but I ended up like
slipping one in my pocket and carried it with me
a lot for several months. And that makes sense to me, though,
(02:36):
because that's that's something that you know, it's um maybe
you're asso sitting it with your father and you wanted
to keep it close to you or you know, as
a symbol of it. But they were if I were
gonna like consciously set out to like, all right, I
will pick out an amulet that reminds me of my
father or is you know, I mean he gets into
the whole thing, the whole power of sympathy uh and
uh and the way our minds working, we ended up
(02:56):
attaching meaning to this, to an object that has come
into contact with somebody. So if I were to like
consciously say, what's an object that was dear to my
father that I could carry as an amulet, that would
not be it. Like, I don't know why that ended
up in my pocket for so long. Um, or sometimes
it will be like a particularly good day or a
good outing or you know, or a good date that
I've gone on with my wife, and I'll like pick
up a rock and it'll go in my pocket, and
(03:18):
not even a pretty rot, not like any kind of
like a fine quartz kind of thing or something that
would wind up on a geologist shelf, but I'll end
up like sticking in my pocket and it will become
kind of an amulet of that day. And so I
have to watch that and try and keep it to
just working tendencies. I don't think know if it's hoarding,
if they're um, if they're kind of like magical amulets, right, yeah, yeah,
(03:40):
And if it keepsakes, if you will, like tiny keepsakes
that remain on your person, right, that have have some
sort of power to you in some sense. Yeah, as
much as we hate to admit, these things do have
a power over us. And if you guys out there
haven't guessed it already, we're talking about that the science
of lucky pants. That's where we're coming back around to. Yeah, yeah,
that you know, we can't help but wear those lucky
(04:01):
pants or pick up that rock something that means a
lot to us, that makes us feel like, you know,
we've got some sort of control over the chaos of
our lives. Yeah, Like, what are some more that you've seen? Like,
because I like, I have a friend who does this
thing where if she is speeding through a red light,
well not really a red light, let's say a an
orange light, yellow light turning, you're give a nerve break there. Yeah,
(04:22):
she'll do this thing where she hits the roof of
the car like it's some sort of like a luck
thing to not get caught by a traffic cop. There's
the rub right, the luck, this idea that we are
actually getting some sort of magical luck from the ritual. Real, Yeah,
we're doing something to influence the outcome. Yeah, I was
thinking about the speed skater Chad Hedrick. He collects fortunes
(04:44):
from fortune cookies because before the two thousands six Games
in Turn, he got a fortune cookie that said your
golden opportunity is coming, and he went on to win gold, silver,
and bronze medals And now he hangs out with fortune
cookie fortunes in his pocket at any time. He's become
(05:04):
a fortune cookie junkie. Wow, how does he say in
shape eating all that all that cookie, you know, Oh,
I'm sure you know, he just probably called up his
local take out and you know, just chops through them
and doesn't necessarily eat him. I wonder I wonder be
gets irritated with the with the fortune cookies that don't
really have fortunes per se, but they're just kind of like,
here's a little bit of good advice. Um in mangled English. Yeah,
(05:27):
I get that on my tea sometimes my my tea package,
you know, the little tag on it. And it depends
on I can always tell what sort of mood I'm
in because either I'm like, oh that's beautiful, or I'm like,
oh man, just take it somewhere else. Yeah, or it's
like that's not really cosmic insight. That's how am I gonna?
That's just good advice. That's just like saying something like
I don't know, um see, that's how devoid of feel
(05:51):
good or I end this morning. I can't think of
a of any kind of crappy little fortune cookie thing,
but but any rate, um, yeah, people do. It's early
this morning, it is kind of early. But yeah, so
so things of this nature, people collecting items, people performing
rituals people um, sticking to some sort of lucky garment.
(06:13):
And I do mean sticking to it literally because some
we know with the sports people that sometimes they don't
change their lucky socks right right, like baseball, uh baseball
sports people. How illiterate am I in in the field
of sports that I can't use the correct terminology, but
baseball people who won't change their socks, and it's terribly smelly.
