What Are the Chances?: Why We Believe in Luck 023119868X, 9780231198684

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
1. What Is Luck?
2. A Brief History of Luck
3. Luck and Psychology: On Being a Social Animal
4. Luck and Psychology: Magical Thinking
5. Luck and Your Brain: Part I
6. Luck and Your Brain: Part II
7. How to Get Lucky
8. Fortune’s Expensive Smile
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

WHAT ARE THE CHANCES?

WHAT ARE THE CHANCES? W H Y WE B EL IEV E IN LU C K

B A R B A R A B L AT C H L E Y

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2021 Barbara Blatchley All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Blatchley, Barbara, author. Title: What are the chances? : why we believe in luck / Barbara Blatchley. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020050526 (print) | LCCN 2020050527 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231198684 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231552752 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Serendipity. | Chance–Psychological aspects. Classification: LCC BF637.S8 B53 2021 (print) | LCC BF637.S8 (ebook) | DDC 158.1–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050526 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050527

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design and illustration: Alex Camlin

This is for Christopher

CONTENTS

1 What Is Luck? 1 2 A Brief History of Luck 21 3 Luck and Psychology: On Being a Social Animal 45 4 Luck and Psychology: Magical Thinking 74 5 Luck and Your Brain: Part I 104 6 Luck and Your Brain: Part II 132 7 How to Get Lucky 158 8 Fortune’s Expensive Smile 183

Notes 195 Bibliography 215 Index 231

 WHAT IS LUCK?

Luck is not chance— It’s Toil— Fortune’s expensive smile Is earned— The Father of the Mine Is that old-fashioned Coin We spurned— EMILY DICKINSON, POEM #1350

LUCK AND THE HIGH SEAS This book is about luck. We all know what luck means for us personally, but, as they say, “one person’s ceiling is another person’s floor”—it might just depend on your perspective. What’s lucky for you can be completely different for the person standing next to you. So let’s start with a question: What exactly is luck? Is it plain old hard work, as Emily Dickinson suggests, or is it random chance reaching out to smack you in the face or lift you into a new tax bracket? Can something be both good and bad luck at

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the same time? Perhaps a story will illuminate the answer. Let’s take a look at what happened to Sarah Kessans and Emily Kohl. In 2005 these two young women entered the Woodvale Events Transatlantic Rowing Race, billed as the toughest rowing race in the world. The competition involves rowing a boat across the Atlantic Ocean. Sarah Kessans very graciously agreed to let me interview her about her adventures at sea. My first question to her was, “What possessed you to consider rowing a tiny, twentyfour-foot boat across the enormous Atlantic?” Her reply was straightforward. I fell completely in love with the sport of rowing from my first strokes on the Wabash River during my freshman year at Purdue. . . . As I was returning from a trip to London, I stopped in a bookshop on Oxford Street to find something to read on the flight home. I picked up Debra Veal’s Rowing It Alone and nearly had it read by the time I touched down in Chicago. I was hooked. Ocean rowing was everything I loved about rowing, plus an absolutely incredible adventure . . . and fortunately there was someone as crazy as I was [her racing partner, Emily Kohl] on the Purdue rowing team!

The race begins in the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa and ends in Antigua, almost three thousand miles with a whole lot of nothing but wide and empty water in between. Sarah and Emily were hoping to break the women’s world record for rowing a “double” across a major portion of the Atlantic Ocean. A “double” is a small but very specialized rowboat. There’s a tiny, one-person-at-a-time cabin at the stern of the boat and an even smaller storage locker at the bow, two rowing positions, and not much else. The boat is so small that rowers have to trade off lying down in the cabin; one person rows while the other sleeps, or tries to, in the narrow, cramped quarters.

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Sarah and Emily named their twenty-four-foot-long six-footwide vessel American Fire and trained like mad throughout the spring and summer of 2005 in preparation for the race. Both had been members of the Purdue University rowing team, so they had lots of experience with distance rowing. The Purdue University Boilermakers make their home in West Lafayette, Indiana, about sixty miles northwest of Indianapolis. The campus is surrounded by waving seas of corn and soybeans, but there is not much in the way of open ocean of any description. Both young women knew that ocean training was essential, so in the summer of 2005, Emily and Sarah moved themselves and their boat to Florida to train on the Intracoastal Waterway. They rowed back and forth between Fort Lauderdale and Miami, building their stamina for the fifty- to sixty-mile days of rowing they wanted to log during the race itself. The race began with what could be interpreted as a bad omen—a sign that bad luck and difficult circumstances were on the way. The race was scheduled to begin November 27, 2005, taking advantage of what usually is the end of hurricane season in the Atlantic. Unfortunately, the 2005 season was the most active in recorded history, cataloging so many storms (including the infamous hurricane Katrina that devastated the Gulf Coast) that forecasters used up all the names on the official list and had to use Greek letter names for the last six storms of the season. The racers finally left tiny La Gomera in the Canary Islands on November 30 and quickly encountered unusually strong winds, very high seas, and extremely difficult rowing conditions. Hurricane Epsilon, a strange, late-in-the-season storm was churning the seas and began to move eastward December 1, 2005. Many rowers had to stop rowing altogether and throw out their sea anchors (large parachute-shaped bags deployed to catch water and hold the boat in place) to keep their small rowboats from

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being blown backward in the strong winds. When able to move westward again, the rowers passed through the southern edge of Tropical Storm Zeta and into even more difficult conditions. After a month and a half of nonstop daily rowing and battling the seas, on January 15 conditions became so bad that the crew of American Fire was forced once again to set their sea anchor and wait. Part of the steering mechanism on their boat had snapped, and they needed calmer water in which to work to reattach it. The horrendous weather drove both Sarah and Emily into the cabin, and the small space quickly grew stifling. They turned on the ventilation system, confident that the design of the vents would keep water from the large waves crashing over the boat outside the cabin. At about 2:30 p.m., Sarah says they had radioed the Aurora, the closer of the two support vessels for the racers—a mere three hundred miles ahead of American Fire (the other support vessel, the Sula, was six hundred miles behind them). In a brief conversation, they advised the crew of the bad weather and their forced stop. At that time, the Aurora had their hands full rescuing another boat that had capsized earlier in the day. Around 4:30 p.m., Emily had the radio in her hand to call Aurora again when the worst possible thing that could happen, happened—a large rogue wave slammed into the port side of the boat (that’s the left side for all us landlubbers), rolling the boat completely over. Water was now rushing into the cabin through the still-open vents. They were in big trouble now. Water was filling the boat, they were unable to stop it, and the boat was upside down in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, in the middle of the winter, in horrid weather. Sarah reached the hatch just in time to see that the wave had snapped the lines holding their life raft. She watched the life raft disappear between the waves, and along with it went their survival gear. Both women struggled to get clear of the

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waterlogged debris and wreckage that made movement inside the cabin almost impossible. Emerging from the cabin, Emily and Sarah clambered on top of the upturned boat, hoping against hope that they would be able to see the life raft nearby. No such luck. They managed to clip themselves together and tie themselves to the boat. They had a sleeping bag that Sarah had grabbed on the way out of the cabin, and an emergency position indicating radio beacon (EPIRB), which Sarah had also managed to snag as she escaped from the rapidly flooding cabin. They held on to each other, the EPIRB, and the boat and waited, keeping morale up and hopes high by telling jokes and singing songs—anything to keep their minds occupied and focused on something, anything, other than their desperate predicament. Sixteen hours later, the tall ship Stavros S. Niarchos, sailing from the Canary Islands to Antigua, came into view. The Stavros had been in the general vicinity (it was more than one hundred miles away, but when you’re in the middle of the Atlantic, at night, tied to the bottom of your very small boat, one hundred miles away is nearby) and had been asked by the U.S. Coast Guard, which had received the EPIRB’s emergency signal, to try to find and rescue the women. Interviewed in Antigua after the Stavros sailed into port, Sarah admitted that she and Emily were very lucky, and I suppose that most of us would agree. Capsizing in the middle of the ocean with no supplies, no life boat, and only the hope that someone heard your emergency signal is about as nightmarish as it gets. Surviving unscathed is indeed lucky. Sarah explained the role luck had played in the 2005 race this way: There were so many variables that led up to the capsize, both good and bad, and I’d have to say that both preparation and

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random chance played key roles in the final outcome.  .  .  . That said, it is hard to prepare for every possible condition that nature can throw at you—had we known that a rogue wave was going to hit we would have kept the inner caps to our ventilating fans locked shut (which would have kept water out of the cabin and could have allowed the boat to self-right as designed). Had we known the violence of rogue waves, we would have found a better way to lash down our life raft and emergency grab bag on deck. Had we known that the hurricane season would extend all the way through mid-January, Woodvale might have postponed or canceled the race. But, as much bad luck as we had out there, we definitely had some good luck—we had each other and a boat that stayed afloat, and while all the rest of the crews were rescued by either the support yachts or carriers (crowded and not much fun), we had the good fortune to be rescued by a tall ship headed for the Caribbean.

After reading this remarkable story, I found myself thinking about their luck. Consider the conditions they encountered. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration reports that waves up to twenty-three feet in height are fairly common in a storm on the open ocean, and in extreme conditions, waves of fifty feet in height have been noted. The rowboat was only twenty-four feet in length, the same size as just a biggish wave. A rogue wave is abnormally large and looks like a wall of water. (Folktales talk of freak waves ninety-eight feet tall— the height of a ten-story building.) These waves appear without warning and move against the prevailing wave direction. It was very bad luck indeed for the American Fire to be struck by one of these monsters. Compounding their bad luck was the fact that the life raft, carrying their survival gear, floated away in the aftermath of capsizing.

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On the positive side, it was good luck that they managed to grab the emergency beacon before getting out of the cabin and, as Sarah points out, good luck that their little boat stayed afloat, even full of water. Good luck also that they had each other to count on and were not rowing a “single,” all alone on the ocean when disaster struck. It was also good luck that they were able to keep each other’s spirits up through the long night of waiting and hoping for rescue. Other aspects of their adventure don’t fit so neatly into the good luck versus bad luck dichotomy. Was it good luck that the boat was designed to right itself in the event of a capsize, or bad luck that the air vents had been opened, allowing the cabin to flood while sitting at anchor waiting for the weather to clear? Was it good luck that both women just happened to be in the cabin at the same time when the wave hit so no one got swept away, or bad luck that the additional weight of both crew members in a cabin designed for just one person might have prevented self-righting even if the vents had been closed? Can the same event be both good luck and bad luck? Just what is luck, anyway? Each of us has our own definition of luck and our own beliefs about how luck operates. To the scientists who study it, luck is a category of causation used to explain success or failure when the outcome doesn’t seem to be the result of our own abilities or effort. When we evaluate what happened, we use all of the information available in an effort to understand what caused that event. We refer to our prior experiences (consult our memory), we draw on immediate sensory information (what our sensory systems tell us is happening), and we consult our dreams and desires, our expectations of what should happen and the course we really want events to take. We use all of this information in our innate drive to determine what happened and to identify the cause of the event.

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Events are often the result of our own effort (or lack of effort as the case may be), and we know deep down that what we did or did not do was the root cause of those events. But when effort seems to have no effect at all—when an event just happens outside the limits of our control—we say that it is luck. The rogue wave that flipped the American Fire was uncontrollable and completely independent of the preparations Emily and Sarah had made. In fact, Sarah said that both she and Emily and their support crew on shore believed that the American Fire team was as well prepared as they could be, perhaps even better prepared than some of the other teams. Despite their two years of hard work and training, Sarah noted that “the ocean doesn’t really care how prepared you are.” They had no control over some events and could not possibly have gained control over these events no matter how hard or how long they trained. That rogue wave was just plain bad luck.

WHAT IS LUCK? The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) says that the word luck came to English from the German word luk, or gelucke, meaning both “happiness” and “luck.” The term was first used by gamblers, but it eventually seeped into general usage. The OED lists several meanings for “luck.” First, luck is “the fortuitous happening of events, favorable or unfavorable, to the interests of a person.” Second, luck is “good fortune, success, prosperity, or advantage coming by chance, rather than as a consequence of merit or effort.” The word “fortuitous” refers to something that happens accidentally, or purely by chance. So the expression “a lucky accident” is redundant—the idea that the “lucky” event is “accidental” is in its very definition. That chance event can work

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to my advantage (in which case it is good luck for me) or to my disadvantage (bad luck). The second OED definition expands on the idea of chance— luck is outside our control, not linked to our effort or to whether we deserve it. Lucky events are random; they occur by chance, regardless of whether or not we’ve prepared or trained for them or want them to happen. However, when we think about random events, most of us run into trouble.

RANDOMNESS From a scientific perspective, randomness is, quite literally, unpredictable. For example, a mathematician would explain random numbers as a sequence of numbers in which any number is “equally likely to be picked next” and where it is “impossible to predict” the next number based on the numbers already picked. Mathematical definitions of randomness rely heavily on the idea that it is the process of selection—not the outcome—that is random. One random event may look just like another event, but this outcome is not significant as long as the selection process was random. Humans have very distinct ideas about what random ought to look like, and we tend to look at the outcome rather than at the process. This tendency can get us into trouble. Suppose I tossed a coin ten times and it landed on tails three times and on heads seven times—is there something wrong with my coin? Many people, looking at this result, would assume that my coin is biased—heads are turning up more often than they should if I tossed a “fair” coin. The problem is that this is not a biased coin (my right hand to God, I took a penny out of my jar of pennies and tossed it ten times in a row). Through random chance my coin landed on heads more often than tails.

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Wait a minute, you say: Don’t the laws of probability say that I have a 50:50 chance of getting heads on each toss, and the same odds that I’ll get tails? Doesn’t that mean that I should have five heads and five tails in a series of ten tosses? Herein lies the problem, which is encountered by many students in introductory statistics classes. Yes, the laws of probability do say that in the long run I should get heads half the time and tails the other half—but that is in the long run. Everything hinges on how long the long run is, and in probability theory that run is very long indeed. Suppose that on another series of penny tosses (I made this one up) I got heads on every single toss. Can ten heads in a row really be random? This result violates our expectations—it doesn’t look random at all. Nonetheless, it is a perfectly possible and completely random outcome in a series. Every time I tossed the coin there was an equal chance (a 50:50 chance) of it landing heads up or tails up. And every time I tossed it again, those odds reset to 50:50. The universe is not keeping track of my individual coin tosses and stepping in to say, “Oops, too many heads in a row, the next one must be tails.” Randomness can and does happen in streaks and clusters. It’s humans who tend to say that random events should not form a pattern, and when they do, we say they can’t be random anymore. Our human perception of what is random is incredibly subjective. Not only don’t we recognize randomness when it is put in front of us, but we are also not very good at producing a random sequence of events when asked to do so. In The Drunkard’s Walk, the physicist Leonard Mlodinow does a marvelous job of describing how, as he puts it, “randomness rules our lives.” “Perception requires imagination,” he says, “because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal.” We’re forced to resort to our imagination because our sensory systems are built to maximize the meaningful in the world and to ignore

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the irrelevant. The trouble comes when we have to identify the meaningful. Our sensory systems are more than just passive cameras or tape recorders. Cameras record the light in front of the lens onto film, but our sensory systems not only “see” and “hear” the world, they interpret that information. No camera can do that. Unlike a camera or a tape recorder, our sensory systems don’t record all of the data we encounter. Much of the incoming data is lost before it reaches the central processing unit—the brain—and we use our imagination to fill in the blanks. When a series of good things happen, one right after the other, we have a tendency to first think that good things don’t happen often, and second, that they don’t keep happening to the same person over and over again. We don’t believe the universe works that way, and that creates a large gap in our understanding of the universe. To fill in the gap, we create a pattern out of random events. We also tend to think that there must be a reason for this pattern of events. If random chance isn’t determining these events, it must be this thing we call luck. The third definition of random in the OED adds the idea of “nonorder . . . such that there is no intelligible pattern or combination.” The working definition of the term random that most of us use in our ordinary lives features the idea of nonorder and no pattern. We often insist that a pattern cannot be found in something that is truly random. There are lots of examples of our human tendency to see patterns and purpose where there is none. Consider the Gambler’s Fallacy (also known as the Monte Carlo Fallacy), a famous example of this common misunderstanding of the rules of probability. On August 18, 1913, at the infamous Monte Carlo Casino—where James Bond enjoys his martinis shaken, not stirred, and gambling against arch-villains—“black” won a record twenty-six times in a row on the roulette wheel. By the fifteenth time the little ball

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landed on black, players began to bet heavily on red, believing the chances that the next spin would come up black were astronomically low and, more important, getting lower. As the players doubled and tripled their bets, the casino raked in the francs. The casino won millions, and the players walked away much poorer, but perhaps wiser, for their efforts. What happened was an example of a streak in a series of random events—twenty-six spins of the wheel and twenty-six wins by black. The gamblers in the casino decided that the streak wasn’t just random chance in action but a pattern due to luck alone, and they all tried to take advantage of the player’s lucky streak by betting that his luck would run out on the next spin of the wheel. What was operating here was random chance. What the people in the casino saw was a reason for the pattern that had nothing to do with random chance and everything to do with being lucky. Stephen Gould describes another example of our all-toohuman confusion when confronted with randomness. This example involves a unique insect found in the Waitomo Caves in New Zealand. These caves, dark and dank like most caves, are the perfect home for an insect called a glowworm. Glowworms are not really worms at all; they are the maggots of a fly called the fungus gnat. As larvae they look sort of wormlike, and they also glow, hence their name. Glowworms have a “taillight,” an organ at their hind end that produces a blue-green light. These larvae are carnivorous—they eat other bugs. In fact, they’ll eat just about anything in their immediate vicinity, even other glowworms. When they hunt, glowworms exude a snare made of sticky strings, turn on the light, and wait for bugs to be attracted by the light in the dark cave. Prey insects get tangled in the sticky snare, and the glowworm has its supper. If you visit the Waitomo Caves, you can take a boat ride through the caves and see the amazing sight created by thousands

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of glowworms alight on the darkness of the cave walls—a sight often compared to the random array of stars in the night sky. Except, that is, to Gould, who was familiar with the patterns of stars in the night sky and with the rules of probability. When he took the boat tour of the caves, Gould reported being struck right away by the fact that the array of glowworm lights didn’t look random at all. When he looked at the lights, he saw what he called “zones of inhibition,” empty space surrounding each little glowing posterior. These zones of inhibition made the lights much too evenly and homogenously spread out for their distribution to be the result of random chance. In a randomly generated series, there should be clumps and strings and swirls and patterns in the array. After all, when we look up into the night sky, we see patterns. In fact, we see patterns so consistently in this random array that we’ve given them names: Orion, Libra, Gemini, and so on. The array of glowworms did not look like this at all. Gould speculated that there was a good reason the glowworms didn’t arrange themselves at random across the ceiling of the caves, and this reason had a great deal to do with glowworm hunting behavior. To keep from being eaten by a neighboring glowworm, an individual worm cannot rely on random chance for the placement of its hunting spot. It must position itself far enough away from its neighbors to avoid becoming supper itself. The physicist Edward Purcell devised a computer program to demonstrate what Gould was theorizing. The program created two arrays of dots (figure 1.1), each dot symbolizing a glowing insect posterior. For the array on the left, Purcell used a random number generator to position the dots. For the array on the right, a rule was added to the random number generator so the positions selected were no longer random. Dots on the array on the right were positioned according to the number the random number generator spat out if, and only if, the spaces around the randomly

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FIGURE 1.1  Dot

arrays illustrating (left) a random arrangement like a field of stars, and (right) a nonrandom arrangement like glowworms.

Source: Stephen Jay Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (New York: Norton, 1991). Copyright © 1991 Stephen Jay Gould. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company.

generated positions were unoccupied. By incorporating the zones of inhibition into dot placement, the computer program was now acting like a living glowworm trying not to be eaten. The array on the left is random; the one on the right is ordered. Yet most of the time, when people are asked to pick out the array that best illustrates randomness, they choose the array on the right. We fail to see the order in the array that actually has order in it, and we insist on seeing order in the truly random array because our brains are not effective calculators of probability. We seem programmed to perceive patterns as evidence of order in the universe. Why do we do this? Gould suggests that the problem isn’t in our seeing patterns, it’s in insisting that all patterns have meaning, “especially [meaning] that can bring us comfort, or dispel confusion.” A number of other scientists have noticed our unique relationship with randomness and have generated a slew of words

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to describe it. Two statisticians, Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson, were studying statistical decision-making and described two kinds of decision errors humans make. A Type I error, a false positive, occurs when we see meaning or significance where there is none—such as seeing a pattern in random noise. Type II errors, false negatives, occur when we conclude that there is no meaning or significance in data that is actually meaningful. The psychologist Carl Jung wrote extensively about what he called “synchronicity”—the experience of connectedness or of a relationship between events that are, in fact, not causally related. To Jung, some events are connected by cause and effect, and others are connected by meaning without cause and effect. Jung believed that life was not just a series of random events. He felt there was an underlying pattern, not just to an individual’s life but to all of human life throughout history—he called this pattern the collective unconscious. When we see meaning connecting two events that occur together, Jung believed we are seeing that underlying pattern connecting all things. The German neurologist and psychiatrist Klaus Conrad studied schizophrenia, and he coined the term apophenia: the “unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness.” More recently, Michael Shermer, a psychologist and writer, coined the term patternicity to describe our tendency to “find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise.” If you’ve ever whiled away a summer day looking for faces in the clouds or seen the Virgin Mary in a pepperoni pizza, you’ve experienced pareidolia—seeing meaning or significance (and nothing, to a human being, is more meaningful than a human face) in a random array. Neuroscientists have developed a possible explanation for pareidolia that may help explain why we humans are so prone to seeing this particular pattern in the world. Researchers in

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Switzerland recorded the brain activity of people looking at pictures of both faces and “facelike” stimuli (images of things like electric sockets in the wall, for example). They found that both images of human faces and images of facelike objects made cells respond in a part of the cortex called the fusiform face area (FFA). Part of the temporal lobe of the cortex (located just underneath the temples), the FFA is a brain region devoted to responding specifically to the sight of faces. The response of these cells happened so quickly (just 150 milliseconds) after the participants were shown the facelike images that the researchers concluded that the stimulus was being automatically categorized as a “face” without the participants having to stop and think about it. We seem to be wired to see this particular pattern in the world around us. What all these terms share is the underlying habit, unique to human beings, of refusing to accept randomness and insisting on meaning in what is really just noise. So, if we are, as a species, unwilling to accept that things are random, what is luck? Shermer may have the answer to this question as well. He has created the word agenticity to describe another all-too-human “tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible and intentional agents.” Perhaps, in our distant past, when we encountered random events—when “stuff just happened”—we invented this thing called luck to name the invisible, temperamental, unpredictable agent who must be in charge. In our collective history, we have often intertwined the ideas of chance and randomness. Nicholas Rescher, a professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, writes that luck is an essential and significant fact of human life that, in his opinion, defines the human condition. We place tremendous significance in luck because the universe is inherently unfair and we are (fortunately or unfortunately) rational enough to understand that it is unfair—that bad things

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will happen to good people, and good things will happen to bad people, no matter what we do.

TYPES OF LUCK A great many people believe in luck as an invisible force in the universe that can change our fate in the blink of an eye. Many more people agree with Emily Dickinson, that what we call luck is really just the result of hard work. Naming things often gives the perception of power over that thing, and many people believe that luck is just the name we give to random chance when we don’t want to believe the outcome is random. But it also seems that what people say about luck depends on the situation in which they find themselves. For example, in a 2013 survey of residents of Puget Sound, Washington, 70 percent of respondents said they believed in luck. Compare that with the results of other surveys showing that about a third of us rate ourselves as “very or somewhat superstitious” and a similar proportion of U.S. citizens (33 percent) say they believe if they “find a penny, and pick it up, then all the day they’ll have good luck.” Why the big difference in responses? Well, it might help to know that the Puget Sound survey was carried out during the second week in March, when everyone claims an Irish heritage, drinks green beer, and wears silly green hats, trying to tap into the famed “Luck o’ the Irish.” The other two polls were carried out in September and late January, respectively—perhaps when our thoughts are focused on more sober topics, such as work and school and getting back into the swing of everyday life after the holidays. Or maybe we vary in our belief in luck depending on what we need at the time we’re asked. When we need fate to bend in our direction—when we

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cross our fingers, knock on wood, wear a lucky color, or carry a shamrock—then we believe. The rest of the time we recognize the role of determination, preparation, toil, practice, and hard work. That wavering flicker of belief is evident in the various types of luck that have been proposed by James Austin, each some combination of random chance and hard work. The first kind of luck he describes is random and accidental; it occurs through no effort of our own, and against all odds. This is the kind of luck we all hope for when we hit the tables on the strip in Las Vegas. Suppose you walk into the casino at the Bellagio and decide to try your hand at poker. On the very first hand, you bet the farm because you’ve drawn a royal flush, and you saunter out of the casino as a millionaire, with the family farm intact. That’s Type I luck. Your odds of winning were not good—the chances of drawing a royal flush are about 1 in 649,739 when playing with just one deck of cards—but despite the odds, and because of pure blind luck, you won anyway. Type II luck adds motion to mix. Action and movement stir things up. The more things are stirred up, the higher the chances that ideas will stick together in new ways and something new and potentially better will result. Austin calls Type II luck an example of the “Kettering Principle,” named after American inventor Charles Kettering. Kettering was born in a small town in Ohio in 1876 and eventually, through hard work and determination, became the head of research at General Motors (1920–1947). Holder of 186 patents, Kettering was a big believer in hard and (apparently) nearly constant work. He also reported that he believed in luck, saying (with tongue firmly in cheek) that he had found that the harder he worked the luckier he got. He advised those seeking to follow in his creative footsteps to “keep on going and the chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down.”

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Type III luck can be summed up in the famous quote by Louis Pasteur: “Dans les champs de l’observation, le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés” (In the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind). This kind of luck is a combination of random chance and hard work. The hard work prepares the mind to see meaning, pattern, and connectivity in whatever the random and irrational universe tosses your way. Pasteur’s universe was the mysterious and nearly invisible world of diseases, molecules, and microbes, and he spent his life working and preparing his mind to understand it. Pasteur never saw a challenge he couldn’t overcome with patience and preparation. Luck was simply seeing the patterns that less prepared minds missed. Austin’s final kind of luck, Type IV, combines movement and preparation with an individual’s unique personality. This kind of luck happens to an individual because of who that person is and how that person behaves. Luck comes to us because we have a hobby that puts us in a unique place at just the right moment in time. Or perhaps luck finds us because we possess some unusual, and often very private, qualities that make us just the right recipient of a lucky break, or because of our unique tendency to look at a problem sideways and see an answer that no one else can see. Whatever it is that blends itself with action and preparation is usually hidden, sometimes even from ourselves, until a “particular set of circumstances calls it into play.” We can see these four kinds of luck in the story of Sarah and Emily’s row across the Atlantic. Type IV luck, in which personality and individual spirit come into play, can be seen in these two Hoosiers, raised in the corn and soybean fields of the American flatlands, choosing to engage in competitive rowing in college and seeing a rowing race across the Atlantic Ocean as an opportunity rather than as something they would only do if the cruise ship they were on sank like a stone. Sarah herself defines luck as a

20What Is Luck?

“sort of serendipitous coincidence—being in the right place at the right time and having the wherewithal to make use of the good in the situation.” A description of Austin’s Type IV luck if ever there was one, combining her own personality, actions, expectations, and worldview in her search for causality. Type III luck, in which good luck happens to the mind prepared to receive it, is evident in the grueling practice and hard work of these two women, rowing on inland lakes, rivers, and streams, even moving to Florida and training along the ocean waterways. They took every opportunity they could find to practice rowing long distances, preparing themselves for a test of endurance unlike any other they’d experienced, with all the tools they had at hand. Type II luck, action and fate combined, can be seen in Sarah’s story about how she learned of the race. Her lifelong desire to stretch her own boundaries pushed her to look for the next thing, for a new challenge, moving her toward the race without even knowing it. And finally, Type I luck—blind, dumb, stupid, random chance—can be seen in that damn wave. Impossible to prepare for and completely unpredictable; that rogue wave changed everything. Sarah and Emily were not defeated by the wave. In 2007 they entered the race again in a boat named Unfinished Business, this time as a “four” (Sarah and Emily, along with Jo Davies from Great Britain and Tara Remington from New Zealand); all of them had failed to cross the finish line in 2005 due to capsize or injury. In 2007, they did cross the finish line (placing third) and set a new world record for a female-crewed four: fifty-one days, sixteen hours, and thirty-one minutes.

 A BRIEF HISTORY OF LUCK

A Lottery is a Taxation, Upon all the Fools in Creation; And Heaven be prais’d It is easily rais’d Credulity’s always in Fashion. HENRY FIELDING, THE LOTTERY: A FARCE (1732)

THE LUCKIEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD In the year 1910, F. Z. Bishop, an insurance agent, came into possession of a large tract of land just a bit west-southwest of Corpus Christi, in flat, hot, and steamy south Texas. Bishop laid out plans for a town and surrounding farms along the existing railroad tracks and began to sell the land to investors, farmers, cattlemen, dreamers and schemers, and ordinary Joes of all sorts. Just four years later, at the outbreak of World War I, the town of Bishop was a thriving community of about twelve hundred people. By the end of World War II, a large chemical plant had arrived in Bishop, supplanting agriculture as the economic mainstay of the community.

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Soon after the end of World War II, Bishop became the hometown of Joan Ginther, a retired professor of mathematics who earned her PhD at Stanford University. As admirable as the teaching profession is, and as difficult as getting a PhD can be, neither of these is the reason she is one of Bishop’s most famous citizens. Ginther is famous for her luck. She won the lottery four times, and each time she walked away with more than a $1 million. In fact, she won more than $20 million over a period of seventeen years, all from playing the lottery and despite the fact that as a mathematics professor she surely knew that Henry Fielding’s assessment of the wisdom of playing the lottery was correct. Ginther first won $5.4 million in the Texas Lotto in 1993. Her first win was in a “traditional” pick-six, choose the number format. Ginther shared the jackpot of $11 million with other players, opting to have her share paid out in installments over time rather than taking it home as one lump sum. Ten years later, in 2003, she won again, this time taking home $2 million, then again in 2008, adding $3 million to her growing total, and finally in the summer of 2010, she walked away with a cool $10 million. For those of you keeping score, that’s a total of $20.4 million. These last three wins were with scratch-off, instant win tickets, nothing to do with the dramatic numbered ping-pong balls bouncing around wildly in a Lucite box that we’re all familiar with from TV. Friends remember Ginther visiting her aging father on her regular trips home to Bishop from her retirement digs in Las Vegas. They’d see her in the large front window of the market where she bought her scratch-off cards, chatting with her father and with passers-by, all the while working on the reams of cards she’d bought, sometimes $50 worth at a time. All those days spent scratching latex paint off cardboard paid well in the end. The Texas Lottery Commission stated that Ginther’s $10 million win is the biggest scratch-off payout in Texas lottery history.

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The odds of one person winning the lottery four times has been calculated at one in eighteen septillion—18,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000 (that’s twenty-four zeros). For comparison, there are an estimated seven quintillion, five quadrillion grains of sand on the beaches of the world (7.5 followed by eighteen zeros). The national debt is a measly $17 trillion and change (just twelve zeros), and the number of people inhabiting the Earth as of December 28, 2020, was only about 7.8 billion or so (nine zeros). Those are some long odds. But it turns out that Ginther’s chances of winning are not quite as straightforward and as unlikely as those odds suggest. The odds are one in eighteen septillion only if Ginther had purchased just one ticket in each lottery—four tickets in all. If she played the lottery more than once each time (and, clearly, she did), her odds would improve. The word “improve” here should be taken with a grain of salt because even her new and improved odds were still not great. Her chances of winning the first time in 1993 were one in 15.8 million; the second time in 2006, one in a little more than a million, and again in 2008, one in a bit less than a million (909,000). Better odds than one in eighteen septillion, but as my uncle used to say, still “Slim to none, and Slim just left town.” When Ginther won for the fourth time, reporters had a field day with the news. Something so unusual, rare, and down-right random packs some punch in the human-interest columns. Lottery experts (who also know full well that Henry Fielding’s assessment of the odds of winning any lottery was correct) and reporters seem to be split on the subject of whether Ginther was lucky or working some angle that made winning less of a risk. Many reporters suggested that Ginther cheated somehow, and that the sheer improbability of her series of wins is evidence that something was not entirely on the up and up.

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Nathaniel Rich, writing in Harper’s Magazine, reviewed the evidence against attributing Ginther’s streak of wins to plain old luck. Rich says he learned that there were three explanations for Ginther’s wins and that all three explanations are equally unlikely. First, there’s the “Inside Job” theory, which suggests that Ginther had made an arrangement with the owner of the Times Market, the store where she bought two of her three winning tickets, to hide the new shipments of scratch-off cards when they came in, holding “the best ones” aside just for her. Apart from possessing X-ray vision, I’m not sure how the assessment of which cards were “the best ones” was made, but Rich’s source, a lottery player in Bishop who had not hit the big one (at least at the time Rich interviewed her), swears up and down that this is what happened. The second explanation is related to the first, combining access to inside information with the ability to crack the code used to generate numbers for the scratch-off cards. This is, as Rich reports, not easily accomplished. Ginther would have had to figure out which card in a typical print run of three million tickets was the grand prize winner; where in Texas that particular card had been shipped; and then somehow make sure that the winning card was shipped to Bishop so she could travel there without raising official suspicion about her motives. Determining which card is the winner and where that card will be shipped are potentially but not easily doable, and probably cannot be done without help from inside the two large companies that create and distribute scratch-off lottery tickets. There is no evidence that Ginther had this kind of help. Making sure that the winning card gets shipped to Bishop to provide her with cover would be almost impossible. The third explanation is that Ginther won the lottery four times because of blind, dumb, stupid, random, bolt-from-theblue luck. She upped her chances of getting lucky by buying lots

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of cards over the years as residents of Bishop have suggested. Rich did some basic calculations about Ginther’s gambling behavior and speculates that if Ginther had purchased roughly three thousand tickets per year for the past seventeen years (the time interval between her first and most recent wins) she would have spent at least $1 million on scratch-off lottery cards, improving her odds of winning from the level of the stratospheric to the merely improbable (from one in eighteen septillion to one in eight thousand). It would also mean that Ginther, a statistics professor, had “forgotten everything she knew about statistics” and decided to invest the proceeds from her first win into the scratch-off lottery game. She would have done better, Rich suggests, to invest in the roulette wheel in the casino across the street from her condo in Las Vegas—the odds of winning would have been better and the potential jackpot considerably larger than a measly $10 million. The information in Rich’s article is echoed by several other reporters, each slyly upping the ante on the suggestion that Ginther’s win was the result of more than just luck. For example, the Daily Mail states that the first “warning sign” of something suspicious going on in her wins is the fact that Ginther lives in Las Vegas. There’s no explanation of why this might be suspicious— perhaps there’s something in the dry desert air that makes residents of Sin City really good at scratching off lottery tickets. The second “warning sign” is Ginther’s PhD in mathematics, and the third has something to do with the timing of her wins—all within “the last five years.”All that suspicion burning bright in the minds of the reporters covering the story has not translated into any official action at all. The Texas Lottery Commission has put Ginther’s wins down to being incredibly lucky and has no plans to investigate anything or anyone connected with her win. Richard Connelly, reporting for the Houston Press, updated the story in 2011, saying that “no allegations or hints of wrongdoing

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have been brought to our attention and no investigation has been conducted.” The Celanese chemical plant is closed now, and the town of Bishop is slowly fading, as many tiny, one-employer-only towns across the United States do when that single employer leaves town. The people of Bishop, according to Rich, don’t seem to believe that Ginther’s win was anything other than good oldfashioned luck. They still buy tickets hoping to catch their own bolt of lightning in a bottle, but they probably have to work harder to get the tickets now because the Times Market, where Ginther bought her winning tickets, has closed. The hope—perhaps spoken by some and unspoken by many—is that if she could win four times surely someone else could win just once, and this hope keeps lottery tickets selling even when very little else seems to move on the streets of Bishop, Texas. How do you feel about Ginther’s winnings? Did she “luck out” or did she “cheat” somehow? The lottery is supposed to be based on luck or, more specifically, on random chance. Did Ginther have an unfair advantage when she plunked down her money and bought her tickets? Is one win luck but a streak of wins evidence of cheating? The insistence that she must have cheated to win so often might easily be explained as another example of the all-toohuman tendency to insist that patterns in events indicate the absence of randomness and that all patterns have meaning. It’s possible that this unlikely and supremely improbable series of events is just another “streak” in the random universe that this time happened to a human being named Joan Ginther, and it will probably not happen again anytime soon. If it was just a streak, it’s quite likely that it means exactly nothing and that we should probably not arrest anyone just yet. Was it luck or skill that led to her windfall? We all want to know the answer to this question. If the answer is that it’s all luck,

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then how do we get lucky? If the answer is that what matters is skill, then teach me how to be a winner. Either way, we’re all looking to change the odds so they are in our favor. Throughout our long and complicated relationship with random chance and luck, humans have tried almost everything to figure out a way to buck the odds.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF LUCK Generally, our species has treated luck as something beyond our mortal control. When we cannot see or explain the cause of an event, we have often given control over all that is unpredictable and inexplicable to the gods. If the cause is readily accessible and we understand it, we don’t need to look for a supernatural cause for that event. It’s only when we cannot explain something that we tend to resort to the divine. Justin Barrett studies cognitive psychology—how humans think, and how we think about religion in particular. He says that humans come equipped with a number of mental tools that help us think about the world quickly and efficiently. We enter the world wired with face detectors and pattern detectors—cells in our primate brains that fire like mad when we encounter faces and patterns, alerting the rest of the brain that something potentially important is out there. We also come equipped with a mental tool that Barrett calls an “agency detector.” When we encounter a pattern in the world that moves as though it has a purpose, that is goal-directed, we start looking for an agent for that pattern. An agent, Barrett says, is a “being that does not merely respond” to something in the world around us “but initiates action.” Agents cause things to happen. Humans have evolved to be hypersensitive agent detectors—to see an agent behind almost everything

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that happens. We’ve developed this tendency because, as Barrett says, “if you bet that something is an agent and it isn’t, not much is lost. But if you bet that something is not an agent and it turns out to be one, you could be lunch.” If you couple this hypersensitive agency detection with our equally strong tendency to interpret all patterns as meaningful and to discount or dislike random chance as an explanation for something wonderful or horrible happening to us, in the opinion of some researchers, we get religion. When human agency just doesn’t work or won’t fit the facts we have in evidence, we start looking for invisible, superhuman agents, often referred to as gods and goddesses. There is a long-standing and deeply intimate connection between luck, religion, and belief in the supernatural. Ethnographers who study culture in all of its forms point out that when we communicate with God we’re frequently making a specific request for help—help with recovery from an illness, help with getting a new enterprise off the ground, help in overcoming our enemies, and so forth. We don’t just shoot the breeze with the Almighty, we entreat him (or her) for a specific desired result, very often a result that we see as being outside of our own personal control. Ambrose Bierce, the American writer, satirically defined prayer as the act of asking “that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy.” If it’s really important, we make a plea to the gods for intervention on our behalf. After all, the gods are usually gods because they can control the uncontrollable. Most, if not all, human cultures have developed a god or goddess (or both) of luck that its citizens can appeal to when good luck is needed or bad luck must be avoided. The process of asking for help has been ritualized, providing those seeking help with magic words, icons, and charms to coax the gods over to our side.

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THE GODDESSES (AND OCCASIONALLY GODS) OF FATE, FORTUNE, AND DESTINY When we talk about luck these days, we’re often combining two ideas that the ancients would have seen as quite different—the ideas of fortune and fate (or destiny). Fate is your preordained course through life. Your fate, if you believe in fate, is determined at birth, and because it is preordained, your fate unfolds throughout your life no matter what you do. It cannot be changed. In our history, fate has been seen as something determined by the gods that is beyond our puny mortal control. The words “fate” and “destiny” are often used interchangeably in English. They share similar definitions, both suggesting the ideas of the events in ones’ life being predetermined, irrevocable, and unchangeable. But destiny does occasionally include the idea of change. For example, the existential psychoanalyst Rollo May described destiny as a spectrum. On the far left-hand end of this spectrum, we find inescapable and predetermined events like our own death, earthquakes, disasters, and volcanoes. At the opposite end of this spectrum are events and circumstances that we might not have had any say in (the culture we’re born into or the period in history our lives occupy) but that we can influence by our activity. In this sense, destiny may be predetermined, but we can actively change or shape the course that destiny takes. Fate sometimes implies something inevitable, a path we’ve yet to go down that stretches unswervingly in front of us. Destiny carries with it a sense of our own activity and choice. Richard Bargdill, a professor of psychology at St. Francis University writing about the historical distinctions we’ve made between the ideas of fate and destiny, says: In general, fate is a concept that acknowledges there are many aspects to our lives that we do not choose and do not control.

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There are events that happen to us by accident, by chance, and without our intention. Our lives are shaped by these events, these givens.  .  .  . Destiny is to see into the future by evaluating the immature elements that are already present in our past. Destiny is a projection of those elements into the future . . . one’s destiny will not be achieved without care, effort and deliberate choices.