(06:36):
I remember reading about there there was this pro wrestler
who wrestled by the name of Vader who it was
based out of Atlanta. I don't know if he lives
in the area or not. I think he's pretty much
retired now. But he was like this big, beefy, kind
of bull looking guy and supposedly there are people that
really hated wrestling him. Um. And you know this is
pro wrestling is all scripted violence going on with a
(06:58):
certain amount of improv But he his his shattering the illusion.
Sorry oh um, but his his lucky thing was to
not wash his wrestling outfit, his his his jumper. Yeah yeah,
And so it was a pretty horrendous at times. Well,
and that probably became a ritual that actually did start
(07:19):
to have some sort of actual effect, right, because yeah,
because you know, you don't want to get too close
to the guy or have the match go too long, right,
even if kind of punching in the face. Yeah, and
you're under his arm. Um. Okay. So there's a term
for this, and it's called apophenia, and it's seen patterns
and meaningless data. And we've talked about this before. Our
brains despised randomness. We try to organize whenever we can.
(07:43):
Whenever we see some sort of data in front of us,
we try to see patterns. We might have a grilled
cheese sandwich. We might think that it looks like the
Madonna on it. As I'm sure a lot of people know.
This was that on eBay. I think it was. I
think it was at some point, Yeah it was. I
mean it was at least after item because people thought, oh,
that looks like the Madonna burned into the grilled cheese sandwich. Yeah.
(08:05):
Our minds cannot help but make order out of chaos.
I mean, it's how we survive. It's you need to
be able to navigate this this world that we live
in and and put one in two together when in
ways that can often save a life. That can allow
us to get to work at all. Uh, you know, um,
it ends up ends up being little things like you
(08:26):
you know that that when you when you feel that
kind of weird wind coming down the train tracks at
a at a subway or train station, you're like, oh, well,
the trains about to get here. But then that's a
very logical one plus two equals three. But then in
other cases, uh, this ends up becoming what is called
a type one error where we end up um um
(08:48):
looking for signs that putting putting signs together that don't
really add up, but but we just think they do.
So Yeah. Actually, there's a Scientific American article called patternicity,
Finding Meaningful Patterns and meaning Less Noise, and Michael Shermer wrote,
our brains are involved pattern recognition machines that connect the
dots and create meaning out of the patterns that we
think we see in nature. Sometimes a really is connected
(09:10):
to be sometimes it's not. When it is, we have
learned something valuable about the environment from which we can
make predictions that aiden survival, survival, and reproduction. Unfortunately, we
did not evolve a Bologney detection network in the brain
to distinguish between true and false patterns, and I love that.
I thought, Yeah, we really do need a Bologney detection
network at this point. Yeah, I mean, it basically comes
(09:31):
down to the fact that that randomness just doesn't really
fit well with us. We don't we don't like the
idea of randomness. And ultimately, as many critics have pointed out,
like even a really chaotic system, there's there's order going
on in it, uh, And you can find order in
that system, but it's not always going to be in
in a predictive way. And this is called adventitious reinforcing. Again,
(09:52):
it's that accidental association between an outcome and whatever you're
doing at the time. Um So again you see that,
you know, people not change gene their dirty socks because
the big game is coming, and that's what they did
last time, and surely if they don't wear those same socks,
they will lose. Right. I wore dirty socks and my
team one. Therefore, my dirty socks altered physical reality, broke
(10:16):
every law of physics, and somehow made that team win. Therefore,
I need to make sure that I wear the same
dirty socks next week. But but now in these cases, well,
why not apply even more scrutiny to it and realize,
my socks need to be the same level of dirty
they are now, if they're more dirty, then maybe it'll
tip the balance. And then he ends up this like complicated. Well,
that's when it becomes a problem, because that's when you
(10:37):
can really kind of screw yourself, right, because you know,
what is first a talisman to kind of help you
through psychologically, when it becomes an obsession, then becomes obsession,
and then you could really kind of throw your your game,
so to speak. Um, I thought it was really interesting
that behaviors DF Skinner took this this up with pigeons. Yeah,
and he put a few half starved pigeons in a
(10:59):
box and put food pellets down a shoot at random intervals,
and the pigeons began to think, or at least he
thought this, because who knows what pigeons think, but he
assumed that whatever they did when the food arrives somehow
caused the food to arrive. So this is like they're
doing like little circles and stuff, right. Yeah. Yeah, he
said that one bird was conditioned to turn counter clockwise
about the cage, making two or three turns between reinforcements
(11:22):
and another repeatedly thrust its head into one of the
upper corners of the cage. A third developed a tossing response.