There’s no wavering or splitting of philosophical hairs when it comes to defining the word fortune. It means chance. Our fortune in life consists of all of the random things that happen to us, out of the blue, just by chance. Our fortune is unpredictable— not even the gods know what our fortune will be. Fortune comes closer to being synonymous with luck than any other term because we cannot control it and neither can any supernatural being. Our fate is known to the gods, but unknown to us. Our destiny is what we shape it to be. Our fortune is random, unpredictable, and sometimes deliciously weird.

PALEOLITHIC LUCK Let’s go way back to the caves at Lascaux in southwestern France. Discovered in 1940, the caves contain nearly two thousand paintings created by our Stone Age ancestors. These paintings are quite literally prehistoric—before language and the modern habit of writing down what we see, hear, and do. They are a record of Stone Age life, or at least we think they are. Anthropologists studying the paintings group them into three categories: animals, humans, and abstract signs. The paintings don’t seem to be a simple record of the world the ancient artists knew, at least in part, because of what is not depicted on the cave walls. There are, for example, no pictures of the plants or vegetation or the

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landscape in general etched onto the limestone. If these painting were purely decorative, surely some would depict a piece of fruit or a nut; food sources were at least as important as animals to our ancient ancestors and more cooperative subjects for the artist—at least they would hold still longer than, say, an aurochs or a sabertoothed tiger. Why did humans spend so much time and effort painting the walls of the caves with these images? There are several theories, varying from ancient star maps to products of sensory deprivation to graffiti left by teenage Neanderthal boys to, you guessed it, attempts to influence the unpredictable, random, and capricious rules of the universe. Researchers who study this rare and beautiful art form speculate that our ancestors entered the cave to perform rituals designed to allow the artist to make contact with his or her animal spirit. The paintings of bulls and aurochs might be records of past successful hunts—the equivalent of stuffing and mounting the deer head in a living room perhaps. But they might also represent part of a ritual prior to the hunt, trying to direct the universe toward a more successful hunt the next time. In some parts of the cave, the pictures of animals overlap repeatedly, suggesting that this area of the cave was associated with a particularly good hunt and a more bountiful return on the hunting effort than were other areas of the cave. Others have suggested that the cave paintings might have been hallucinations, produced in a trance state while one of our ancient forbearers was engaged in ritual communication with the spirit world. When we hallucinate, there is a tendency for our nervous system (and the nervous system of our ancient ancestors) to produce common images. We see spots of light, wavy lines, crisscrossed hatch marks, and circling spirals—visual hallucinations so universal that they have been given their own name. They’re called entoptic phenomena, from the Greek for “within the eye,”

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and they’re products of the visual machinery of the eye itself. These same images appear in the art our ancestors left on the cave walls, leading some experts to suggest that our ancestors went into the caves to commune with the spirit world and copied their visions onto the walls of the cave. The similarity of these images across cultures and time is startling, providing an amazing link to the beginning of our species (figure 2.1). What really happened when one of our Neanderthal ancestors crept into a cave with a torch and some paint will never be more than speculation. All that our ancestors left behind were the beautiful images they apparently felt compelled to create. Without a written history, we have no names for the gods that served these ancient peoples, nor any indication that in fact the concept of a divine being that could interfere with nature even existed for the people creating these astonishing paintings. Coming forward in

FIGURE 2.1  Entoptic

images compared to Paleolithic art.

Source: J. D. Lewis-Williams and T. A. Dawson, “The Signs of All Times: Entoptic Phenomena in Upper Palaeolithic Art,” Current Anthropology 29, no. 2 (1988): 201–45. Republished with permission of the University of Chicago Press; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.

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time a bit, the divine beings humans could turn to when random events needed a nudge in a particular direction begin to appear.

MESOAMERICAN GODS Early Mesoamerican peoples—Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas— believed in a multileveled, ordered cosmos, and they created calendars that mapped out past, present, and future. The calendars were incredibly complex and based on careful observation of the movement of the sun, the moon, and the stars. The oldest of these three great civilizations, the Olmec, described a “world tree (axis mundi) [that] perforated and stabilized the constituent layers of sky (upper world), earth, and underworld, but also provided a highway to traverse them.” Holy men needed the help of animal spirits to travel between these layers of the world to change the direction of life in their village or to cure a disease. Scholars suggest that the often odd and mysterious figures carved out of rock or bone that combine animal and human features might represent a shaman being transformed into an animal for this journey. To the Olmecs, everything that moved was animate—containing a living spirit—and often worshiped and sacrificed to as a god. Our human fate was linked to the gods and the ordered cosmos. When a catastrophe struck, the calendars were consulted to find portents that explained why disorder and chaos had been visited upon them. The ancient Aztecs used blood sacrifice to keep the cosmos in order or to restore that order if necessary. The sacrifice of humans is probably the one characteristic of Aztec, Mayan, or Incan religious belief with which most people are familiar, but scholars argue about how often this supreme sacrifice was actually used. The idea of sacrifice was central to Mesoamerican

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culture and is related to a theme that runs through several creation myths. Human fate could be influenced by performing rituals and making the appropriate sacrifices. An on-the-spot blood offering could be made by smearing ones’ blood on a thorn and offering it to the gods. Cutting the tongue or the ear and collecting the blood on a piece of paper that was then burned, or smearing it on an idol, might move the gods to intervene and rebalance the world, perhaps in your favor. The Aztec god Tezcatlipoca could, with the appropriate sacrifice, release you from the fate that is determined by your birth date. He could also forgive sins and cure disease, but apparently he wasn’t bound by any sacrifice you might make—he could relieve you of all your worldly goods or bring a drought or famine down on your village just as easily.

AFRICAN YORUBA AND VODUN GODS Vodun (or the Americanized “Voodoo”) is another of the oldest religions in the world. The word Vodun means “spirit,” and the term has come to refer collectively to West African traditional religions from Ghana to Nigeria. Again, the spirit world is seen in everything and in everyone in the physical world. The forces of nature and human societies are ruled by major spirits, and individual streams or trees or rocks are governed by minor spirits. The goddess Mawu and her male partner Lisa are the Creator couple, makers of the world and everything in it. Mawu gives birth to seven children, and each child is given dominion over an aspect of nature. There’s Sakpata, oldest of Mawu’s children, who has dominion over the earth and disease; Agbe, the vodun of the sea; and the invisible Gu, vodun of iron and war. The youngest son of Mawu is Legba. Legba rules over no specific aspect of the

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cosmos because, as is often the case for last-born children, the estate had already been divided among his siblings by the time he came along. With no specific aspect of the universe to oversee, Legba serves as an intermediary between mortals and the spirits. Legba is “one of the most important deities . . . usually characterized as a trickster because if he is unhappy, he will quickly spoil a ceremony or ruin someone’s luck . . . he is dangerous and unpredictable.” Ancestor worship is also a feature of Vodun. The spirits of the departed can be found side-by-side with the living. Appeals for intercession with the Vodun can be made to the ancestors because they serve as links between the spirit world and the world of everyday life. In some traditions, an appeal can be made to a human diviner who will consult with Fa, the spirit of divination, about the solution to a problem. In other traditions, Orisha or helper spirits can intercede on behalf of a mortal seeking help from the spirit world. Rituals can be performed to make contact with the spirit world and to entreat the spirits to help celebrate a lucky event, to ask for help in ending or avoiding an unlucky one, for healing, for a good birth, or regarding marriage or death. A sacrifice of animal blood or food or a gift might be made to ensure protection from evil spirits, a good harvest, or good fortune.

LUCK IN ANCIENT EGYPT One of the oldest of the Egyptian gods was Bes. Scholars believe Bes might have been imported from some other region of the African continent, perhaps Nubia or the Congo, or maybe he was already present in the Nile valley when the Egyptians began to create their magnificent culture. Bes is a very unusual god, especially in Egypt where gods and goddesses are usually portrayed as

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lithe, elegant, long, and lean. Statues and paintings of Bes show him to be short, squat, and bandy-legged, sometimes with the head of a lion and usually with his tongue sticking out and wide, protruding eyes. Of all the Egyptian deities, Bes is the only one painted in portrait as if he were a three-dimensional statue or carving, facing the viewer, not in the much more typical profile view of painted icons seen from the side. Scholars believe that the rigid “frontality” of Egyptian statuary, in which carvings of kings, queens, gods, and goddesses stare straight ahead at the viewer, had more to do with the function of the art than it did with style. Statues of the gods were usually placed where their intercession was needed—where they could do the most good for the penitent. The statue needed to look straight ahead, directly at what was happening in front of it, so the “living could interact with the divine” through rituals and sacrifice. Bes stares straight ahead because he is the protector of the household, scaring away evil demons threatening the family. Representations of Bes were posted at the front door to keep bad luck away from the family inside. Bes was also believed to be present at the birth of a child, tasked with keeping misfortune and bad luck away from both mother and child. His efforts to scare away demons had an added benefit—they served as entertainment for new babies. In modern Western culture, when babies smile for no apparent reason, we say that it’s just gas. The Egyptians said that infants could still see Bes and were laughing at the strange faces the little god made, sticking out his tongue and wagging his head and dancing around the room with his eyes open wide. Sometimes shown as a snake, sometimes as a human, the god Shai ruled over human destiny, determining the length of an individual’s life and the way in which that person would die. Shai was thought to be born with each individual, so each person had his or her own personal Shai. He was also present at the end of

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a person’s life, standing next to the scales at the “Weighing of the Heart” ceremony when the deceased’s life and life works were judged. If your heart weighed less than a feather (the symbol of Ma’at, goddess of truth, justice, and order), your heart would be returned and you would be admitted to the afterlife. If you were not found worthy, your heart, weighed down by misdeeds committed during your life, would be consumed by Ammit (the “gobbler,” who had the head of a crocodile, the body of a lion, and the back legs of a hippopotamus), who waited underneath the scales to take care of business. Shai’s job was to tell the tribunal of divine beings who would sit in judgment over you and your life all about what you’d done, or not done, during your time on Earth. Like many luck gods, Shai could be fickle. He could bring you your heart’s desire or rain destruction, pain, and misfortune down upon you. The people were advised not to devote themselves to seeking riches because Shai had already determined your fate and would not be ignored. The ancient Greeks compounded Shai with another snake god to form Agathodaimon, or Agathos Daimon, a sort of quasi-god, more of a beneficial spirit, who ruled over fortune-telling in Alexandria. He may also have been the husband of Tykhe, who we’re just about to meet.

LUCK BE A LADY: THE GREEKS AND ETRUSCANS Good luck in Greece was represented by the goddess Tykhe (or Tyche), who could be importuned to bring good fortune, luck, success, or prosperity. Tykhe is often shown with a number of symbols of luck and fate. For example, she can be shown holding a ship’s rudder, symbolizing her role in guiding the fate of the world. At times, she is shown holding a ball, representing

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the unpredictability of fate. The ball could roll in any direction, unpredictable and random, just like one’s fate. She is also shown with a cornucopia, symbolizing the bounty that fate can sometimes bestow on the supplicant. Sometimes she is shown spinning the wheel of fate, casting some of us down and raising others up. Individual cities would often build temples to a specific and iconic version of the goddess, praying to her to watch over their fortune and wealth. Tykhe can also be shown wearing a mural crown—a crown shaped like the walls of the city she protected, the ultimate in chamber of commerce boosterism—letting the world know that prosperity and good fortune lived in Athens or Apollonia or Helos. The ancient Greeks personified fate as three female divinities called the Moirai (or Morai). The first of these three goddesses was Clotho, the spinner who spins the thread of life onto her spindle. Lachesis measures the thread of life allotted to each person with her measuring rod, and Atropos cuts the thread of life and in doing so chooses the time and manner of death. Atropos’s name means “unturning” or “inevitable,” and it’s easy to see how she earned it. The Etruscans were heavily influenced by Greek culture and often borrowed ideas, temples, and gods from their neighbors in Greece. They worshipped Nortia, a goddess who ruled over both fortune and fate. Historians describe an Etruscan ritual signaling the end of one year and the beginning of a new one. The Etruscans would drive a nail into the door jamb of Nortia’s temple, symbolizing fate. Both the nail and fate fix a thing in place, putting an end to change and motion. Metaphorically, the nail puts an end to the motion of the year or a life through time. Fate puts an end to our own motion through the possibilities of life. Our fate, our path through life, is fixed at birth, literally nailed down from our very beginning.

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LUCK IN ANCIENT ROME The ancient Romans could turn to several divine entities when random events needed a nudge in a particular direction. The Moirai reappear, still spinning and still determining where, when, and how we die. This time they are the Parcae, the personification of destiny. First there is Nona (the Roman version of Clotho), who spins the thread of life. Her sister Decima (Lachesis) measures out the length of that life thread for each of us, and finally Morta (Atropos) cuts the thread at the predetermined time. Luck was personified in two ways in ancient Rome, first as a minor god called Sors, and again as a much more powerful and important goddess who we will meet in a moment. Sors shares his name with a method of divination involving drawing lots—a way of predicting the future that was controlled by the divine beings humans worshipped. A lot (a sorte in Latin) was a small tablet, often made of wood, that might have a verse of poetry from a famous poet written on it, or perhaps the name of the person casting the lots. The lots (predictions were usually made with multiple lots) were then placed in a water-filled urn. The lots were drawn out after the water mixed them up so that only fate, or perhaps the divine, determined which lot was retrieved. The sortes could also be rolled like dice, and the pattern could be interpreted by a priest or priestess with connections to the gods in charge. The practice of drawing lots to predict the future or to make a major life decision survived the fall of Roman culture. Examples of casting lots abound in the Bible, both old testament and new. Jonah famously winds up in the belly of a whale after he is told by God to go to the city of Ninevah and to preach against their wickedness. Jonah tries to escape this command, fleeing instead to the city of Joppa and paying for

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passage on a ship bound for somewhere else entirely. It didn’t fool the Lord, who sent a “mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken.” The sailors were terrified and cast lots to try to find out who on board had so displeased God. The lot “fell to Jonah,” and the crew threw him overboard, whereupon he was swallowed by a big fish that gave him plenty of time to think about what he’d done to anger the big guy upstairs. Historically, Sors almost disappears when compared to the importance and glory afforded to his competitor in the business of luck. The goddess Fortuna was worshipped as the bringer of both good luck and bad fortune in life. She was often depicted veiled or blindfolded, like the modern figure of Justice, symbolizing the unpredictability of fate and the fact that good luck doesn’t always get to those of us who most deserve it. She is also often shown with the same symbols that Tykhe held: a cornucopia (the horn of plenty) symbolizing her ability to grant prosperity and good things in abundance to some, a ship’s rudder, or seated on a throne into which is built a wheel, representing the wheel of fortune, the ups and downs of life. Like many of the goddesses of luck and fate, Fortuna, Tykhe, and Nortia were originally fertility goddesses, bringing abundance and success in the form of both food and children. The link between pregnancy, fate, and death is incorporated in many religions. Recognition that the same fate awaits us all may be the reason we’ve spent so much of our energy as a species trying to change that inevitability. Regardless of religion, culture, social class, or the number of toys we’ve accumulated in our lives, our end is completely predictable, and yet (thankfully) unexpected. Imagine being able to alter that fate; as a species we’ve done so, many times.

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LUCK IN INDIA Luck in both ancient and modern civilizations is often conflated with monetary gain. After all, what is luckier than unpredictably coming into money (the other meaning of the word fortune). In India, luck is represented by the god Ganesha and the goddess Lakshmi. Ganesha is the son of two divinities, Shiva and Durga. Ganesha, the “remover of obstacles,” is easy to spot because he has the head of an elephant and a great big belly. Most accounts of how he came to have such a distinct appearance suggest that Shiva, his father, beheaded him when Ganesha came between Shiva and his wife Durga—an oddly unlucky moment for a god of luck. Shiva then gave him the head of an elephant and a big belly to keep him from being too attractive. Ganesha is often represented reclining on a couch, and he is worshipped as the bringer of good luck, wealth, good food, and luxury. Ganesha is often shown together with Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, prosperity, fortune, and beauty.

LUCK IN CHINA In the ancient folk religions of China, things are a bit more complex. Three principles form the foundation of Chinese folk religion. The first is ming yun (your own personal destiny), the second is yuan fen (fateful coincidence), and the third is bao ying, a cosmic accounting of what you have done in life. Ming yun is seen as a combination of both something fixed and something flexible. Your lot in life, the status of your life, was seen as fixed. The choices that you make, the decisions you come to, are flexible and can change the course of your life. Yuan fen is approximately

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equivalent to the Western idea of luck, incorporating the chance events that happen without our control. Because we live in a moral universe, everything that we do, both good and bad, has an effect on the course our life takes. In Chinese religion, as in many others, there will be an accounting at the end of life for each of these actions. Bao ying has been described as the “fundamental belief of Chinese religion since the beginning of recorded history.” These three ideas are closely related to one another, intertwining with ordinary prayers for help with a specific problem, work, social engagements, and just plain old life to determine our fate. You might offer a gift directly to one of the hundreds of gods, goddesses, and demigods that populated the Chinese pantheon. Many of these gods and goddesses were either historical figures or folk heroes who, because of a noble sacrifice or their exemplary lives, were deified and worshiped. For example, Cai shen (Ts’ai shen or Caishen), the god of wealth, may have been a real person who lived during the Qin dynasty (221–206 bce). Cai shen was said to have criticized the extravagant life of his nephew, the emperor (always a risky proposition no matter what the family connection), and was put to death as a result. His sacrifice put an end to the emperor’s rule and to the dynasty. Statues and paintings depict Cai shen riding a black tiger, a symbol of power, and carrying an iron rod that can turn iron into gold. During the New Year celebrations, you can burn incense in Cai Shen’s temple and receive riches in return. In Chinese mythology, three gods personify good fortune and happiness (the god Fu shen), prosperity and success in life (Lu shen), and a long life (Shou shen). Gifts to these three gods are traditionally offered to celebrate the New Year, or when fortune, wealth, and health are needed. Statues of Fu, Lu, and Shou can be found in homes and shops all over China because these three

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symbolize the three major attributes of a good life. Fu shen is depicted wearing red clothing, a color symbolizing happiness. Lu shen statues are dressed as a mandarin, symbolizing success and rank in the Imperial government; and Shou shen is an old man smiling and happy, who carries a peach, the symbol of immortality, and a gourd containing the Elixir of Life.

FINDING ORDER IN CHAOS Countless cultures are spread around our world and throughout our history on this planet; so many that that there just isn’t space to mention them all. For example, I could have told you about the Norns, the goddesses of the past, present, and future, who keep Yggdrasil (the Tree of Life), the foundation of the cosmos, healthy and sound. This trio of goddesses sit beneath Yggdrasil at the Well of Wisdom, spinning out each individual’s destiny in Norse mythology. Dozens of Celtic gods and goddesses inhabit the waters and trees of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales; and Inuit, Cherokee, or Maori divinities watch over us and keep us safe. I’ve tried to hit some of the highlights in the story of how humans have attempted to impose order on the chaos we see in the universe. And there are a lot of highlights to hit. Every society that humans have created shares some kind of belief in a powerful and controlling spirit, sometimes just a single god, sometimes entire cities full of divine characters. But why do we do this so consistently across this immensely varied world? Most of the theories about the cultural function of religion point out that shared belief of any kind offers society a number of benefits. First, religion provides a shared sense of identity. It also provides guidelines for living a good life, offers a way to expand our awareness of life beyond the everyday and mundane matters

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of survival, and helps us interpret what happens to us, especially when what happens doesn’t seem to make any sense. Making sense of the seemingly nonsensical seems to be key. Researchers have suggested that, at its core, belief in a deity, even though this belief often violates our basic assumptions about how the world works, allows us “to imagine minimally impossible supernatural worlds that solve existential problems, including death and deception.” Aaron Kay, at Duke University, says that the universal human tendency to believe in powerful spirits comes about because humans want the universe to make sense and to be ordered. Kay says that randomness makes us feel anxious, and when we’re anxious, “people will go to considerable lengths to reaffirm order in the face of evidence to the contrary (e.g., by blaming victims of random misfortune or seeing patterns in random arrays).” So, when we’re confronted with a situation in which personal control is absent and random chance seems to rule the day, we often start looking for an external agent, or for someone to blame. In the case of Joan Ginther’s remarkably profitable lottery streak, the tendency seems to have been (1) to reject random chance as the agent in charge; (2) to make Ginther the agent, insinuating that she cheated, even though cheating would require a degree of control over events worthy of a goddess, perhaps Fortuna or Tykhe, rather than a retired professor of statistics; or (3) to chalk it up to good, old-fashioned luck. In an ordered universe, this kind of thing wouldn’t happen. Or maybe what we really want is for blind, dumb luck to happen more often and to more of us—specifically (if you’re listening, gods), to me.

 LUCK AND PSYCHOLOGY On Being a Social Animal

Good luck comes in slender currents, misfortune in a rolling tide. IRISH SAYING

THE LUCKIEST MAN IN THE WORLD Frano Selak is a roly-poly man with a smile that lights up his whole face. He looks like everyone’s favorite grandpa, or maybe Santa Claus on his day off. He is also reputed to be the luckiest man in the world. Frano says that his life began on a stroke of luck. One fine day in early June of 1929 his parents were on a fishing trip when his mother, only seven months along in her pregnancy, went into labor. His father delivered young Frano, but then very nearly killed him by washing him off with freezing cold seawater. Newborn babies are not able to regulate their body temperature efficiently (hence the tradition in many cultures of swaddling the baby in blankets even in the summer heat), and by the time the frantic family arrived at the hospital, their brand new son was blue and stiff with cold. The doctors saved his life, and Frano lived to tell the first of several near-death experiences.

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Frano, a music teacher by profession, reports that his first thirty years after the near disaster of his birth passed relatively uneventfully. He attended music school, learned music composition, and played the piano and the accordion. He married, fathered a son, divorced, and remarried—all the normal, and non-death-defying things we expect to happen in life. But beginning in 1962, Frano found himself in a series of accidents, any one of which could have ended his life, but luckily didn’t. The first of his many near-death experiences involved a winter train trip from Sarajevo to Dubrovnik in 1962. Frano says the train he was riding in jumped the tracks and plunged into an icy river. He was able to break a window and swim to safety, rescuing an elderly woman seated nearby as well. Seventeen passengers on the train died, but Frano suffered only a broken arm and hypothermia. One year later, in 1963, the plane he was flying in grazed the top of a mountain and crashed. As the plane headed toward the ground, Frano fell, or was sucked out, through the back door of the plane, plummeting 850 meters (almost 3,000 feet). Twenty other passengers on the plane died, but Frano survived (although just barely) because he landed in a very large pile of hay. He reports that he “was in a coma in a hospital for three days before I woke up. Doctors told me I was a phenomenon.” He also says that this was his first and last trip by airplane. In the future, Frano might want to reconsider riding in cars as well. Having survived disaster on a plane and on a train, Frano experienced several more near catastrophes in automobiles. In 1968 he survived a bus accident, this time as a passenger on a bus that slipped on an icy road and fell off a bridge. No one died this time; the twenty-five schoolchildren who were passengers on the bus had been dropped off just minutes before the accident.

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In the 1970s he survived two burning cars. The first time, his own car apparently tried to kill him—a problem with the fuel pump resulted in gas being spewed onto the hot engine, causing flames to shoot into the car through the air vents. Frano’s hair was singed, but he and his wife managed to escape the flames just seconds before the fuel tank blew. The second time, the car he was driving somehow burst into flames, forcing Frano and his wife to leap from the rolling (and burning) automobile. Both times he says that he escaped “in the nick of time, just as the flames were about to engulf us.” The freezing water on the day he was born was near-death experience number one, the train was number two, the plane number three, the bus number four, and the burning cars numbers five and six. Near-death experience number seven occurred in 1994 when, as a refugee in the war in Croatia, the car Frano was driving was hit by an armored vehicle driven by a UN peacekeeper. Frano’s car rolled off the road and into a deep hole. He jumped clear of the rolling car just in time and escaped with three broken ribs and an injured hip. He says that “he sat in a tree as he watched his car hit the bottom and explode.” Finally, in 2002, in an unambiguously good bit of luck, Frano won close to $1 million in the Croatian lottery, enabling him to build a chapel where he can “thank God for all my lucky escapes and one big win.” Some questions have been raised about Frano’s astonishing series of nearly fatal accidents. If you read more than one of the stories written about his remarkable life, you will find discrepancies. The number of other people who died in each accident varies from telling to telling, from no one injured in the bus accident in one story to four dead in another, from sitting in a tree with an injured hip watching his car burn to leaping from

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the car just in time to watch (uninjured and whole) as it plummets to its destruction. Bad or faulty record keeping is not unheard of, so it is possible that these accidents did happen as Frano remembers them. It is also possible that it doesn’t really matter if he’s being 100 percent accurate in his story. Who among us can claim that our memories are completely accurate? When examining the headlines of the multitude of stories written about Frano, a pattern quickly emerges; it is universally reported that he is the walking epitome of luckiness.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LUCK If Frano only survived one brush with death, we can still ask the big question: Was he lucky, unlucky, or both? The answer to that question depends on how we answer a more fundamental question: What does it mean to be lucky? Frano gave his personal answer to this question in an interview with the Telegraph in 2010. Announcing that he was giving his newfound fortune away in order to downsize his life, he said: “I never thought I was lucky to survive all my brushes with death. I thought I was unlucky to be in them in the first place.” As we’ve seen, luck is what we say causes the events that happen to us when we cannot predict or explain them any other way. It must be luck, or as the French say, faute de mieux (for lack of any better explanation for an event). Because luck and our search for the cause in cause-and-effect relationships are so tightly tied together, it might be worthwhile to take a look at what the study of human behavior has to say about luck. Let’s start with a branch of psychology that examines how we determine the cause of events and behaviors in the world around us.

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The formal study of luck in psychology begins in a branch of the discipline called social psychology, “the study of how people think about, influence and relate to other people.” Sartre’s famous comment that “Hell is—other people!” notwithstanding, psychologically, emotionally, and even physically our interactions with other people are critical to our health and well-being. Humans are social animals; we need social contact to survive and thrive. We raise our offspring in groups, we form bonds with other members of our own species, we live together in groups within still larger groups (families, societies, cultures), and we have long-standing, sometimes even permanent relationships with one another—all defining characteristics of social beings. Our interactions with other members of our own species create our social world. At a fundamental level, in every social interaction there’s an actor (the person behaving) and an observer (the person watching and interpreting the actor’s actions). Social psychology studies these interactions and how we interpret them using our ability to sense the world outside us, our memory, our ability to learn and to change our behavior in response to what we’ve learned, and so forth. We scan the world around us with every weapon we have in our social arsenal, working to understand and interpret what is happening right now and to predict what might happen next, especially when we’re interacting with other human beings.

LUCK AND ATTRIBUTION THEORY One significant part of social psychology research focuses on how we interpret the actions of other people. In other words, how we explain the causes of behavior. Because other human beings are vital to our physical and psychological health, we’re

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heavily invested in this activity. Making the wrong decision about the behavior of another human being can have disastrous consequences. Imagine that you are walking down the street alone on a dark night, and it’s very late. As you turn the corner, running toward you is a huge person with a strange sort of shambling gait, bouncing and leaping in the air, making very odd animal-like sounds. You need to assess what’s going on here and do it double quick! What’s he doing? Am I in danger? Should I run away? Why is he doing that? Now imagine this same scenario with just a few changes. This time you’re walking down the street with a group of friends late at night on July 4. The local fireworks display has just ended, and people are streaming back to their cars to head home after a long, hot day. The large human running toward you is actually two people, a father with his child riding on his shoulders, galloping ahead of the rest of the crowd. You probably still ask yourself some of the same questions (especially if the appearance of the man and child is abrupt and unexpected), but your interpretation of his behavior and the reason for it is quite different. The social situation in which we find ourselves plays a large role in how we interpret and understand what’s happening around us. Whether you are alone or part of a group, whether the strange newcomer is alone or part of a larger crowd, and whether the stranger is doing what is “normal” and expected on a warm July night all influence how you understand what you experience. We use these social cues to interpret both our own behavior and the behavior of others. For example, in the first scenario you might be asking yourself if the approaching stranger is dangerous and intent on doing you harm. That interpretation drives your next set of actions—the approaching person is potentially big trouble and you should run away as fast as you can. In the second situation, you might well interpret the stranger’s actions

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as those of a loving father, willingly playing the part of Silver to his child’s Lone Ranger. Your actions this time would be quite different—you might start laughing and hollering “giddy-up” as the duo passes, joining in with the stranger’s behavior rather than trying to avoid it. This kind of analysis is called making attributions—we’re thinking about our own behavior and the behavior of others and coming up with explanations for both. As Harold Kelley, a well-known researcher of attributions and the ways we make use of them puts it, “attribution theory is a theory about . . . how [people] answer questions beginning with ‘why.’ ” Fritz Heider (1896–1988), an Austrian psychologist transplanted to the wide flat plains of Kansas, is considered to be the “father” of attribution theory. Heider proposed that our attributions to explain the behavior of other humans tend to focus on stable, long-term characteristics of those humans. He says that we look for characteristics of the world around us that don’t change, or that change very slowly, and use those stable characteristics (called “invariances”) to explain what’s happening to us. We’re less likely to say that the father “horsing around” with his child is doing so for the first and only time. We’re much more likely to attribute the interaction between father and child to an enduring characteristic of the two individuals, to see their behavior as confirmation that they are just that kind of family. Heider goes on to say that we encounter two kinds of dispositional invariances when we interact with the world around us. First, and from a social psychologist’s point of view most important, are the properties of the people we encounter—what Heider called person properties such as character and ability. Something inside that person, intrinsic to that individual, made him behave the way he did. For example, we might say that Dad is the kind of person who enjoys playing with his child and is willingly acting in a “goofy” way to please the kid. The second kind of properties we

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use to explain an event are object properties such as color and the size of the things in the environment. Heider called these properties situational attributions. We decide that something about the situation in which the behavior occurred caused the behavior. For example, we might say that very large individuals who move in unexpected and unusual ways down the street late at night are dangerous and should be avoided at all costs. Modern attribution theory says that the attributions we make can vary along three dimensions. First is the internal/external dimension (Heider’s “person” and “object” attributions, renamed), referred to collectively as the locus of causality; the second is the stability of the cause of the event; and the third dimension is the control we see ourselves as having over the cause of the event. Suppose you’re driving down the road (perhaps on the way home from seeing the fireworks display) and your car abruptly gives out a cough, starts to spew blue smoke, and coasts to a stop, refusing to move another inch. If you attribute the cause of this event to your own abysmally poor knowledge of cars and the fact that basic maintenance procedures don’t occur to you until after the darn thing dies, then you’re making an internal (person) attribution. You’ve explained the cause of this event as the result of a characteristic of you as a person. If, on the other hand, you explain your sudden shift in status to that of pedestrian as the result of the shoddy manufacture of cars these days, and the fact that your car is fourteen years old, then you’re making an external (situation) attribution. The causes of the event now are seen as part of the situation in which you find yourself and not a part of you as a human being. The attributions we make can also vary in terms of their stability. You might see the sudden demise of your car as yet another example of your chronic inability to deal with anything mechanical. If this characteristic is something that you see as always and

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reliably a part of you, this would be a stable attribution. But if you see the breakdown as a temporary glitch, something that came out of the blue and probably won’t happen again in the near future, you would be employing an unstable attribution. The third dimension is the amount of control you have over the behavior. Some causes for behavior are (at least potentially) controllable, and others are uncontrollable. You might see the breakdown of your car as something that you could control: if you had kept up with routine maintenance or paid attention to that odd knocking sound the engine was making the last time you went uphill, the car would not have left you stranded on the side of the road. Notice that you don’t necessarily have control over the events here and now, but when you stop to think about the car breaking down, you might well see it as something that you could have controlled enough to have avoided this event. Or you might see the breakdown as something that just came at you, random, unavoidable, and outside the realm of things you have control over—an uncontrollable event. These dimensions of causality interact and intertwine with one another, resulting in a sliding and shifting array of causes we use to explain what happens around us. The attributions we come up with often center on four characteristics: our own ability, the effort we expend in trying to accomplish something, the difficulty of the task at hand, and—you guessed it—luck. Generally, “ability is [seen as] internal and stable and uncontrollable; effort is internal, unstable, and controllable; task difficulty is external, stable, and controllable . . .; and luck is external, unstable and uncontrollable.” We attribute the cause of an event to luck when we have eliminated our own ability, effort, and the difficulty of the task as possible causes for it. When all else fails, we say it was luck. There is lively debate in the social psychology research about the factors that determine which of these attributions we’ll use,

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and when we’ll use them. Let’s take one of Frano’s brushes with death as an example. The bus driver of the ill-fated bus that slipped off the bridge and into the river may look back on that event and attribute the cause of the accident to ice on the road, bald tires, or to the fact that the shock absorbers on the rear of the bus were shot and unbalanced the bus on the steep approach to the bridge—all external attributions. These explanations of the cause of the event are focused on the situation or the environment in which the driver found himself, and they are used to make sense of what happened in a way that is comfortable and comforting to him. None of these attributions require that he consider whether the accident might have been the result of his own bad driving or lack of attention. On the other hand, the bus driver might attribute the cause of the crash to Frano distracting him from attending to his driving by yammering away about music trivia as the driver negotiated a tricky bit of icy road. Once again, seeing the cause of the bus crash as the result of an internal characteristic of Frano allows the bus driver to present himself in the best possible light. “I was doing the best I could in a tough situation,” he might think, “That Frano, he talks too much. It’s his fault we crashed.” The bus driver might see Frano’s talkativeness as a stable characteristic that reliably and predictably shows up in everything that Frano does, or he might see it as an unstable characteristic that showed up this one time, perhaps because Frano was nervous about the weather and the icy roads. Now suppose that the bus was functioning normally, Frano was quietly reading during the trip, and the driver was paying attention to the conditions and to his driving. Despite all of this, the bus still spun out of control, slipping into the frigid water and scaring the pants off both the bus driver and Frano. In this case, the cause of the event might just be attributed to plain old bad luck.

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ATTRIBUTION ERRORS We make attributions all the time, often without even knowing that we’re doing so. Given that we practice making attributions over and over again, you’d think that we’d be really good at it. Unfortunately, we’re not. We make mistakes when we are searching for causes, and we make some mistakes so often and so predictably that they’ve come to have their own names. These mistakes in determining the cause of an event show up quite often in ambiguous situations characterized by uncertainty, where more than one interpretation of events is possible and it’s hard to tell precisely what’s going on. For example, Heider noticed that the attributions we make when we’re in an ambiguous situation tend to reflect our own individual wants and desires rather than the specifics of the situation. One of our strongest and most persistent desires is to have a positive self-image—to think of ourselves as capable and effective people. To maintain that positive self-image, we tend to explain our success as the result of our own talents and abilities and our failures as the result of the situation we were in or other people. This attribution error is called the self-serving bias. In the case of Frano’s ill-fated bus trip, the bus driver is very likely to see failure to keep the bus on the road as the fault of the bad road conditions or a bad bus but to see his success in keeping his passenger and himself alive as the result of his own talents as a professional driver. Ambiguous situations also bring out another kind of bias in our attributions. This one is called a hostile attribution bias. When it’s difficult to figure out what another person is doing, we have a tendency to interpret that behavior as hostile rather than as harmless or benign. It’s easy to see why we do this. Basic survival of the species dictates that assuming hostile intent is safer in the long run; all we need to do is to think of the consequences of

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being wrong. Researchers have found that this kind of attribution bias is made more often by aggressive than by nonaggressive individuals, and that aggressive people are also more likely to be the target of this bias (assumed to be acting in a hostile manner) by other less aggressive individuals. When we’re trying to figure out what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, we turn to what we know about you. If we know that you’re aggressive, we’ll interpret your behavior as hostile and aggressive most of the time. Then there’s the hindsight bias, an interesting twist we put on events when we’re asked to think about event probabilities. Hindsight bias is “the way our impression of how we acted or would have acted changes when we learn the outcome of an event.” As an example of hindsight bias, let’s take the 2018 race for governor in Georgia between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brain Kemp. Suppose you were asked to predict the number of votes Abrams would get in the Atlanta area one month before election day. Because you know that metropolitan Atlanta constitutes one of the few spots of blue in a mostly red state, your bet is 60 percent. Flash forward to inauguration day, when you find out that Abrams won more than 80 percent of the votes in Atlanta (although she lost the election to Kemp by a very slim margin). If I now ask you what your initial prediction was, you might well show the hindsight bias and confidently reply that all along you predicted Abrams would take 70 percent of the Atlanta metro area votes. Why did your estimate of probabilities change? Assuming that you are not deliberately lying, social psychologists say that you’re using the new information you just received to update what you know about the situation. We’re particularly prone to doing this when we can’t remember our original prediction or judgment. We use current feedback to re-create our past estimate of probability, allowing us to “unclutter our minds by discarding inaccurate information and embracing that which is correct.”

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Perhaps the most famous of all the attribution biases is the fundamental attribution error (FAE) and its partner, the actorobserver bias (AOB). When we are trying to explain the behavior of someone else, the FAE says that we tend to overestimate the effect of personality and disposition. Other people act the way they do because they’re just that kind of people. When we’re interpreting the causes of our own behavior, the AOB says that we overestimate the influence of the situation and underestimate the influence of our own characteristics. After all, we know what kind of people we are and we’re right in the middle of the situation, so we often look to the external environment to explain what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. If we compare Frano’s attributions of the cause of the bus accident with the driver’s attributions, we might well see the FAE and the AOB. Frano might attribute the cause of the crash to an internal personality characteristic of the driver rather than to external characteristics such as the weather or the road conditions (an FAE). When asked about his own part in the accident, Frano might point to elements of the situation rather than to any factor internal to himself (an AOB error).

ATTRIBUTIONS AND LUCK Right or wrong, good or bad, we make attributions about cause all the time. In fact, it may not be possible to imagine a human mind that does not make attributions. In the words of two scientists studying attribution theory, “few ideas are so deeply engraved in our minds as the notion that events have their causes. The notion of causeless-ness is so alien to us that in the absence of a known cause we tend to attribute events to imaginary causes like luck and chance.” We are so averse to the notion of events

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just happening for no reason that we’ve created a cause for these event—luck. Social psychologists who study luck examine how and why we’ve developed this tendency to label some things and people as “lucky.” What social elements of the situation determine when we’ll reach for the luck card? How are other people a part of what we call good and bad luck? Fritz Heider originated the research into when and how we attribute the cause of events to luck: When the success is attributed to luck . . . two things are implied. First, that environmental conditions, rather than the person, are primarily responsible for the outcome, and second, that these environmental conditions are the product of chance . . . there is a diversity of conditions that lead to the cognition of luck. One of these is consistency, or conversely, variability of performance . . . the unusual is attributed to luck.

So when we say it was just lucky that we survived that plane crash, what we’re really saying is that the situation was to blame (the cause is external), random chance was to blame, and the events in question were improbable, unusual, and infrequent. Modern research on attribution theory has concluded that good luck and bad luck are external, unstable, and unpredictable causes of events in our lives. The only difference between good and bad luck is the outcome. Good luck is invoked as the cause when we succeed at something, and bad luck when the outcome is negative. Arguing from a philosophical position, Nicolas Rescher agrees with both Heider and the modern researchers in their assessment of luck. Rescher believes we will say an event is “lucky” if the event came about “by accident” and the probability of that event happening is low, and if the event itself has some significant

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benefit to us or creates some significant loss for us. “If X wins the lottery, that is good luck; if Z is struck by a falling meteorite, that is bad luck; but a chance event that is indifferent—say someone’s being momentarily shaded by a passing cloud—is no matter of luck, one way or the other.” Luck can also be seen as an internal and personal characteristic, something that we feel. Take a look at the language we use to talk about luck. Gideon Keren and Willem Wagenaar interviewed regular, habitual gamblers at a state-run casino in Amsterdam, asking them (among other things) about the roles chance and skill played in their gambling. At first, the gamblers they interviewed seemed to be uncomfortable with the question about the role chance played in their behavior. The gamblers explained gambling in terms of three variables, not just the two the experimenters were allotting to them. The gamblers said that chance and skill played a role, but so did luck, which they saw as quite different from chance. In their own words, the gamblers described luck like this: One cannot force luck to happen. One should wait till luck appears. . . . On the other hand, you can lose your luck easily by using it unwisely. You can also fail to utilize it when it happens, for instance by not even noticing that this is your lucky day, or your lucky deck, or your lucky dealer. Finally, one can also ruin the effect of good luck by not noticing that it ended, thus losing everything that was won.

These gamblers, people intimately familiar with luck and who routinely rely on luck, saw luck and random chance as two different causal factors. Luck was a personal characteristic with some people having more of it, making them “luckier” than others. Chance, on the other hand, had to do with the end result or the

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outcome of the wager and was the same for everyone. Chance could not be influenced, but luck could be exploited or taken advantage of because it came along in waves, peaking and falling away like swells on the ocean. In the words of one gambler, “The art of the game is to catch the crest of the wave.” We say we feel lucky in the same way we might say we feel happy or sad. Feeling lucky implies more than just an external, unstable, and unpredictable category of causation. It is also a characteristic that some people possess, as well as something that can be attracted to us or repelled from us, given the proper sacrifices, tokens, rituals, and prayers. Karl Halvor Teigen, a social psychologist at the University of Tromsø in Norway, set out to explore how ordinary people experience luck. First, he decided to see if we use basic probability to determine whether an event was lucky or not. Are we calculating the probability of events and labeling the unusual or highly improbable as lucky or unlucky, as Heider suggested? He asked students at his university to read two short stories about gamblers. The stories described “Anne” and “Liv,” who were playing a game that involved spinning one of two wheels that resembled roulette wheels minus the point values and a spinning marble (figure 3.1). In the story the students read, Liv plays with wheel A, divided into three segments: black, light gray, and gray. Anne plays with wheel B, which is divided into eighteen segments: six black, six light gray, and six gray. A player “won” when she spun the wheel and the marker landed on “black.” Both Liv and Anne spin their wheels, and both wheels show black—a win. After participants read the description of the game, Teigen asked them: Who will feel luckier, Anne or Liv? If assessment of luckiness is based on probability, then both women should feel equally lucky (statistically speaking); they both have the same odds, the same probability of winning.