So it's kind of funny, like I don't like to
think of of myself as a pigeon, but you know,
looking at my past behavior and attaching meaning to things
don't necessarily have a meaning. It is sort of like
we're all pigeons, you know, in a cage making these
(11:42):
weird ritualistic turns to try to affect our environments. Um,
so it's really interesting. This is from a BBC article
Go figure why we think rituals can influence outcome? They
say the experiment might be said to demonstrate a sort
of superstition. The bird behaves as if there was a
alsal relation between his behavior and the present presentation of food,
(12:04):
although such a relation is lacking. Huh. Well, you know,
it reminds me a lot of our previous research into
build sea bows too, and certainly some of the literature
makes this correlation as well, because like it could be
something as simple as, uh, I need to be at
my mental best for this meeting that I have every week, right,
so I must have a you know, some sort of
(12:25):
an energy drink to boost me up. And then to
what extent is that energy drink actually increasing your performance?
And to what extent is it just a ritual, a
superstitious ritual that has to take place for you to
feel confident enough to go into the uh in into
the meeting, to get into the mindset. And um, and okay,
you can make an argument that yeah, you're getting a
(12:45):
caffeine boost, but now replace the energy drink with a
like a rosary or you know, or or or a
little amulet or or some sort of magical ceremony you
perform on the floor in front of the meeting room
with chalk and candles or something. Yeah, And then I'm
just thinking that. And then you're on your way to
(13:05):
O C D and you start tapping three times you
know which you know again, I'm that's it's just interesting
to see how you can take this to the nth
degree and your behavior really begins to splinter a little bit,
this little spinking of knocking and splinters. There's the whole
knock on wood thing, right, That's like a classic example.
I don't think of myself as being particularly superstitious. You know,
I'll be talking about something and I'll accidentally, you know,
(13:27):
mention some sort of horrible thing that has not happened yet,
and then I'll be like, knock on wood, and then
i have to find wood to knock on, like it
just makes sense. Likewise, um, the whole salt shaker thinks,
spill some salt and you have to throw some over
your shoulders. I'll find myself doing that just because I'll
have spilt a little salt, and I'll be like, well,
it doesn't hurt, right, So I'll take like one grain
(13:47):
and then ill position myself so that if I throw
it over my shoulder goes into the sink. So that
way I'm also not making a mess. I think the
roots of that are in um shamanism too, right, I
think that it's like to dispel evil spirits somehow. I
have that watched and one of one of the knooks there.
But I mean, I'm sure that many different cultures have
(14:08):
many different interpretations for the whole salt trick, but nonetheless
it's it's a ritual, right right. But but then again
I would not freak out of idea. Oh. Another one
is the of course, the stepping on a crack and
breaking your mother back, which I don't think there's ever
been a proven cause and effect with that. Like every
nobody actually believes that. I mean with anyone with a
(14:28):
with a healthy mind is not believe that they're they're
they're stepping on a crack will somehow harm the vertebrae
of their mother. But people do get been out a
shape about it if they in some cases, so I mean,
it's just if you end up letting it the um
get ahead of you. Yeah, and you see this too,
UM in extreme cases where if someone has lost a person,
they start to see signs everywhere of you know, they
(14:49):
might have I think I read something about it was, uh,
one guy who lost his son. His son committed suicide,
and he began to see signs in everything open clothes,
pin and uh, you know all these different UM like
forty five degree angle UM shapes, and he began to
think that that was pointing to the time that his
son had committed suicide. And again, this is you know,
(15:12):
this is us trying to have some sort of mastery
over what we can't control. Probably helped him a lot
to think, well, okay, there's there are signs that are
pointing just to at least tell me some aspect of this,
you know, the time that my son passed away, or
to get a better rooted feeling and what had happened. Um.