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FIGURE 3.1  These

wheels were used in Teigen’s 1996 experiment. The probability of the wheel coming up “black” is the same for wheel A and B despite the difference in appearance of each wheel.

The probability of an event is calculated by dividing the number of times a target event happens (in this case, the pointer landing on a black segment) by the total number of events possible. Liv, playing with wheel A, has a one in three chance of winning—there is one black segment on the wheel in the set of three possible segments (one-third or a 33 percent chance of winning). Anne, using wheel B, has six chances out of eighteen of winning (six-eighteenths reduces to one-third or 33 percent). The odds of spinning the wheel and getting a win are exactly the same on wheel B as they are on wheel A. However, the students in Teigen’s study did not see things this way. Seventy-six of the eighty-nine students (85 percent) said that Anne, playing with the wheel with six out of eighteen black wedges, would feel luckier than Liv. Only nine students said that they should feel equally lucky, and four students said that Liv would feel luckier than Anne when she won. This result might well be another example of our tendency to misunderstand probabilities. The students might be responding to the size of the black segments in each of the wheels when they

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make their judgments about the luckiness of the people playing. Anne might be seen as luckier than Liv because the smaller segments might make it appear to be harder for the pointer to land on black on wheel B. The students might be ignoring the facts that there were more black segments on wheel B and that there was the same amount of black on both wheels. This problem is typical of the way we consider probabilities. Many studies have found that we’re often distracted by irrelevant characteristics of the stimulus, such as the size of each segment on the circle in this example, and we disregard the relevant information (the total amount of black on the wheel) when we make assessments of likelihood. Teigen repeated this study with another set of students from his university, adding a slightly different question to the mix. After explaining to participants that the probabilities of winning were mathematically the same on both wheels, he asked fifty students which wheel they would rather gamble with: A or B. If advance knowledge of the probabilities influences assessment of luckiness, the students should not have preferred a particular wheel (a response option offered them) or about half of them should prefer wheel A and the other half wheel B. The results of this study also fail to support the idea that we take probabilities into account when we’re making attributions of luck. Thirty-two of the fifty students (64 percent) said they would prefer to gamble with wheel B, fourteen (28 percent) chose wheel A, and only four students (8 percent) said they had no preference at all. Perhaps the sheer number of winning segments on wheel B made it look like a better bet? Teigen’s data suggest that probability is not what we are considering when we say that luck is responsible for an outcome. Coupled with what a number of other studies have said about our difficulties with probabilities in general, this isn’t a big surprise.

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What about the effect of benefit and loss? Are good luck stories always associated with gain and benefit and bad luck stories with loss? To answer this question, researchers often use a technique called “content analysis.” When you do this kind of research, you study the content rather than the structure of a communication to determine the objective or meaning of the communication. Teigen examined stories in two Norwegian newspapers over the course of one month, looking for the terms “luck” or “lucky.” He found that lucky people were the ones who had survived a potentially catastrophic situation, sometimes unscathed, sometimes injured but alive. “Their luck was often characterized as ‘incredible,’ presumably because death would have been a more ‘normal’ or expected outcome of the situation.” Each person described as having “good luck” gained nothing that could even remotely be called beneficial. In fact, they all suffered losses— of their health, their self-image, their dignity, even an entire limb—yet they all still described themselves as having experienced “good” luck. Sound like anyone we know? Poor Frano may have earned his title as the “Luckiest Man in the World” simply because he didn’t die, when in the “normal” course of events, he probably should have. Teigen then asked college and high school students in Norway and Poland and a smaller set of older adults (professional journalists) to write down stories about good and bad luck events in their lives. Each person then evaluated his or her own story on several dimensions: the degree of good and bad luck, the degree of control each person had in the event, the probability of the outcome, and the attractiveness of the outcome. Table 3.1 is a scoring sheet used by participants in this study. Table 3.2 shows the results of the study; good luck story scores on the five dimensions are colored white, and bad luck story scores are colored gray.

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TABLE 3.1 How lucky are you? Scoring in Teigen’s 1995 study

Degree of good luck in situation Degree of bad luck in situation Amount of control

1

2

3

4

Min 1

2

3

4

1

2

3

4

1 Absolutely Not

8

5

5

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

3

4

5 Neutral

9 Max

6

7

8

9 Total

6

7

8

50% 2

9 Max

Some

0% Attractiveness of outcome (Is this an experience you’d like to repeat?)

7

Equal

None Probability of the outcome

6

Equal

Min 1

5

9 100%

6

7

8

9 Absolutely

Source: Karl Halvor Teigen, “How Good Is Good Luck? The Role of Counterfactual Thinking in the Perception of Lucky and Unlucky Events,” European Journal of Social Psychology 25 (1995): 281–302.

Neither good nor bad luck stories were seen as entirely “good” or “bad.” Students and professional journalists both recounted good luck stories that were usually tinged with a bit of bad luck (about a 2 on the scale), and bad luck stories (the degree of bad luck in the story rated at an average of 6) that had just a hint of good luck in them (again rated about a 2). The participants felt they had very little control in both the good and the bad luck stories and saw both good and bad luck events as relatively improbable (both dimensions rated at the low end of the scale). The degree of attractiveness of these events differed significantly

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TABLE 3.2 How lucky are you? Results in Teigen’s 1995 study

Degree of good luck in situation

Min

Equal

Degree of bad luck in situation

Min

Equal

Max

None

Some

Total

0%

50%

100%

Absolutely Not

Neutral

Absolutely

Max

Amount of control

Probability of outcome

Attractiveness of outcome (Is this an experience you’d like to repeat?

Source: Karl Halvor Teigen, “How Good Is Good Luck? The Role of Counterfactual Thinking in the Perception of Lucky and Unlucky Events,” European Journal of Social Psychology 25 (1995): 281–302.

for good luck stories and bad luck stories. It is interesting that the good luck stories were not seen as really attractive; they were not rated at 8 or 9 on the scale. Instead, the attractiveness of the good luck stories was viewed somewhat ambivalently, whereas the bad luck stories were generally seen as something participants would just as soon not repeat anytime soon, ranking attractiveness down at the bottom of the scale. Teigen reported that “altogether, 35 percent of the lucky experiences were of a kind the person in question would prefer not to repeat . . . whereas only 3 percent of the bad luck experiences were given positive ratings.”

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The lack of control most participants felt, and the relatively low probability of the outcome, did not seem to be related to the degree of luck each participant felt. Teigen measured this aspect of the study with a correlation statistic The correlation statistic (the letter “r”) is a number between −1.00 and +1.00 that measures the degree of relationship between two variables. Variables that are related to one another change together in predictable ways—they are “co-related” or correlated. When variable B tends to increase as variable A increases, this is an example of a positive correlation. Think about the relationship between your own height and the height of your parents. Generally, as the height of the parent increases, the height of the offspring also tends to increase—tall parents tend to have tall children. The strongest possible positive correlation would be associated with an r value of +1.00. When variable B decreases as variable A increases, their relationship is negative and would have an r value between 0.00 and −1.00. For example, as the age of your car increases, its value tends to decrease. An r value of zero, or very close to 0.00, would indicate that variables A and B are totally unrelated. The correlation between hair length and intelligence would be very close to zero because these two variables have no relationship at all. The correlation between degree of control and degree of good or bad luck was very close to zero (−0.09 and 0.14, respectively). Statisticians would say that these r values are indicative of a meaningless relationship between these variables. The amount of control participants felt didn’t predict the amount of luck, good or bad, that they experienced. Probability and ratings of the amount of good or bad luck were also not meaningfully related to one another. This is one more piece of evidence that we’re not taking probability into account when we describe things as lucky or

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unlucky. This supports the idea from attribution theory that luck is uncontrollable. Finally, the attractiveness of the outcome also was not correlated with the degree of good or bad luck. Outcome attractiveness was used as a rough measure of the amount of benefit or loss each participant experienced, and it also failed to predict when a particular event was labeled as good luck or bad luck. Taken all together, Teigen’s studies showed that the “good luck-ness,” or conversely the “bad luck-ness,” of an event is experienced as being outside of our control. It isn’t dependent on probability, and it isn’t dependent on the benefit or loss produced by the outcome.

COUNTERFACTUALS AND LUCK Just what do we use to decide if we’ve gotten lucky or not? To answer this question, we need to look at the way one or two other patterns attribute causality to luck. First, our attributions of causality to disposition, to the situation, or to luck are typically made in hindsight. In the middle of the event, we’re not really thinking about blame, fault, or personality. In the middle of things, we’re dealing with what’s going on in the immediate moment. Looking back allows us the time and space to consider the event in a way that is quite different from our thinking during the event itself. When we pause to look back, we often see what we could have done differently, or how the situation we found ourselves in might have been different. Psychologists say that we’re looking for aspects of the situation that are mutable, that is, aspects that could change and that might have been different. When we look for the mutable in an event, we compare the counterfactual outcome to the factual outcome.

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Factual outcomes are the things that actually happened. For example, poor Frano’s bus really did slip off the road and into the river. Counterfactuals are alternative versions of the past, that is, events that could have happened but didn’t. The bus might have stayed on the road or the driver might have been able to regain control and avert disaster. Research has shown that consideration of the counterfactuals often play into the attributions we make. Specifically, we look to the counterfactual when we’re deciding whether or not to attribute the cause of the event to luck. Counterfactuals are always post hoc constructions. Each event spurs us to create an alternative to that event in which we build “representations of what could have been, might have been, or should have been.” When we think back and compare these counterfactual alternatives to what has just happened, we decide whether luck, good or bad, has played a role. The trigger for the creation of counterfactuals is typically a negative event, and the content of the counterfactual is determined by what we think should normally have happened. “Normal” is relative to the experience of the individual creating the counterfactual. What I think is normal might not be what you think is normal.

CHARACTERISTICS OF COUNTERFACTUALS Counterfactuals are classified in terms of their direction: upward or downward. An upward counterfactual is better than what actually happened. Upward counterfactuals often start with what are said to be two of the saddest words in the English language, “if only.” When Frano looks back on the first of his brushes with disaster, he might think: “If only the train hadn’t hit that icy section of track too fast. It wouldn’t have jumped the track, and we’d never have crashed into the river.” The alternative reality created

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in this reconstruction of what happened is better than what did happen, so it’s an example of an upward counterfactual. When we think about how “it could have been worse,” we’re creating a downward counterfactual. For example, Frano might think, “It could have been worse. The train might have crashed in the summertime when the river is full, and we all would have drowned.” The reconstructed reality here is worse than what actually happened, a downward counterfactual. Counterfactuals are also categorized in terms of their closeness. A close counterfactual is a near miss: the car screeched to a halt just millimeters from crashing into you; you caught the expensive crystal decanter wedding present slipping out of your hands just in time to prevent it from hitting the floor; or your lottery ticket had all the winning numbers but one. These are all close counterfactuals. The car that missed you by a mile, the crystal decanter you brushed against but that didn’t move, or the lottery ticket with numbers that weren’t even close can be described as distant counterfactuals. Both the direction of the counterfactual outcome and its closeness determine how lucky or unlucky what happened is seen to be. We can turn to another study by Teigen to see how these two factors affect our assessment of luckiness. Teigen asked another group of students to compare the outcomes of a new set of short stories. In one story, two soccer teams, Sharp and Spark, play and win against teams that are their equals in playing ability. Sharp and Spark each score only one goal, winning their games 1–0. Team Sharp gets their goal within the first five minutes of the game, and Team Spark scores in the last five minutes of the game. Which team will feel luckier, Sharp or Spark? The students in Teigen’s study overwhelmingly (95 percent) saw Team Spark as the luckiest team because the counterfactual (not winning) was seen as closer for Team Spark. For them, losing the game

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was only five minutes away, whereas Team Sharp had eighty-five minutes (out of the typical ninety-minute soccer game) to enjoy their goal and feel safe. In another story, two boys are waiting for the bus when an icicle falls from the roof of an overhanging building. One boy turns to the other and says, “You were lucky!” Participants were asked which boy made this remark: the one closest to the icicle or the one farthest away from it? All of the participants (100 percent) responded in the same way; the boy farthest away from the danger pointed out how lucky the boy who almost got speared by the icicle was. The degree of luck depended on how close the boy was to disaster. Luck also depends on the direction of the counterfactual. When the imagined alternative to reality features a negative outcome that did not happen—a downward counterfactual in which disaster is avoided—we feel that we’ve experienced good luck. The more negative the possible counterfactual could have been, the luckier we feel: “Wow, that could have been much worse!” Conversely, if the counterfactual involves a positive outcome that did not happen—an upward counterfactual—we feel unlucky. The more positive the possible outcome, the more unlucky we feel. Thinking “I almost had the winning lottery numbers—I was only off by one!” is much worse and significantly more unlucky than thinking “I didn’t even have one winning number on my ticket—oh well, I’ll try again next week.” Now imagine the combination of counterfactual closeness and direction. Think back to the boys at the bus stop. The boy who was almost punctured by the icicle was lucky because the counterfactual (getting smacked by the ice) was worse than reality, and the counterfactual didn’t happen. Would your assessment of how lucky the boy was change if the icicle that almost hit him was a tiny one, smaller than the lead in a mechanical pencil? Most of us

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would say that he was still lucky (it’s unpleasant to get ice down your shirt on a cold winter day), but the severity of the counterfactual is reduced if the icicle is small and the luckiness of the boy who almost got hit is readjusted. Now suppose the icicle was gigantic, similar in size to the largest icicle on record, a twentyseven-foot monster that dangled from a bridge in Scotland during the winter of 2010. Now how lucky is the kid who almost got hit? Most of us would agree that his luckiness just jumped up several notches—the counterfactual here is much worse than what actually happened, so our assessment of the luck involved is revised upward. The closeness of the counterfactual and its direction are the two major factors that determine our assessment of luckiness. Researchers have also found several other factors that play a somewhat more minor role in our decisions. For example, the temporal order of events is important primarily because temporal order affects the degree of mutability seen in events. Generally, we see events that happen early in a sequence as less mutable, and therefore less lucky, than events that happen late in the game. The Sharp and Spark team wins illustrate this factor. Team Spark was seen as luckier than Team Sharp because Spark’s goal came at the end of the game. Another factor is the degree of choice seen in the actions of the actors. If we see outcomes as the result of events in which we had a choice, then the luckiness or unluckiness of the situation is enhanced. For example, students were asked to rate how lucky Bjorn and Arne were in the context of a story about access to vaccinations for yellow fever before embarking on a trip to Africa. Bjorn has a choice between two vaccinations. He chooses vaccine A, has an allergic reaction to it, and as a result misses out on his planned trip. Arne has access only to vaccine A, he also has an allergic reaction to it, and so he also misses the trip. Who

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was unluckier, Bjorn or Arne? Most respondents said that Bjorn was significantly unluckier than Arne because he had a choice but chose the wrong one. And finally, whether the actors deserve what they get also influenced the assessment of luck in a situation. Consider these two events. A:

Berit asks Jannicke to buy her a lottery ticket. Jannicke decides to buy a ticket for herself as well. Jannicke wins $10,000 on her ticket, Berit wins nothing.

B:

Anne asks Kristine to buy her a lottery ticket. Kristine decides to buy a ticket for herself as well. Anne wins $10,000 on her ticket, Kristine wins nothing.

When asked “Who is luckier?” students in Teigen’s psychology class said that Jannicke was luckier than Anne, and Berit was unluckier than Kristine. They saw the person who took action, who went out and bought the tickets, as more deserving of a win than the passive player. The active and deserving person is therefore seen as luckier if she wins, and unluckier if she loses.

DECIDING TO BE LUCKY Luckiness could be described as a creature of our imagination. If we could imagine something worse happening, and if that something worse is close at hand—it might have happened recently, we had a choice of actions that lead to that possible something worse, or we deserved that outcome—we say we were lucky. It all seems to hinge on being able to imagine something worse. Let’s apply these criteria to Frano and his storied life. He experienced seven near-catastrophes. Each time, he came to the

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edge of death’s abyss and was allowed to back away. According to Teigen’s research, the closeness of disaster in each instance, and the downward direction of the counterfactual object, would make Frano one lucky son-of-a-gun. In each of his adventures, the counterfactual was death (about as bad as it gets). And in each instance, the fact that Frano didn’t die gave the counterfactual object a downward direction. The outcome could have been much worse: seven instances of very bad, very close counterfactuals. It’s no wonder he’s considered the luckiest man in the world. If I see Frano about to board the subway car I’m rushing to take to that very important meeting scheduled uptown, well, I don’t know about you, but that meeting can just do without me. I’m waiting for the next train.

 LUCK AND PSYCHOLOGY Magical Thinking

Superstition is the poetry of life. It is inherent in man’s nature; and when we think it is wholly eradicated, it takes refuge in the strangest holes and corners, whence it peeps out all at once. JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

LUCK AND THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY On a beautiful autumn day high in the Tyrolean Alps in September 1991, two ardent hikers, Helmut Simon and his wife Erika, began to climb. The Simons wanted to finish a hike they’d attempted on a previous trip about a decade before; they wanted to “summit” the Similaun, an 11,808-foot mountain in the Oetzi range that runs along the border between Austria and Italy. They began their ascent from the village of Vernagt on the Italian side of the divide, already more than halfway up the mountain. The rapidly fading summer had been an especially warm one, and the trail the Simons planned to follow, normally a track trampled deep into the snow across the glacier, had melted away. Instead of a climb “without crevasses,” they found themselves confronted with maze of them. In the stark landscape of splintered

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rocks above the tree line, they picked their way carefully, detouring around cracks, both big and small, deep enough to allow the brave climber a view into the innards of the glacier. Fall into a glacial crevasse and it’s unlikely you will get out alive. If you’re not buried by the snow and ice you pull in after you, your hiking buddies (providing you were smart enough not to go climbing alone) probably won’t be able to get you out without falling in themselves. Taking many detours slowed their climb, and they found themselves on the summit much later than they had planned. So late that they were forced to spend the night at the Similaun hütte, an old, wood and stone Alpine lodge about two thousand feet below the peak of the mountain. Their late arrival did have an upside; the Simons met a younger couple who joined them in sheltering for the night. The next day the Simons shared breakfast with their new friends, who persuaded them to come along on a climb up a nearby summit called Finail Peak. After a mornings’ climb and admiring the view from the top, the two couples made the usual promises to keep in touch once they’d returned home and began their descent, the Simons to Italy and the other couple to the Austrian side. As the Simons descended, they discovered they had wandered off the main path to the hütte below; proceeding slowly and carefully on the unstable rocky ground, they followed a small ridge with a long trench filled with ice, snow, and run-off water coursing along its edge. As they walked along, they saw something dark in the white snow. Erika noticed it first: “Look, it’s a person! . . . There, protruding from a solid bed of ice, was a torso, face down.” Shocked by their discovery, Helmut took a picture of the body and made note of its location, then they continued down the mountain. They reported their find to the authorities, turning responsibility for the corpse over to the local Alpine rescue squad

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and the Italian carabinieri (Italian National Military Police). Then they ordered drinks and went out onto the terrace to enjoy the remains of the day. The body was first thought to be that of a music professor from Verona who went missing on his way to the Similaun hütte in 1934. However, once the body was successfully extracted from the ice (no mean feat with the corpse encased in solid ice from the chest down), scientists quickly discovered he was much older than first suspected. The longbow, complete with a leather quiver full of stone-tipped arrows, and the copper axe found with the corpse were the first clues that this man had died on the mountain a very long time ago. Dubbed Ötzi (rhymes with Tootsie) for the range of mountains on which he died, or “The Iceman” (for obvious reasons), this remarkable find changed what we know about our own past. The first clue that Ötzi was ancient was not his body but the tools found with him. A copper-headed axe, in particular, puzzled the experts. The fact that the blade was copper rather than bronze (an alloy of copper and other metals like tin) was extremely unusual. The discovery of how to work copper marks the end of the Stone Age of man and the beginning of the Copper/Bronze Age, when weapons, blades, and tools began to be created out of metals. Ötzi’s axe blade was pure forged copper and bore obvious signs of having been used. These clues put the age of the axe, and presumably of its owner, at more than five thousand years old. Today speculation rages on about almost all aspects of the discovery. For example, anthropologists, chemists, and physicists still debate how Ötzi died. There’s evidence of deliberate human injury (an arrowhead embedded in the shoulder and cuts on Ötzi’s hand) and hints that Ötzi might have gotten caught in a sudden fierce winter storm and died of exposure. Others have suggested that his final resting place, his body wrapped around a

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boulder near the summit of the mountain, was part of some sort of ritual burial, signifying Ötzi’s high rank in his society. Questions also remain about how his corpse managed to survive the tremendous destructive forces of the glacial ice, forces so extreme that they can grind boulders to dust and have been known to turn human bodies into unrecognizable paste as the glacier flows down the side of the mountain. Did the gully he was found in shelter his remains from the relentless movement of the ice down the slope, holding his body motionless for centuries in its own private deep freeze? And why wasn’t he found before 1991? Glaciers melt and reform regularly, and 1991 wasn’t the first time warmer than usual summer weather had caused the ice to melt. The location of the body when the Simons stumbled upon it was off the beaten path (literally), but it was near a relatively high-traffic area. Surely, in the intervening five thousand years, someone else had passed by. Did no one notice Ötzi’s wooden longbow, which was found embedded, upright, near the body of the Iceman? A carved length of wood should stand out like a sore thumb in the almost lunar landscape of the high Alps. These questions, and others, still await answers. For his part, Ötzi remains frozen solid and now spends eternity in a museum constructed especially for him in Bolazano, Italy. Visitors to the museum can see Ötzi in his final resting place, his face turned toward his audience as they file past the window cut into the side of his climate controlled freezer. The medical examiner who first examined Ötzi’s mortal remains said that Ötzi “looked alert, and seemed to be on the verge of saying something.” I wonder what he would say about where he finds himself now. Researchers continue to examine every detail of his corpse, the scraps of his clothing (remarkably, Ötzi was still wearing the battered remains of one shoe when he was found, along with bits of a woven grass overcoat of sorts, and scraps of leggings made from animal hide,

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hair still attached), his weapons, and even his DNA in the search for hints of what life might have been like for our ancient ancestors. I also wonder what Ötzi would have to say about “The Curse.” Yes, like many mummies, Ötzi is said to carry a curse: to touch him is to risk joining him in death, shuffling unnaturally and early from this mortal coil. Goethe may well have been right when he said that superstition is part of human nature. Most of us are familiar with cursed mummies because of the astonishing discoveries made by Howard Carter and his financial backer, Lord Carnarvon, in 1922. Carter discovered the pristine tomb of Tutankhamun, the “boy king” of Egypt. According to believers in the curse, Carter had ignored the warning scrawled on the wall of the tomb that anyone who disturbed the rest of the pharaoh was doomed to be plagued forevermore by bad luck, illness, and death. Just so you know, experts say there is no evidence of any such warning being present in the tomb. The rumors of the curse began with the death of a bird. A messenger, sent to retrieve something from Carter’s house, was startled by “a faint, almost human cry” as he approached the house. In the entrance to the house, he reportedly saw a cobra, the ancient symbol of the Egyptian monarchy, in the process of consuming Carter’s pet canary. The story was picked up by the New York Times and the curse was off and running. Marie Corelli, author of a number of overheated melodramas featuring themes such astral projection and reincarnation, helped the story of the curse along when she declared in print that Tut’s tomb was cursed and that death would follow those who broke into it. The first actual death (not counting the poor canary) attributed to the curse was that of Lord Carnarvon, and admittedly his death was a rather odd way to die. Carnarvon died of an infected mosquito bite that led to blood poisoning and ultimately to pneumonia. He died about two weeks after Corelli’s letter was

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published, and the press had a field day with the timing. When doctors examining the mummy found that the king had a small, healed wound on his face, the speculation ran wild—It’s the mummy’s curse! The mark was said to be in the same place as the mosquito bite on Lord Carnarvon. By this time, Carnarvon was six months in his grave, so confirming this “fact” was impossible. But that did not dampen the enthusiasm of the believers in the curse. Even the death of Howard Carter from lymphoma nearly twenty years later (in 1939) was attributed to the curse. Ötzi’s curse began in a similar way—someone noticed that several people who had been involved in the discovery, recovery, and examination of the Iceman had died. The evidence offered looks impressive. First to die was Rainer Henn, a forensic pathologist who was part of the extraction team that labored to remove Ötzi from the ice. In the process of doing so, Henn had “picked up the cadaver with his bare hands and placed it in a body bag.” Henn died in a car crash one year after Ötzi’s discovery, ironically on his way to a conference where he was scheduled to present the results of his study of the mummy to the assembled scientists. Next to die was Kurt Fritz, who was probably the first man to actually touch the iceman. Fritz was a local guide who trekked up the mountain the morning after the Simons reported the corpse to the authorities. In an attempt to determine the identity of the frozen remains, at the time still thought to be the musician from Verona, Fritz knelt down and turned the iceman’s face to the light. Fritz made his living on the glaciers and was leading a group of hikers through the mountains one day when they were hit by an avalanche. Fritz was the only fatality. Two years later, in 1995, Bernardino Bagolini, an archeologist at the University of Trento in Italy who was part of the team studying Ötzi, died of a heart attack at the ripe old age of fifty-eight. In 2004, forty-seven-year-old Rainer Hoelzl, the cameraman who filmed Ötzi’s removal from the ice, died of a brain tumor. Hoelzl

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was followed to the grave by Helmut Simon, and his death was eerily similar to Ötzi’s—he too was found frozen in the ice on the Similaun, not far from Ötzi’s original grave, having gone missing three days earlier. Simon was hiking in the mountains alone and had apparently fallen nearly three hundred feet to his death. The curse wasn’t finished with the mountain just yet. Just an hour after Simon’s funeral, Dieter Warnecke, who led the rescue team sent out to find Simon, died of a heart attack. The curse has also claimed Konrad Spindler, the first scientist to examine Ötzi’s body and the leader of the scientific team studying him. In 2005, Spindler died of complications of multiple sclerosis. Most recently, Tom Loy, a molecular archeologist whose work identified blood from four different people on Ötzi’s clothing and weapons, succumbed to a hereditary blood disease he’d been suffering from for several years. In all, eight people who worked on the team examining Ötzi’s remains have died in the twenty-three years since his discovery in the glacial ice.

LUCK AND CURSES Curses are not only associated with mummies, despite what Hollywood would have us believe. Almost anyone or anything can be cursed. For example, there’s the curse of the Hope diamond, said to doom anyone who wears the huge blue stone to misery, sorrow, misfortune, and tragedy. It is hard to pin down where stories of the curse began, but in 1888 the Hawke’s Bay Herald (Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand) traced the origin of the curse to India. According to the curse, the diamond originally “formed the single eye of a great idol,” allegedly a statue of the goddess Sita. Having been pried (again, allegedly) from the statue by a French gem merchant, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, the uncut stone was brought to

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Paris where it was purchased by none other than His Majesty Louis XIV (possibly in 1668 or 1669). Louis had it cut and made into a cravat pin. The stone was stolen from the palace during the French Revolution, smuggled to England, and recut into two stones, the larger of the two became known as the Hope Diamond when it was purchased by Thomas Hope, a wealthy London banker, around 1839. The diamond rattled around the Hope family for several generations, eventually making its way to the United States and the jewelry box of Evalyn Walsh McLean. The story is that jeweler Pierre Cartier convinced McLean to buy the diamond by telling her that it was cursed, laying out in detail the various famous murders, mutilations, and suicides associated with wearing it. Then there’s the curse of the “Great Omar,” reputed to be the crowning achievement of the London bookbinding company of Sangorski and Sutcliffe. Established in 1901, George Sutcliffe and Francis Sangorski specialized in jeweled bookbinding, inlaying precious and semiprecious gems and gold leaf into their tooled, ornate book covers. In 1909, they were commissioned to create an elaborate binding for the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Edward FitzGerald’s famous translation of the poems attributed to the ninth-century Persian poet and scholar. Their finished work was “decorated in a most lavish manner . . . [with] numerous sunken panels, thousands of color inlays, as well as some 1,050 jewels, including garnets, olivines, rubies, topazes, and turquoises,” and it took almost two years to complete. The curse is alleged to have something to do with the two magnificently embossed peacocks on the cover of the book. In some cultures, peacocks are symbols of bad luck, and putting two of them so ornately on the cover of the book did not bode well for its creator. The curse made its first appearance when Sangorski was unable to find a buyer for his labor of love. When it finally

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sold, for less than half of Sangorski’s asking price, it was packed up to be sent to its new owner in New York City. The boat that carried this pinnacle of the bookbinders’ art was the HMS Titanic. Needless to say, the book did not make it to New York. Six weeks later, Sangorski, who did not know how to swim, drowned while attempting to save another bather. A second copy of the binding was created and stored in a bank vault for safe-keeping at the outbreak of World War II. Unfortunately, the bank, the vault, and everything in it were destroyed in the bombing of London during the war. A third copy of the book was created and now resides in the British Library, so far with no hint of the curse. Sports teams seem to attract curses the way honey draws flies. There’s the “Curse of the Bambino,” which is supposed to have started when the Boston Red Sox, at the time the proud possessors of five World Series titles, traded the great Babe Ruth (the “Bambino”) to the New York Yankees. After the trade, the Red Sox couldn’t win a World Series title for love or money, whereas the Yankees, who had been in the basement prior to acquiring Ruth, suddenly became one of the most successful baseball franchises in history. If you’re a baseball fan, you know that the curse was broken in 2004 when the Red Sox finally won the World Series after an eighty-six-year drought. The Chicago Cubs suffer from the “Curse of the Billy Goat,” which dooms them to never win the World Series as well. There are several stories about the origin of the curse. My personal favorite features the owner of the Billy Goat Tavern, a man named Billy Sianis who, so the legend goes, had a pet goat named Murphy that he used as an advertising gimmick to draw patrons to his bar. A devoted Cubs fan, Sianis decided one fine October day to bring his favorite goat with him to see his favorite team play and to get some plugs in for his bar, which was located across the street from the Chicago stadium. He bought two tickets, one

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for him and one for the goat, and took his seat in the stands. At some point in the fourth inning, Sianis was approached by stadium security. The fans around him, he was told, had been complaining about the goat’s odor, and he and Murphy would have to leave. Sianis was so angry that he cursed the team, shouting “Them Cubs, they ain’t gonna win no more.” It took the Cubs 108 years to win the series again, finally breaking the curse in 2016. Golfers talk about the “Open Curse,” which allegedly dooms any winner of the U.S. Open golf tournament to never win again. This curse does not seem to pack much punch because a number of players—Jack Nicklaus (a four time U.S. Open winner) and Tiger Woods (who has won the U.S. Open three times) and several other multiple winners—seem to have done just fine after their initial U.S. Open wins. In the NBA there’s “Billy Penn’s Curse,” in hockey there’s the “Curse of Bill Barillko,” in the NFL there’s the “Curse of Bobby Layne,” and the list goes on.

GOOD LUCK AND LUCKY CHARMS Curses generally involve bad luck, but there are ways to break the curse or to keep the curse at bay. The most common method of attracting the forces of good luck in the universe is to carry a lucky charm. Many of us rely on lucky charms, lucky articles of clothing, or ritualized behaviors to align the stars, to encourage good luck in our direction, and to keep bad luck away. I’m just a tiny bit embarrassed to admit that I own a pair of lucky shoes. Despite being intellectually certain that they cannot alter the course of events in the universe, I’m emotionally certain that they make me feel better. I still wear them when I need a bit of luck. Richard Wiseman, at the University of Hertfordshire in England, has been examining our beliefs about luck and how they

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influence our lives for more than fifteen years. In 2003, Wiseman reported that 86 percent of the residents of Great Britain he’d surveyed believed in luck and engaged in some ritualized superstitious behaviors to ensure good luck or to ward off bad luck. For example, touching wood to ward off bad luck was very popular (86 percent), and 64 percent crossed their fingers to try to entice good luck into their lives. About a quarter of respondents (26 percent) avoided the unlucky number 13, and 28 percent carried a good luck charm regularly. Things are not much different here in the United States. Wiseman reports that approximately 70 percent of Americans surveyed said they carried a lucky charm on a regular basis. A Gallup poll found that nearly half of Americans say they are not superstitious (47 percent of those surveyed), but 27 percent said that they believed knocking on wood would help them avoid bad luck. Forbes magazine reported that more than half of the Americans surveyed admitted to reading their horoscope, and 31 percent said that they thought astrology (the study of how the position of the stars and the movements of the planets affect events in our lives) was “very” or “sort of ” scientific. Athletes, both professional and amateur, are famous for carrying lucky talismans and for rituals designed to bring them luck on the court, the field, or the green. The career of a professional athlete is short and full of risk, uncertainty, and stress. As a result, athletes are highly motivated to do whatever they can, including engaging in irrational behavior, to play well. Third baseman Wade Boggs followed a series of rituals that were intended to improve his play. He woke up at the same time every day, and he ritualized his practice sessions. Before the game, Boggs would have a chicken dinner, and despite the fact that he does not speak Hebrew, at each at-bat he drew the Hebrew word for life (“Chai” ) in the dirt of the batters’ box before he was ready to swing the

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bat. Tennis great Bjorn Borg didn’t shave his beard during the two weeks of Wimbledon (and won five consecutive Wimbledon titles between 1976 and 1980), and LeBron James, currently with the Los Angeles Lakers, performs “The Ritual” before the game begins that consists of a sequences of moves that feature tossing a cloud of chalk into the air so that it rains down on him. It seems that we all ritualize parts of our lives despite any reservations we might have about the effectiveness of this behavior. Scientists have long wondered why we are devoted to these peculiar behaviors and what they might be doing for us that make us so reluctant to stop performing them. B. F. Skinner believed that superstitious behavior was a consequence of learning and reinforcement. Almost anything can be a reinforcer: food when we’re hungry, water when we’re thirsty, or relief for our aching feet when we slip those too-tight shoes off under the desk. The reinforcement occurs after we’ve made some kind of response: slipping the shoes off and then feeling relief or eating a cookie and then feeling less hungry. That reinforcement either makes the response more likely to be repeated (in which case it is called a “positive reinforcement”) or less likely to be repeated (in which case it is called a “punishment”). Skinner trained animals to make a specific response to get a specific consequence (or reinforcement). For example, hungry pigeons very quickly learned to peck at a small lighted disk in their cage to get food. One day Skinner wondered what would happen if the food was presented to the hungry pigeons randomly rather than as a consequence of anything the pigeon did. If food was presented every 15 seconds or so, no matter what the pigeon did, the pigeons developed a variety of odd and very persistent behaviors. One bird made two or three counterclockwise turns between presentations of the food. Another poked its head at the upper corner of the cage, and another started swinging its

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head back and forth like a pendulum. The birds acted as though there was a connection between whatever they might have been doing when the food was presented and the food. Skinner concluded that humans do the same thing when we carry lucky charms or eat lucky food or wear lucky shoes. As Skinner put it, “rituals for changing one’s luck at cards are good examples. A few accidental connections between a ritual and favorable consequences suffice to set up and maintain the behavior in spite of many unreinforced instances.” I wore my lucky shoes to the job interview and got the job—happy accident or lucky shoes? Skinner’s work predicts that I will be more likely to wear my shoes again the next day because I’ve learned to connect wearing the shoes with good things happening.

LUCK AND MAGICAL THINKING In the early nineteenth century, science and scientists studying the cultures of the world saw a belief in curses, magic, and superstitions as characteristics of primitive people. They assumed that the thinking of their thoroughly modern Western culture was much more sophisticated. Sir James Frazer, in his famous study of religion and magic, which first appeared in 1890, describes magic among the primitives like this: If we analyze the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two: first, that like produces like or that an effect resembles its cause; and, second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed. (emphasis added)

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Frazer called the first principle the Law of Similarity and the second the Law of Contagion. Voodoo dolls and burning someone in effigy are good examples of the Law of Similarity in action: making a figure representing the person you want to harm or destroy and then harming or destroying that figure. The Law of Similarity says that whatever you do to the doll will also happen to the individual person the doll represents—like produces like. The curse of Ötzi, and curses in general, are examples of the Law of Contagion. Once in contact with Ötzi’s frozen corpse (or the Hope diamond, etc.), you are always in contact with him. Any residual bad luck still clinging to his body will be transferred to you, even though you may have only touched him once and are no longer touching him. Ask any Cubs fan, and the fan will tell you that the odor of an insult can last long after the goat has left the stadium. Frazer offers a number of examples of these two laws operating in a wide variety of cultures across the world. The assumption Frazer makes, however, is that belief in these laws of magic are gradually replaced by belief in the laws of science as we evolve and become more sophisticated as a culture or society. Well, as the old song goes, “It ain’t necessarily so.” There are, as belief in curses demonstrates, plenty of sophisticated modern people who believe that one man’s anger at the treatment of his pet goat could doom a team to ignominy, or that simply taking a picture of a frozen mummy could cause your early demise. Many reasonable and intelligent people believe in the power of curses, lucky charms, the evil eye, and avoiding the number 13. Psychological research has shown that human beings have a habit, perhaps wired into our brains, of engaging in magical thinking. Magical thinking “is the idea that events and happenings can be directly influenced by another person’s thoughts, wishes or rituals,” and, like it or not, all of us engage in it. As Matthew

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Hutson puts it: “We all believe in magic—luck, mind over matter, destiny, jinxes, life after death, evil, and heavenly helpers—even when we say we don’t.” Belief in luck is an example of magical thinking. After all, isn’t believing in a curse the same as believing in bad luck? By the same token, isn’t wearing my lucky shoes the same as believing in good luck? We accept belief in magic in children. We expect children to believe in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, and the possibility that a red cape with a big “S” on it is all you need to fly. But we often say that adult thinking is different: more sophisticated, more scientific, and less prone to belief in the unseen and invisible. However, research into magical thinking says otherwise. Paul Rozin, Linda Millman, and Carol Nemeroff examined magical thinking in adults and found that we’re just as likely as children to resort to the magical for an explanation when the situation is ambiguous. For example, in one study Rozin and colleagues presented adults with either a cup of apple juice or grape juice that was poured into the cup right in front of their eyes. They were asked to rate their preference for the juice; most of the participants in the study liked it. Then, again right in front of their eyes, the experimenter presented the participants with either a plastic birthday candleholder or (and, may I just say right now, ick!) the dried, desiccated, and sterilized body of a cockroach. Experimenters first explained to the participants in each group that both the birthday candleholder and the cockroach were clean and sterilized. Then they touched the juice in the cup with this “contaminant” and asked the participants to rate how likely they would be to drink the juice now. Please note that no one was asked to actually drink the juice—just to rate how likely they would be to do so. Not surprisingly, contamination of the juice by the sterilized roach body had a huge effect on the acceptability of the juice. Almost no one said that they would drink the juice after it had

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been touched by the cockroach (the average ranking for this juice dropped 102 points on a 200 point scale). By comparison, contact with the plastic candleholder resulted in a drop of only 3 points. And finally, participants were presented with a clean cup and new, never been contaminated juice and were asked to rate their preference for the juice again. The same kind of juice was offered as had been “roached,” but this was a brand new cup and brand new juice that had never been in contact with the roach body at all. The average ranking for this juice also dropped significantly. It was as if contact once between the roach body and the juice had made the juice contaminated forever in the minds of the participants. This is an example of the Law of Contagion, and it is a great example of magical thinking in rational adults. Rozin and his colleagues also looked at the Law of Similarity. This study began with participants sitting at a table across from the experimenter. The experimenter put two empty, clear, glass bottles in front of participants, along with a name-brand bag of sugar purchased that day from the grocery store. The experimenter opened the bag of sugar in front of participants and using a clean spoon put some sugar into a bottle labeled SUGAR. Using a new clean spoon, sugar was then added to the other bottle, which was labeled SODIUM CYANIDE— POISON, again, right in front of participants. The experimenter then spooned some sugar from each bottle into separate glasses, added water, and asked participants to rate their preference for the sugar water in each glass. Which glass would you like to drink from? Remember, both bottles clearly have the same thing in them, only the labels are different. If participants are thinking magically, the Law of Similarity predicts that they should avoid the sugar water that had been sweetened from the jar labeled poison: like produces like. The label should be enough for these individuals to avoid the “contaminated” drink, even though they