So it's interesting to see it in that way. You
(15:33):
can take that situation trying to master something you can't control,
and if you you transpose it back on some like
prehistoric setting. You know, some guy drugging through the woods, um,
and there is a predator out there that because will
eat him, or a human enemy, and your amount of
control over what is going to happen depends on your
ability to pick up signs in the world around you. Uh,
(15:57):
you know, the sound of footsteps in the dark, the
the the the silhouette of something against the moonlight, things
of that nature. Right, And so we're sort of hardwired
to air on that side, right, which is better for us,
because that's why we have gotten to the point where
we have right as a species. Because then it's a
false alarm and that's when we laugh. Right. According to
some of the theories about laughter, that laughter is a
response to say, oh, I'm not really in physical danger. Yeah,
(16:20):
it's a it's a release, yeah, and in a signal
to to other humans that oh, we're not really going
to die. It's all right. That wasn't really a savor
tooth tiger, but better to be sure are on the
side of cushion, like you said. That's right, that's I
mean behind every good joke is a is a false
savor tooth tiger in a way, right right, because it's
a benign threat. Trust no one. You heard it here? Yeah,
(16:40):
that's right. When we come back, we're going to talk
about Lady Luck and if she actually exists. This podcast
is brought to you by Intel, the sponsors of Tomorrow
and the Discovery Channel. At Intel, we believe curiosity is
the spark which drives innovation. Join us at curiosity dot
(17:02):
com and explore the answers to life's questions. All right,
and we're back. So Lady Luck LEO are not okay? Well? Uh,
Luck is not a lady tonight. I don't know. I mean,
it's it's a nice thought, right, likes a lady. She's
shining down on you. She has a bugle beat address
(17:23):
on Thank you for resisting the urge to break into song.
By the way, I mean, this podcast isn't over yet, okay. Uh.
There is an article called Apophania Definitions Analysis by Sandra L.
Hubsurance really interesting. She talks about the gambler's fallacy and
holds that in a sequence of random events, past outcomes
influence future outcomes. The off sided example is a game
(17:46):
of roulette where black has spun seven times in a row.
The players around the table begin to all the players right.
They all begin to feel that their luck is running
out and that the red is due soon or um,
that they're having a streak in black will continue to appear,
when in actuality, the probability of the next spin being
read or black is the same as ever. And this
(18:08):
you see this all the time at gambling. Right, there's
this idea that you know you've got good luck tonight. Um,
but that's kind of what gets us in trouble. And
according to psychology today, luck really actually wouldn't exist without
the following conditions. Okay, rabbit foot, rabbit foot, troll. You
(18:29):
have to take a chance in order to have a chance,
which is kind of a thing. It's like if you
don't play the lottery, you cannot win the lottery exactly. Um.
But it Studies show that when outcomes are in certain
pessimistic people tend to avoid these situations and are averse
to to risk, right, whereas optimistic people don't. So optimism
is actually necessary to take a chance. So not only
(18:51):
you have to take a chance, but you kind of
have to be like, yeah, hey, I'm taking a chance, right, Okay,
So it goes back to that optimism boost we're talking about. Yeah,
guy walks in to a casino. Guy feels confident enough
to play roulette because he has uh, you know, a
statue of in his pocket. Well, and even just map
back to other times in your life where you felt lucky, Um,
(19:13):
something happened. The sequence of events. I always think about this,
always feels like something builds up to something happening, and
always like, oh, yeah, there's this pattern here. But the
fact of the matter is is that I happened to
be in the right place at the right time, But
not only that I was open to the experience and
had put myself out there or whatever it was. So
that's kind of how I think about it. You've got
the gambler, Yes, who's who. Yeah, they did it. They gambled,
(19:36):
so therefore you know they got a fifty percent chance
whether or not they're going to make good on it.
But that's about the same for anything that you try
to do in your life. Right, more or less, I think, yeah,
I guess what you're trying to do. Sometimes there's like
ten percent, sometimes seventy five percent, but still there's there's
a chance. There's a chance. Yeah. Uh. The second thing
is unexpected actions come from the subconscious. Your unconscious brain
(19:58):
may actually see what you need to see before your
conscious brain knows. This is called preemptive perception, and it's
thought to be subserved by part of the prietal lobe
of the brain. Yeah. This reminds me of of priming memory,
which is one of the types of memory that we've
talked about in the past, where you're not consciously aware
of it, but your brain is forming this, uh, this pattern.