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know it is just sugar. And sure enough, the participants rated the “poisoned” drink significantly lower than the “sugared” drink. In fact, participants did this even when they were the ones to put the sugar in the bottles and affix the labels to the bottles—when they themselves chose which bottle would be labeled “poison”! These researchers went on the test the Law of Contagion and the Law of Similarity in a variety of studies that are very amusing to read about but probably not so amusing to be in. They found that participants didn’t want to throw darts at pictures of people they liked but didn’t mind throwing darts at people they didn’t like. In fact, their ability to put a dart between the eyes of a picture of a hated person (Hitler, for example) was significantly better than their accuracy when the picture was of a good friend. They were also unwilling to eat fudge that had been shaped— right in front of them—to resemble dog poo, even though they’d already eagerly accepted the same fudge cut into the more traditional square. And they were less willing to hold brand new, novelty store plastic vomit between their lips than brand new rubber sink stoppers, both removed from their packaging in front of participants. Emily Pronin and her colleagues at Princeton University have studied “everyday” magical thinking. Curses work, she says, because we see powerful connections between our own private, internal thoughts and what happens in the wider world. For example, one experiment asked students, at least ostensibly, about psychosomatic illnesses and Haitian voodoo. The experiment was actually about whether or not these students could be made to believe that they had put a “hex” on another person. The experiment included a “confederate”—a person acting in a scripted way who is “in” on the real purpose of the experiment. The confederate was asked to behave in a way that would get the other participant to dislike him, and was he ever successful. He showed up

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late and kept everyone waiting, he chewed gum with his mouth open, he wore a T-shirt announcing that “Stupid people shouldn’t breed,” he rattled his pen on the table when the participants were supposed to be reading some background information, and he wadded up his copy of the consent form, threw it in the general direction of the trash can, missed, shrugged his shoulders, and left it on the floor. In other words, he behaved like an obnoxious jerk, and as expected the other participant didn’t like him at all. Both participants completed a survey asking about their current physical symptoms, and the confederate loudly reported that he felt just fine. Then the confederate left the room so the participant could act as “witch doctor.” This person was told to think “vivid and concrete thoughts” about the “victim” (thankfully silently) and to insert pins into the voodoo doll, including one into the doll’s head. The confederate was then brought back into the room, and everyone repeated the symptoms survey. This time, however, the jerk reported that he had a headache. The participants who’d acted as “witch doctors” were asked if they thought they had been the cause of the victim’s headache, and they reported that they were. In fact, participants who had been asked to think evil thoughts about their victim were significantly more likely to report that their curse had been effective compared to another group who had been asked to think neutral thoughts about a much less obnoxious person. They acted as though they believed that their evil thoughts had manifested a headache in an evil man. They also reported that they didn’t feel guilty at all about having hexed Captain Obnoxious—they all felt that he richly deserved his headache. Pronin and her colleagues went on to see if thinking positive and encouraging thoughts about someone who then succeeds at a difficult task would also lead participants to think that their thoughts had caused the performance. And again, they did. They

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even tested this idea outside of the laboratory. They asked people at a Super Bowl party how much and how often they had thought about the game while it was in progress. Then they asked whether these football fans felt responsible for the outcome of the game. The more the fans felt that they had thought about the game, the more they believed that their thoughts had influenced the game. It didn’t seem to matter if their team had won. Even fans who had backed the losing team reported that the more they’d thought about the game the more they believed their thoughts had influenced the outcome. It’s as if, says Pronin, we’re treating our thoughts as though they were agents or “causes of physical outcomes in much the same way that [we] perceive physical objects to be the cause of contiguous physical outcomes.” We hear a crash and see the child in the kitchen standing next to the broken plate and attribute cause to that effect. Or we rub our lucky rabbit’s foot before the important presentation to the boss and get promoted to the front office after the meeting. That rabbit’s foot becomes a symbol of good luck and good consequences and never leaves our person again. Sometimes our attributions are rational, and sometimes they are not. Magical thinking and attribution theory go hand in hand. In fact, coming up with a magical explanation for an event can be thought of as an attribution error in the same way that assuming hostility in an ambiguous situation or attributing success to our own abilities but failure to someone else are errors. When we say that someone died because he touched a mummy, we’re making an attribution—we’re assuming the cause in a cause-and-effect relationship. When I say that I won at roulette or that I walked away from a car crash without a scratch because I’m lucky, I’m making attributions. They are illogical and irrational attributions, but they are attributions none the less.

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There are two keys to getting someone to use magical thinking. First, a lack of control seems to be essential to produce superstitious behavior and claims of luckiness or unluckiness. This can be either a real lack of control or a perceived lack of control. Remember the experience of pareidolia—seeing meaningful patterns in random noise. From seeing faces in a photograph of the rocky surface of Mars to seeing the Virgin Mary in the bark of a tree, our habit of seeing and imparting meaning to patterns in the world around us abounds. Jennifer Whitson and Adam Galinsky studied the role control, either real or imagined, had on seeing “illusory patterns” in random visual stimuli. They found that people who lacked control in a given situation or even those who were asked to recall examples of situations in their past when they lacked control were much more likely to see patterns where there were none than were participants who felt they had some control. After six experiments designed to examine this phenomenon, they concluded that “the need to be and feel in control is so strong that individuals will produce a pattern from noise to return the world to a predictable state.” When we feel that we have no control, saying that events happened the way they did was because of luck or because we are lucky people restores that sense of control. The sociologist George Gmelch has studied pregame superstitions of baseball players and came to some interesting conclusions about them. First, the ritualized behaviors seem to lend a feeling of increased control over players’ performance. Second, the proof that rituals make the player feel in control comes from the fact that pitchers and hitters have lots of superstitions, but outfielders have almost none. They [rituals] are associated mainly with pitching and hitting— the activities with the highest degree of chance—and not

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fielding. . . . Unlike hitting and pitching, a fielder has almost complete control over the outcome of his performance. Once a ball has been hit in his direction, no one can intervene and ruin his chances of catching it for an out. . . . Compared with the pitcher or the hitter, the fielder has little to worry about. He knows that, in better than 9.7 times out of 10, he will execute his task flawlessly. With odds like that there is little need for ritual.

The second factor in producing magical thinking is stress. We are much more likely to generate a magical explanation for an event (saying it was caused by luck) when we’re stressed or when we are at serious risk of losing something important if things don’t go our way. Jeffrey Rudski and Ashleigh Edwards looked at how one particular, very superstitious (and usually stressed) group of people use magical thinking—college students. Surprising as it may seem, college students are remarkably superstitious, especially when it comes to things that affect their grades. A study of 426 undergraduates found that almost 70 percent of them reported some kind of superstitious, luck generating practice before an exam, ranging from trying to get the “lucky seat” in the classroom to not talking to “unlucky” people before the exam. Rudski and Edwards asked students how likely they would be to use a lucky ritual or a lucky charm to do well on a test. They found that the use of superstitious rituals or charms increased as the stakes involved increased—the more important the test was to the student, the more stressed the student was at exam time, and the more likely the student was to carry a lucky charm or to try to snag that lucky seat. Researchers suggest that there are three main reasons for the link between stress and superstition. First, the superstitious ritual might be helping the student focus on the exam. However, some of the rituals students engaged in seem to have been performed instead of actually studying for the exam. One student

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reportedly needed to find a coin before the exam to have good luck on the test. Fine and dandy until the student can’t find a coin to pick up and shows up late to the exam because he was scouring the ground at the bus stop trying to find that elusive charm. Second, performing the ritual may reduce stress and help the student relax. And third, the ritual may be providing at least the illusion of control in what is, regrettably, often seen by students as an uncontrollable situation. Ellen Langer introduced the idea of the illusion of control in 1975. She found that people often expect to be more successful in situations in which random chance is in control more than the real probabilities of the situation would warrant. We act as though we have control when faced with randomness because we believe that being familiar with the task we’ll do well on it. Or, if we have at least some choice in the task, we see the whole task as a matter of personal skill rather than chance, so again, we’ll be okay. We’re motivated to do this because when we feel that we have control, even the illusion of control, we feel better about our chances of success and our anxiety is reduced. Because anxiety seems to be an important factor in determining when we use magical thinking, researchers wondered if the personalities of believers in luck and magic might differ from those of the skeptics among us. Are believers in magic and lucky charms more anxious than disbelievers? Much of the early research focused on trying to describe the kind of person who believes in lucky charms or superstitions didn’t paint a very pretty picture. Stuart Vyse developed a personality profile of the “superstitious person” based on reams of data from a variety of laboratories. According to Vyse, the superstitious person tends to rely on intuition, hunches, and feelings rather than careful, systematic analysis and to see life and decisions as controlled by factors outside of his or her control. They also have low self-efficacy, tending to believe that they will be unable to succeed in achieving a goal,

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and low ego-strength (poor coping skills and a tendency to feel easily overwhelmed by everyday challenges). All in all, the picture of the believer in superstitions is one of poor psychological health and low coping skills. Yikes. Aaron Kay and his colleagues suggest that when our control over a situation is low or, worse yet, absent, we feel the need to defend ourselves against randomness and chaos. One line of defense against perceptions of randomness is to literally see patterns, even illusory ones, in the world. Alternatively, having faith in institutions that impose structure and order . . . can also be effective at satiating [the] need [for control]. People will even look to the heavens for order, toward interventionist deities that control what happens on earth.

When the perception of personal control was reduced, participants in Kay’s lab showed an increased preference for “external systems of control”—for a controlling God and government. When researchers reversed the situation and created the perception that a particular governmental system was unable to restore control when it was needed, participants reported an increased sense of personal control. We seem to operate in the world with the firm and unshakable belief that someone or something must be in charge. In some cases, that “large and in charge” force is us, and at other times, it is something external to us. Chaos and randomness are anathema, and we’ll perform all kinds of mental gyrations and justifications to push these twin evils away from us.

THE BENEFITS OF BELIEVING The research doesn’t paint a very pretty picture. It looks as though we haven’t advanced much beyond our Stone Age ancestors like

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Ötzi at all. We’re still crouching in the corner of the cave and shaking our lucky talismans at the stars, hiding from bad luck and wishing for good. But all of us who own a pair of lucky shoes can take heart. More recent research has shown that magical thinking—believing in superstitions, luck, and lucky charms—can be linked to some very positive and beneficial characteristics. For example, Kay and his colleagues have proposed that the benefit of superstition is that it makes us feel in control, and when we feel in control, we are physically and psychologically stronger and healthier. The compensatory control model proposes that “rituals inoculate against anxiety and stress resulting from the partly random nature of [our] experiences and help individuals psychologically engage with, rather than withdraw from, their environments, ultimately increasing actual performance.” One often mentioned benefit of superstitious ritual is that it reduces anxiety and tension. Two Dutch researchers, Michaéla Schippers and Paul Van Lange, asked players on the top ranked soccer, volleyball, and hockey teams in the Netherlands about their use of rituals before a game. Superstition was quite common among these elite athletes. The players reported an astonishing array of superstitious behaviors they engaged in, from eating exactly four pancakes for breakfast before a home game to putting a piece of chewing gum on a particular part of the field to having to see the number 13 before the game at least once. They also reported that the more important the game was to them personally, and the tougher the opponent was, the more committed to the ritual the players were. As the level of pregame tension rose, pregame rituals were seen to be more important, apparently because performing these rituals reduced tension and anxiety and made the athletes feel better. Counterfactuals are alternatives to reality that we generate, particularly after negative events (see chapter 3). An upward counterfactual is an imagined alternative to reality that is better

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than what actually happened. A downward counterfactual is an alternative that is worse than reality. Researchers have found that upward counterfactuals might help us prepare to encounter this negative situation again in the future and perhaps to do better the next time. Imagine you are in your car, about to pull out of your parking spot. Just as you are about to hit the accelerator and pull out into traffic, a large truck appears as if from nowhere, right in your lane. The upward counterfactual here would be to say to yourself, “Jeez, if I’d just looked behind me before I pulled out, I wouldn’t have spilled my coffee and given myself a stroke. Next time I’ll have to check all of my mirrors first.” You’ve used your imagined alternative to reality to prepare for your next encounter with trucks and traffic. One problem with upward counterfactuals is that they often make us feel worse about ourselves. You might well be embarrassed at your impulsive attempt to pull into traffic and feel sort of foolish. However, the decrease in our happy thoughts associated with upward counterfactuals might serve as motivation to change our behavior next time. Downward counterfactuals also might serve an affective or emotional function; we usually feel better about ourselves if we imagine how things could have been worse. The downward counterfactual with the truck incident would be to say to ourselves, “I almost died! I’m really lucky I didn’t get hit by that truck,” and to be very happy that you are not waiting for the firemen with the “jaws of life” to get you out of what’s left of your car. Liz Day and John Maltby examined how belief in good luck might be contributing to your overall psychological well-being. They asked 144 men and women about their belief in good luck, their feelings of depression, anxiety, optimism, and neuroticism, and then they looked for patterns in the results. In their study, depressed and anxious participants tended not to believe strongly

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in their own, or anyone else’s, good luck. On the other hand, participants who believed in good luck tended to be optimistic and not depressed or anxious. In a separate study, Maltby and his research team found that people who believed they were unlucky tended to show impaired “executive function,” a term that refers to a collection of cognitive abilities such as planning, coming up with alternative strategies when the initial strategy doesn’t work, organizational skills, and the ability to pay attention to the task you’re working on or to the goal you are trying to achieve. Believing yourself to be lucky was not associated with better than average executive function; however, believing yourself to be an unlucky person was linked with impaired executive function. Finally, Lysann Damisch, Barbara Stoberock, and Thomas Mussweiler wanted to find out if superstitions actually improved performance on a difficult task. They began with a conclusion drawn from the research we’ve just been talking about: people tend to use superstitious ritual when they experience a high level of uncertainty about the possibility of success, along with high levels of psychological stress and low levels of perceived control. Superstition reduces tension, creates at least the illusion of control (which is often good enough), and makes the often unpredictable and chaotic world around us seem less so. If this is the case, they surmised, then activating a superstition should increase the person’s feeling of self-efficacy (their perceived control over events), leading the person to try harder at the task and to persist at it longer. In addition, the superstition should provide a sense of optimism and hope, leading to better performance on whatever task is at hand. Damisch did several experiments to see if these hypotheses were correct. First, she asked two groups of students (none of whom were golfers) to putt a golf ball. One group was simply

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handed a golf ball and told to do the best they could at the task. The other group was given the golf ball and told that that particular ball had been lucky for others—setting up a belief in the luckiness of the ball. The participants who putted the so-called lucky ball sank more putts than the ones who were not told anything about the ball at all. In the second experiment, she gave two groups of students a toy that you tilt one way or the other to get the little balls inside to fall into the appropriate holes. One group was told that the experimenters were “crossing their fingers” for them. (In German the expression is “I’m pressing the thumbs for you,” and the study took place in Germany so that expression was used.) The other group, as you probably expected, was told nothing, simply handed the toy and told to go at it. Sure enough, the group that believed the experimenters were trying to channel luck in their direction got more of the little balls into the little holes, in less time, than did the group that was told nothing. In two other experiments, Damisch asked students to bring a lucky charm with them to the lab. One group was allowed to keep the lucky charm with them while they took a memory test (essentially the card game Concentration in which you turn over cards and try to make pairs) or solved an anagram task (made as many German words out of a set of eight letters as they could). The other group had their lucky charms taken away from them before they started each task. You can probably predict the results—the group that got to keep their lucky charms outperformed the group that had their lucky charms taken away, on both the memory task and the anagram task. Damisch sums up these results saying, “Activation of a good-luck superstition leads to improved performance by boosting people’s belief in their ability to master a task.” Magical thinking, superstition, and belief in luck as an external force in the universe, or as a personal characteristic that we carry

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with us in everything that we do, are remarkably beneficial. These beliefs reduce stress, uncertainty, and the anxiety associated with them. They also increase our feelings of control and self-efficacy. Recent research has suggested that aspects of magical thinking also might help us find meaning in life. Laura Kray and her colleagues asked college students to imagine what life would be like if they’d never met a great friend or if a personal life-changing transition in their past had not happened. They hypothesized that engaging in this kind of downward counterfactual thinking might, on one hand, highlight randomness in the world and make the students feel less in control and more buffeted by the whims of fate. On the other hand, imagining what might have been, focusing on what did not happen, might make the participants feel as though what actually did happen was more meaningful. They found that downward counterfactual thinking about major, life-changing events in their lives helped students understand why things had turned out the way they had and made the real outcomes that they’d experienced feel more meaningful. As Kray and her team put it: Counterfactual thinking provides a satisfying causal explanation for life changing events and in doing so, an increased sense of the inevitability of the outcome.  .  .  . Odd though it sounds highlighting the improbability of an event bestows inevitability on the event. . . . The logic appears to be: “something so improbable could not have possibly happened by chance alone. Therefore, it must have been fated.”

Imagining what might have been decreases the ambiguity of the situation and the uncertainty of life. The rejection of random chance as a cause of events, both major and minor, makes us feel better, more in control and happier, and gives the sometimes

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chaotic chain of events that make up our lives a sense of purpose and meaning. Belief in curses, lucky shoes, lucky test-taking pens, and the power of prayer is illogical, irrational, and as unscientific as all get out. It is also a persistent characteristic of human beings. The fact that we keep engaging in these sorts of behaviors, in spite of all logic and reason, speaks to the benefits they provide us. As a species, we are strongly motivated to reduce uncertainty and to increase our sense of control. We look for the cause behind even the most mundane of events because feeling as though we know why something happened helps us feel in control of that thing and, by extension, of the universe itself. When we come across something unusual, something we could not have predicted in a million years, our need to explain “why” is put to the test. Random chance put Helmut and Erika Simon on the path past Ötzi, just as random chance put Ötzi into that trench, protected from the elements and the glacier for five thousand years. It is astonishingly lucky, as well as amazingly random, that Ötzi’s body would survive all that time frozen in the ice pristine and whole. It is so improbable that the corpse found on the mountain would date from our distant, Stone Age past that we assume finding him can’t be random, it must have meaning. The body must have been fated to be discovered, and perhaps it was fated to be discovered because it is cursed, just as King Tut, the Hope diamond, the Great Omar, and countless sports teams have been cursed throughout time. We have a strong desire to see cause-and-effect relationships for everything we encounter and have an atavistic terror of the uncontrollable, the random, and the unknown. If these are combined with our remarkable ability to respond to accidental reinforcement as if it were meaningful, they can create belief in curses of all sorts. Our conviction that the frozen corpse of a man

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who lived five thousand years ago is somehow responsible for the death of someone who touched him is strange, no question. But the fact that we can create these connections is a testament to our unique and amazing minds that also let us do things like consider what life might have been like for that frozen stranger all those thousands of years ago. Who knows? Maybe that stinky goat really can explain why the Cubs couldn’t win for such a long time.