(20:19):
It's associating one thing with the other. Yeah. And it
actually reminds me too of the free Will podcast that
we did when we talked about this the eye of ourselves,
the conscious that we are the last person to actually
learn what our decision is because all of these other
things are taking place in our brain that could have
been culminating there for an hour, year, or even ten years,
(20:42):
and so there's things going on under the surface that
are really helping to inform you. So we're like the
false memory, where we pointed out that some experiments have
have suggested that our brain knows when even though we
think a false memory is true, deep down our brain
knows of that false memory is false. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah,
(21:03):
it's it's there's somewhere there's a center there in our
brains that can sniff out the difference. So at conscious level,
we're not putting one in two together about what's about
to happen. But below the surface, our brain already knows
or thinks it knows what's going to happen. And this
has been observed in studies in m r I, which
is really fascinating. So the psychology today is basically saying
when you next sense something that you should actually take
(21:24):
it seriously before you discard it, because there is some
sort of basis that instinct coting in right exactly. The
third is to tap into your empathy. Oh yes, this
is of course, especially when you're dealing with other people.
You're playing a game poker or even something like you know,
scrabble or words with friends or or anything where there
is a human intellect on the other side. You're in
(21:45):
a hot water situation to write now that we're advocating
hot water situations. Yeah, like don't play scrabble in a
hot tube or be a jewel thief and then get caught.
Yeah okay, but but yeah, there's a there's a it's
a of cat and mouse and uh, and so you're
you're inevitably thinking about trying to think, what is the
(22:06):
other guy or gal? Uh, thinking about let me try
and put myself in their shoes so I can outsmart them.
I mean, this is basic. This is a basic h
principle of our cognitive architecture because so much of our
of our of our brain activity is devoted to trying
to determine how, say a prey animal is going to react,
how an adversary is going to react, how even how friends, enemies,
(22:31):
loved ones, uh, etcetera, how they're going to react, and
so so that we can tailor our behavior to reach
the most desired outcome. That's right. And this is theory
of mind. And we talked about it and I Don't
Eat the Panda podcast, which is basically like here, you know,
the ability to anticipate someone else's actions also necessitates empathy,
which in that case is why you sometimes feel bad
(22:51):
about eating an animal. Right, that's the really boiled down
point there. But when when you're trying to sway your luck,
you have to be able to, like you say, inhabit
the other person's mind, and your brain can actually mirror
the intentions of people automatically. It's able to do this right,
and we already know this through mirror neurons. Of course. Yeah,
(23:12):
then it's going to be i don't know, five ten
years out before they can really you know, tinker without
to make it exact. But people who are more empathetic
may be better at doing this, and doing so may
accurately read what another person is going to do. And
again this could come in really handy with poker um.
On the flip side too, you can actually influence the
outcome of a situation by not radiating something like nervousness,
(23:36):
which would tip off the other person that they need
to observe you closer and they need to search for
a threat. So if you affect a sense of calm,
you're essentially faking it until you make it, which might
feel like luck to you, you know, if the other
person is buying into it, when in fact it's just
this complex symphony of functions in your brain that's being
(23:56):
carried out and you feel like you just got luck now.
And when it comes to uh, to thinking about our
brain's ability to perceive connections and make connections between um
sometimes diverse ideas, I can't help but think of creativity.
Which so much creativity, especially in the world where everything
has been done before, A lot of it boils down
(24:17):
to can I create new patterns? Um? You know, such as, oh, I, well,
the Exorcist has been done, Madman has been done. But
what if you combine the two and you have an
exorcist whose whole job is to remove advertising demons from
you know something that Draper is the exorcist or the demon?
(24:37):
Is he Reagan the child or both? I don't know this,
This idea hasn't been We'll get back to that. Yeah, well,
we don't want to give away the seekers who haven't
pitched it yet. But but yeah, so, so our creativity
works on establishing new patterns and new connections. So I
can't help but make the comparison here between that and
(24:58):
un luck. Yeah years uh. Peter Bruger as a neurobiologist,
and he's actually talked about this before and He says that, UM,
this this ability of creative people to link and associate
UM and prefer remote over close associations to the heart
of it really gets to the heart of UM creative thinking,
but also paranormal and delusional thinking. UM. And you know,
(25:24):
not that do you have to be delusional in order
to be creative and make all these patterns, but certainly
there is a parallel there, right in both instances that
person is willing to really sort of run with the
pattern recognition that they see and spin off even more patterns,
which is, you know, one of the hallmarks of creativity
(25:44):
is we've have researched before, right, and not just fiction
based creativity, which is an easy model to turn to,
but creativity, say in a business setting where one is
seeing patterns in the in the marketplace and in consumer reactions,
so that kind of thing. Bruger also found a connect
and with dopamine actually and levels of dopamine and people.
(26:04):
He found that people with high levels dopamine are more
likely to find significance and coincidence and pick out meaning
and patterns where there are none. In one trial in
which skeptics and paranormal believers were both given the drug
el dopa, which increases dopamine. The skeptics began to perform
much more like the believers in the studies, which I
(26:25):
think is fascinating. Wow. So huh, that's that's really fascinating. Yeah,
because and I mean I instantly think of like pumping
this into say a church environment, right, temple or environment
to just to sort of give people a little extra
boost to get superstitious about things. It also makes I
can't help but think of like someone going into see
a priest and uh and being like, father, um, I'm
(26:48):
having a crisis of faith, and then the the priest saying,
we'll hear, take take three of these. The should boost
dopamine levels and then you'll be good. You know. Wow,
Can I mean, can it get down to that level? Maybe?
I mean, I mean not not that you could take
a pill and it would I think, you know, completely
change the way you view the world. But what we're
talking about here does underline some of those connections though
between between the chemical us. At a chemical level, it
(27:13):
does inform our perception, right. Yeah, So it's kind of fascinating.
I did want to make another um mentioned about creativity. Again.
This is from Sandra Hupture's article. She was talking about
creative innovation, and she was saying, you know again, it's
the ability to understand and express novel orderly relationships, and
that in fact, Leonardo da Vinci advised his students to quote,
(27:35):
look at walls covered with many stains, with the idea
of imagining some scene you will see in its similarity
to landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, broad
valleys and hills of all kinds, also battles and figures
with lively gestures and strange faces and costumes, in an
infinity of things which you can reduce to separate and
(27:55):
complex forms. Well it This, of course brings to mind constellations.
The pattern of the stars, of course intensely complicated, as
we discussed in the Shark episode. You know, NASA has
has complicated algorithmic programs designed to look at the night
sky and uh and make sense of it all, But
(28:16):
constellations very ancient form of looking at the stars and
making sense of it by at times desperately forming patterns
amid those stars to create something like a big dipper
or a guy with a bow and arrow, or or
you know, or some sort of an animal. Uh, and
I think you can. You can definitely make the case
that as out there, some of those connections are those
(28:37):
connections allowed have allowed us to more easily make sense
of a very complicated system in the sky up. Well,
and once you name it, don't you feel some sort
of level of comfort to mean? Um, I'm sure that
Again it's that trying to master your environment and feel
some sort of sense of control. Um. And it's not
all bad, right, I mean patterns again, that's that's that's
(28:58):
what's scotten is so far here. Yeah, it's a there's
we we live in a chaotic system, but one where
there are patterns. So it's just to the extent that
we can avoid overcompensating and and just finding um, unreal
patterns everywhere. Um. Then I think I think of it
as the continental drift theory. Like this is a good
(29:20):
example of why patterns are important. People looked at maps
and they said, hey, wouldn't that piece fit here? I
bet those two places we're joined together. Yeah. Alfred Wagner,
who's actually the person who recognized the puzzle piece like
fit of a continents and came up with this theory
in part because of this pattern recognition, and of course
that sat around like thirty years or so before someone
(29:41):
was able to corroborate it with you know, other information.
But again, I mean, this is this is stuff that
can lead to breakthroughs if harnessed right, or it can
lead to cravy conspiracy theories that seriously damaged ones reputation.
It's yeah, yeah, it's a it's a power. You just
have to learn to use it, right. All right, Well,
let's see if any of our listeners got lucky and
(30:03):
I drew their listener mail. Here, let me turn it. Oh,
here we go. Let me grab this one, all right,
This one is from Lisa. Lisa says, may I start
off by saying that I absolutely love this podcast and
all the others from how Stuff Works. So see that
one was kind of like, oh, and then she likes
all of them stuff. I mean, but they're all great, Yeah,
they are awesome. Um, I like it would have been
(30:25):
different if she said, let me say that I absolutely
love this podcast and all other podcasts, then it feels
a little less special. But but no, no, yeah, we
take it and take your complict. I wouldn't be able
to make my quarter five minute drive to from work
every day without it. I recently listened to your podcast
on miss aphonia, and I was rather surprised this is
an actual diagnosed problem. I have never been to the doctor,
(30:47):
nor have I ever seen the need to be checked out,
because it has never really bothered me, bothered my day
to day life. But every time I hear someone's fingernails
scratching a car, I definitely react to it. I do
not simply cramp like you would if you heard a
chalkboard being scratched. Instead, it makes me feel like I
am going to turn inside out. We did a podcast
on that too, cry having done on a yet uh
(31:11):
and or gag, I think that's coming up all At
the same time, my younger brother used to do this
just a mess with me, and I would suddenly become
insanely in rage and start screaming for him to stop. Obviously,
this isn't a normal sound you hear when you were
around others, so it is never really interfered with my life.
I have always thought it was just a strong reaction
to a bad sound, but now I can't help but wonder.
(31:33):
Obviously I'm not going to try to diagnose myself. I'll
leave that up to a doctor. Thank you guys for everything. Oh,
thank you. Yeah. We received a lot of cool comments
regarding that episode we did, and it was really interesting
to hear people's take some of the things that really
bother them. And so many people have discovered that, yeah,
they could put a name to this, whether or not
you know it was actually dignified doctor yet or And
(31:56):
it opened up the door for a lot of listeners
to write in just tell us about annoying things in
their life, like my uncle as the worst cough let
me tell you so specific, like the one about the
socks in the carpet, And even though I'm like a person,
I'm like, wow, that doesn't annoy me at all, But
it definitely makes sense when you look at the at
(32:18):
the overall issue in the overall condition. Yeah. Um. We
also heard from Don. Don writs and says, I'm so
glad you did a podcast on misophonia. My whole life,
I've been told I have sensitive innards because of my
aversion to all sorts of sounds. I have always thought
that my husband was just a loud person. While he
(32:39):
does suffer from with allergies, of which causes him to
sometimes chew with his mouth opens a snort and breathe loudly.
My reaction is to want to run away or punch
him in the face. I am absolutely guilty of looking
him right in the eye to mock him with obnoxious
chewing and slurping noises so embarrassing. Funnily enough, when my
children were very small, I love the tiny sounds made
(33:00):
while eating as they ate. However, the sounds are becoming,
for lack of a better word, irritating. I also can't
stand the sound of water running out of a faucet,
which is probably why I allow my husband to be
in charge of the issues. It's nice to put a
name to the weirdness, thank you. Indeed, it is nice
to be able to put a name to the weirdness.
And as we discuss, I think that's the first step,
at least with with sort of normal, uh you know,
(33:22):
non clinical cases of this. That's the first step to
being able to control it, to be able to say, well,
this is you know, this is a this is what's
going on. This is at least some form of misophonia perhaps,
and this is how my brain is processing It is
how my brain is processing information. And if we're aware
of that, then we're in a better position to be like, well,
let's not let let me not get that, let they
get out of hand, let me not yell at someone
(33:43):
right again. You get to name it and then you
can control it to an extent. So yeah, if you
want to share anything with us, feel free to contact
is on Facebook or Twitter. We are blow the Mind
on both of those and we update those feeds regularly
with all sorts of cool stuff, and you can always
drop us an email at blow the Mind at how
stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our
(34:04):
new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Staff
Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing
possibilities of tomorrow.
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
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