 LUCK AND YOUR BRAIN: PART I

Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think. AMBROSE BIERCE

HANS BERGER AND HIS ELECTRICAL BRAIN The human brain is a three-pound wonder, capable of keeping track of the thousands of events, lights, sounds, feelings, smells, tastes, plans, and predictions we swim through each and every day. The brain plans for our future, agonizes over whether we’re doing what we should be doing right now, and waxes nostalgic about the past. It lets us love one another, plot the downfall of our enemies, and decide what to have for breakfast. Because of our intricate and complex nervous system, we can dance with joy, run, swim, sing, breathe, chew, study, laugh out loud, whip up a gourmet meal, burn the toast, and dream fantastical dreams, all with equal ease. Everything we do, each and every behavior of which we think ourselves capable, is the result of brain function. That includes every thought we’ve ever had or will have, every belief we hold dear, every expectation, every fear, and every hope we’ve ever

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entertained. It also includes this odd and sometimes quirky sense of being lucky or unlucky. Scientists faced several immense problems when they began to study the brain. The first problem was that brains don’t move when they do whatever it is they’re doing. Early science firmly held onto the idea that movement equaled life, so an organ that didn’t move wouldn’t be seen as important to life at all. When science finally came around to recognizing that the brain might be important, when they finally began to think that brains might be thinking, they had to figure out a way to watch it work. It took an unusual man, Hans Berger, who was trying to scientifically demonstrate the existence of mental telepathy, to invent the means for direct observation of brain function in the cortex. Berger initially planned to study mathematics with the intention of becoming an astronomer. That intention lasted all of one semester. In the manner of more than one first-year college student unsure of why he or she is in school, Berger dropped out and went looking for his path in life. Like many students before and after him, Berger joined the military (in his case, the cavalry) in hopes of finding his purpose. While in the military, Berger had a nearly fatal accident. The horse he was riding reared unexpectedly and threw him directly into the path of an oncoming carriage hauling a very large and heavy cannon. The driver of the carriage managed to stop his horses just in the nick of time, scaring Berger out of a few years of life but leaving him with no serious injuries. Early the next day, he received a telegram from his father asking if anything out of the ordinary had happened to him recently. Apparently, just when Berger was scrambling to get out of the way of the oncoming juggernaut, Berger’s sister had experienced a moment of sheer panic, convinced that her beloved brother was in danger. Berger firmly believed this was an example of the strong psychic connection he shared with his sister, and he became a devoted believer in mental telepathy for

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the rest of his life and was obsessed with finding a physiological basis for it. When his year of military service ended, Berger went back to the university with a newfound goal. He was determined to discover the physical basis of what he called “psychic energy” or “P-energy.” The central theme in his life and his work became “the search for the correlation between objective activity in the brain and subjective psychic phenomena.” Berger would not become famous for his stated life’s work. He never did find a brain area responsible for psychic phenomena, nor was he able to definitively demonstrate that this energy even existed. His lack of success did not deter him in his search, however; he was amazingly persistent, doggedly continuing to look for evidence of P-energy despite repeated failure. Perhaps he would agree with Thomas Edison’s philosophy on research: “I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Berger began his search for psychic energy with a unique group of patients who quite literally had holes in their heads. Patients who need brain surgery underwent a process called trepanation in Berger’s day (craniotomy today), in which a portion of the skull is temporarily removed to allow the physician access to the brain. At the end of the surgery, the bone flap is replaced, and the hole eventually heals over with new bone growth. Working in a major medical school, Berger had ready access to these trepanned patients. He first tried measuring the pulsations of the brain within its bony case but found no evidence of psychic energy using this method. He next tried measuring brain temperature, and finally turned to measuring the electrical energy of the brain, first trying unsuccessfully to record electrical activity in dogs. World War I interfered with his laboratory work, and Berger went off to serve his country as a psychiatrist on the Western Front. After the war, he returned to the university and to his

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research. The war that so devastated Europe and the individuals who fought it proved “lucky” for Berger. The hospital where Berger worked now had an abundant supply of patients with head injuries and ready-made trepanations, with exposed brains just waiting to be examined. Berger tried stimulating the brain directly with a tiny electrical signal and measuring the time between touching the electrical signal to the cortex and the patient’s reports of feeling a touch on the body (the brain lacks the ability to feel pain). These experiments led him to try the reverse of stimulating the brain—recording the electrical activity of the brain itself. Finally, in 1924, he successfully measured some incredibly tiny oscillations in the electrical activity of the brain in a seventeenyear-old trepanned patient named Zedel. He spent the next five years making sure the signal that he recorded was in fact coming from the patient’s cortex and was not some laboratory-generated artifact. He decided to call his recording of the working brain an electroencephalograph (literally, a picture of the brain’s electricity) and published his results in 1929 in the Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten (Archives of Psychiatry and Neurological Sciences). It was the first scientific record of an EEG obtained from a living, breathing human subject. Unfortunately for Berger, the article didn’t even make a ripple in the scientific pond. No one believed he had recorded the activity of the cortex. It is possible that Berger’s well-known interest in psychic energy was one reason his accomplishments in the development of electroencephalography went almost unnoticed. Apparently, Berger was not well respected at his own university nor in the larger scientific world. Promoted to hospital director when he returned from the war, Berger ran his domain with stereotypical Prussian efficiency: punctual, strict, and somewhat aloof from his colleagues. He did not endear himself to his peers

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in the lab or in the clinic. He was also apparently unaware of just how lucky he’d been in figuring out a way to record the activity of a working brain. He had never bothered to learn the basics of electricity and electrical systems, and his remarkable success in the face of his ignorance was not lost on his peers. W. Grey Walter visited Berger’s lab in 1935 and wrote that Berger was a surprisingly unscientific scientist [who] . . . was not regarded by his associates as in the front rank of German psychiatrists, having rather the reputation of being a crank . . . he was completely ignorant of the technical and physical basis of his method. He knew nothing about mechanics or electricity.

Despite the resounding silence that greeted his publication, Berger continued with his research, publishing fourteen papers describing the electrical activity of the cortex between 1929 and 1938. (He is a wonderful example of Austin’s Type II luck, in which persistence, action, and movement stir things up and create new lucky opportunities.) It wasn’t until 1934, when Berger’s results were replicated by a better-known and more respected English physiologist, Lord Edgar Douglas Adrian, that EEGs came to be part of the medical and scientific arsenal and Berger earned fame as the inventor of this technique.

THE EEG: A PICTURE OF THE WORKING BRAIN During an EEG, small disk-shaped electrodes are attached to the skin over the skull with a sticky gel designed to help maintain good contact between the skin and the electrode. The millions of cells underneath the electrodes are “firing,” sending tiny electrical

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messages called action potentials from one neuron (the messagesending cells in the brain) to another. The electrical message in the brain is carried by ions—an atom or a group of atoms with either a positive or a negative charge caused by gaining or losing an electron. High school physics class taught us that ions with the same charge repel one another, and ions with opposite charges attract each other. When lots of ions push or pull on many other ions, they create a wave of electrical current—moving the charge through the system. These waves of electrical activity are picked up by the electrodes on the scalp. The metal of the electrodes conducts the push (like charges repelling each other) and pull (opposite charges attracting each other) of the voltage in these waves. Electrodes placed at different spots on the scalp record slightly different waves, and these differences are measured by a voltmeter. An EEG is a recording of these voltages over time, reflecting all of the synchronous activity of the cells under the electrodes. The EEG revolutionized the study of the brain, enabling researchers to see the brain at work. The waves recorded during an EEG are characterized by their frequency (the number of oscillations or waves per second), their amplitude, and their location (which part of the cortex is generating them). Four basic sets of waves are created by active cells in the cortex. Alpha waves (the first type Berger recorded; in fact, initially they were called “Berger waves”) oscillate at about 8 to 13 waves per second and are typically seen in a person whose eyes are closed and who is not concentrating on anything in particular (a person in a state of relaxed wakefulness). Typically, alpha waves are recorded from electrodes over the back (posterior) portions of the head rather than from electrodes over the front of the head. Beta waves oscillate at about 13+ waves per second and are more prominent in the EEG when we’re awake and paying attention to something. The person being recorded will often be asked

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to do math problems silently or to read, etc. The eyes are open and the person is awake and attending to the world. Beta waves are more prominent anteriorly (at the front of the head rather than the back). Both alpha and beta waves are relatively low in amplitude (they’re small) and relatively high in frequency (they’re fast). Theta waves are slower than alpha or beta waves (about 3.5 to 7.5 waves per second), and delta waves are slower still (3 waves per second or fewer). Theta and delta waves are also very large compared to alpha and beta waves. Theta and delta waves are usually seen when the subject is asleep but not dreaming (although how anyone can sleep with an EEG array on their scalp mystifies me).Theta waves are also characteristic of someone who is daydreaming, or what my grandmother would have described as “off in a brown study.” EEG records can tell researchers and physicians if the brain is functioning normally. They look for abnormalities in the shape of the waves, the frequencies of the waves, and in the location of the waves over time to pinpoint just where things may have gone wrong.

LUCK, YOUR BRAIN, AND AN EEG What does all of this have to do with luck? Well, belief in luck, like belief in anything—good or bad, profound or silly, leprechauns or demons, life on other planets or the power of a particular pair of shoes to get you what you want—is a thought. The brain is the organ of thought; in fact, thoughts are the end result of the brain working. Rumbaugh and Lewin stated that the fundamental purpose of a sophisticated central nervous system (the brain) is to help us figure out what to do next. The brain uses everything it can get its figurative “hands” on in making that decision. Our understanding of the meaning of life, our expectations, the connections we make between cause and effect, our fear and anxieties,

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our beliefs about who we are (lucky or unlucky), and how the universe works (luck happens, or it doesn’t) are all factors our brain considers when making a seemingly simple decision: What’s next? Can the pattern of activity in the brain add to what we know about luck? Can we see evidence of the attributions we make and the counterfactuals we choose to construct in an EEG snapshot of our hardworking brain? To answer these questions, we’ll first take a tour of the brain, pointing out the major landmarks and functions of the systems and circuits that make it up. Then we’ll talk about what EEGs can tell us about luck.

A BRIEF TOUR OF THE BRAIN Berger and other scientists noticed that cortical activity underneath different parts of the skull seemed to vary. Activity recorded from the front of the skull at the cortex didn’t look exactly like activity at the back of the brain. What’s different about these areas? What are these different regions of the cortex doing when we’re relaxed and not particularly focused versus when we’re trying to decipher a problem? The problem facing scientists then and now is that one part of the brain pretty much looks like every other part of the brain. Neuroanatomists had to combine information from a wide range of studies from both the lab and the hospital clinic to determine what each region or structure in the brain was doing. Eventually, the basic organizational patterns that can be seen in mammalian brains began to be described. You can think of the brain as adopting a divide and conquer strategy when it comes to the massive amount of information it is faced with every moment of every day. Without organization, the information coming into the brain could get lost in the shuffle.

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Rules, patterns, and organization make accessing information much easier. The first organizational pattern evident in the brain is the fact that we actually have two brains in our head— two hemispheres, each covered by a cortex and each having the same basic subcortical structures underneath. The first general rule about brain function is that the right hemisphere of the brain controls the left side of the body, and the left hemisphere controls the right side. Right-handed people are often described as left-hemisphere dominant, and the lefties among us are righthemisphere dominant. The cortex itself can be divided into four basic lobes loosely based on the kind of information processed in each lobe (figure 5.1). Each lobe of the brain is primarily responsible for a set of dominant

FIGURE 5.1 The lobes of the cortex in the human brain. The occipital, temporal, and parietal lobes process incoming sensory information, ultimately sending that information to the frontal lobe for a decision about what to do next.

Source: Henry Vandyke Carter, “Lobes of the Brain” (labels added),Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lobes_of_the_brain_NL.svg.

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functions, although they share information with the other lobes as well. The “little brain,”(the cerebellum) at the very back of the brain, is sometimes considered a fifth lobe, but it has its own anatomy, including its own cortex and subcortical structures as well as a distinct set of functions, so we’ll leave it out of this discussion. Three of the four lobes of the brain deal primarily with information about what’s happening in the world outside of us. These lobes make up the sensory cortex because they’re receiving information from our eyes, our ears, and the largest sensory organ we possess—our skin. Information from each sensory system is processed in its own specialized sensory area in the cortex. We’ll begin our tour at the back of the brain with the occipital lobe (literally “the back of the head” from the Latin words ob meaning “against or behind” and caput meaning “head”). This portion of the cortex, located as far away from the eyes in the front of our head as it could possibly be, processes visual information. At the sides of our head, literally at our temples, we find the temporal lobes (from the Latin temporalis referring to the flat sides of our head). This region of the cortex processes auditory information and our memory of the faces of the people we know. The parietal lobes (from Latin paries referring to the walls of a house) sit at the top of the brain. This area handles information about what’s touching us, how warm or cold that thing is, whether it’s rough or smooth, etc. The parietal lobes also help guide our actions and help us recognize where an object is in the space that surrounds us. Finally, at the front of the brain is the frontal lobe (so named because it’s in the front). The frontal lobe receives messages from every part of the brain. All of the sensory information about what’s going on in the environment we live in is sent up to the frontal lobe. The frontal lobe needs this information because it is in charge of the executive functions—the systems that control attention, memory, planning, abstract thinking, emotion, motivation,

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and the feeling of being rewarded when we do something right. It monitors our behavior and lets us know when we’ve made an error or when we’re doing something that isn’t socially acceptable (or is just plain incorrect) and we need to squash the impulse to do that thing again. It also contains the systems that send commands to the muscles of our bodies (called motor systems) that enable us to voluntarily move our bodies. The brain is a complex and organized structure, with different regions of the brain processing different kinds of information and sharing that information with other brain regions. The organizational patterns divide up the workload into left and right hemispheres, and to specific regions within a hemisphere, to make sure everything gets done in its proper order. The frontal lobes, in particular, seem to be in charge of who we are as individuals, where we want to go in life, the plan for what happens next, and, ultimately, with telling our bodies how to execute that plan. Have you ever wondered how we know all of this about brain function? In part it is because of technological breakthroughs such as the EEG, along with detailed and careful study of circuits of individual neurons and the messages they send to one another. One of the problems scientists have encountered in their study of how the brain works is the massive amount of individual variation found in healthy brain function. As a result, we cannot tell if the brain is functioning normally just by looking at what an individual is doing. How do we know what kind of EEG patterns, for example, are characteristic of normal healthy brains and what kinds indicate a problem? You’ve probably noticed that the answer to that question is fairly evident in the way the question was phrased. There is a very long history in medicine, neuroscience, and psychology of looking at abnormal brains—brains that have been damaged or have suffered disease—to describe what normal brains do.

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The story of Phineas Gage is a great example of studying the abnormal to understand the normal. Gage is famous in neuroscience and psychology because of a truly horrific injury he suffered to his brain and because that injury didn’t just flat out kill him (he was very lucky). On September 13, 1848, while using dynamite to clear a railway roadbed, a ill-timed explosion sent an iron rod completely through Gage’s head. To the surprise of his colleagues, doctors, and family, Gage survived and made a (lengthy) recovery. However, his friends and family said that the person who recovered was completely different from the Phineas they knew and loved. John M. Harlow, the physician who treated Gage after his injury, said that before the accident Gage was well liked and well respected by his employers and had a “well-balanced” mind. Gage’s friends, family, and employers described him as a “shrewd and smart business man, energetic and persistent in his plans . . . of temperate habits, quiet and respectful . . . possessed of an iron will and an iron frame.” After the accident, his family and friends said that he was “no longer Phineas.” Harlow reported the following: The equilibrium or balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculties and his animal propensities, seems to have been destroyed. He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity, . . . manifesting little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans for future operation, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible.

In short, Phineas had formerly been a nice, dependable guy and now he behaved like an easily distracted, obnoxious, unreliable,

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foul-mouthed jerk. Small wonder that he had trouble holding a job and had to move from town to town, taking whatever work he could get. To the generations of doctors and scientists who’ve examined this strange case, it seemed that the destruction of at least part of Gage’s brain had resulted in a fundamental change in his personality and in his ability to formulate a plan for achieving a goal. After the accident, he seemed incapable of focusing his attention on a task and carrying that task out to achieve a goal. Harlow speculated that part of Gage’s frontal lobe had been damaged by the passage of the iron bar, but the doctor didn’t have the tools needed to actually look to see where the damage was. More recent study of Gage’s skull (which is part of the collection at the Countway Library of Medicine in Boston), using some sophisticated digital imaging techniques, has narrowed the location of the damage to the frontal lobe, primarily in the left hemisphere (on the left side of his brain). Let’s take a closer look at the frontal lobe. The frontal lobe is divided into the prefrontal cortex (the front of the front, if you will) and two large “motor” regions. The two motor regions are the main output lines for the brain; they generate the commands to move that are sent down to our skeletal muscles, allowing us to move in all the wonderful ways that we can. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is itself subdivided into three major regions, each region handling different aspects of executive function. Like many structures in the brain, these three areas are named for where they are found within the frontal lobe. Dorsal means at the top, like the dorsal fin on a shark, ventral means at the belly (or in this case, at the bottom), lateral means at the side, and orbital refers to the eye orbits, the bony sockets into which the eyes fit (figure 5.2). There is some overlap in what the regions of the PFC do. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is primarily in charge

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FIGURE 5.2  These

three regions of the prefrontal cortex are implicated in the perception of luck.

Source: “Principles of Animal Communication” (illustrator unknown). Copyright © Oxford Publishing Limited. Reproduced with permission through PLSclear.

of planning what to do next: Should I take action in this situation or wait until things change? To make a plan we use information that we’ve stored in our memory, so dlPFC also calls on our working memory—the information we’re thinking about right now. (Working memory has been compared to the information online on your computer right now, whereas long-term memory is all of the information stored in your computer’s CPU.) The dlPFC also handles our cognitive flexibility, that is, our ability to switch from one task to another or to think about more than one thing at a time. The dlPFC is particularly active when we’re called upon to make a risky decision, such as when

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we have to weigh both the costs and benefits of a plan. This region of the PFC has abundant reciprocal connections with regions of the brain that control sensory processing (understanding what is going on in the world outside of us) and movement (what I should do about whatever it is that is going on around me). The ventralmedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is involved with integrating and organizing working memory. The vmPFC shares information with brain areas that are in charge of emotional processing and memory, as well as with the dlPFC. And finally, the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) handles our emotional responses to the world and, most important, our social interactions and our sense of what is socially appropriate. Damage to the OFC can result in a set of behavioral changes collectively called disinhibition syndrome. The patient behaves as though all restraints on his or her behavior are gone—social norms and expectations are disregarded (Gage’s sudden habit of swearing a blue streak, for example), every impulse is acted upon, and risk assessment is difficult (or perhaps there is simply a lack of concern regarding risk). When the rod ripped through Gage’s head, it destroyed the prefrontal cortex on the left side of his brain and left him with the classic symptoms of prefrontal cortical damage—difficulty making decisions, loss of the ability to make plans for the future, apathy or a loss of interest in the environment and whatever is going on in it, and loss of the ability to monitor and moderate his behavior. Patients with damage to the PFC act as though they no longer care about anything or anyone but themselves. Their impulse control may be entirely absent, and they often act in ways that are completely inappropriate. The symptoms of damage to the PFC often make it very difficult to live with a “prefrontal patient” because they do not restrain their impulses at all. The decision-making and plan-making problems seem to be the result of damage to the system that allows us to pay attention

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to our own internal state as well as to the world around us, usually described as being housed in the dlPFC. The inability to monitor and moderate behavior results from damage to the OFC, and it made Gage’s friends and family say that he had changed completely as a person. Both of these circuits have an impact on what we expect to happen in the world, on how we see ourselves, and on how we interact with those oh-so-important other humans in our social world. As a result, both of these circuits affect how lucky, or unlucky, we are or believe ourselves to be.

LUCK AND YOUR PREFRONTAL LOBE— PAY ATTENTION! Remember Austin’s Type IV luck, the combination of movement, preparation, and each person’s own unique personality? You might think about this type of luck as a description of how the lucky among us use our attentional systems to find these “just right” outcomes. Lucky people more often find themselves in the right place and at the right time for their particular talents and abilities to shine than do the unlucky. Being lucky might just come down to the ability to focus our attention better. Indeed, training in how to improve your luck often starts with improving your attention skills (see chapter 7 for a discussion of how to improve your luck). So just what is attention? Attention is a cognitive process, a series of actions that we engage in almost continuously that are aimed at achieving a goal. When we “pay attention” to something in the world, we concentrate on that one thing and do our best to ignore everything else. Each time we pay attention to something, we use up part of that finite resource. We can’t divide our attention indefinitely because at some point we’ll “run out of ” attention to divide. We really

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can’t drive and talk on the phone or, worse still, text at the same time and do either thing well—humans just don’t have the attentional capacity to do that many things at once. The dorsal regions of the PFC are involved with what’s known as executive attention. Executive attention is voluntary; it is under our control, and we decide where and how we’re going to direct it. We usually use our executive attention to achieve a goal, and when we do, it’s called top-down processing. There is also bottom-up attention, driven by, or grabbed by, events and stimuli outside of us in the external world. I’ll talk about this kind of exogenous (outside of us) attention and what it has to do with luck in chapter 6. Research on how the brain controls attention has also used the “damage” model—examining patients with damage to parts of the prefrontal cortex, for example, and then detailing what has happened to their ability to attend to the world. As Phineas Gage so clearly demonstrates, damage to the PFC can result in some serious damage to the attention system. More recently, researchers have focused on people with problems paying attention and then worked backward to try to discover what, if anything, had changed in the brain. The disorders most often studied in this kind of research are attention-deficit disorder (ADD) and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). By definition, ADD/ADHD is characterized by problems with attention. There are several subtypes of ADD/ADHD, depending on which schema you use to classify them. However, the symptoms that show up on most of these lists of diagnostic criteria are a short attention span, high distractibility, disorganization, and difficulty paying attention when paying attention is what is needed to achieve a goal. When researchers looked for brain regions that might be functioning abnormally in ADD/ADHD, it isn’t surprising that

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they looked at the PFC. Several interesting studies have pointed to differences in the EEGs of patients diagnosed with ADD/ ADHD and those without this disorder. The ratio of theta waves to beta waves being generated by neurons in the PFC, in particular, seems to be disturbed in patients with attention difficulties. Theta waves, remember, are large, relatively slow waves (4 to 7 waves per second), usually seen when we’re asleep and just about to start dreaming. They are also characteristic of daydreaming or when we’re deeply relaxed and not concentrating on anything in particular, or when we’re meditating. Beta waves, on the other hand, are small (low amplitude) but very fast waves (15–40 waves per second), typically seen when we’re concentrating on solving a problem. It is not surprising that beta waves are generated by neurons in the frontal lobe that are part of the executive function, attention-paying circuit in the prefrontal cortex. We should see both kinds of waves in the EEG from a healthy brain. If your EEG showed exactly the same amount of theta waves as beta waves, this ratio would be 1.00 or close to it. “Typical” theta/beta ratios in “healthy” adult brains range from about 1.7 to as much as 8.5, depending on age, what part of the cortex is being recorded, and the specific techniques used to make the recording. More beta than theta waves would yield a ratio that is less than 1.00. If there are higher levels of theta waves than beta waves, the ratio of theta to beta would be larger than 1.00, and that might indicate a problem. “Typical” high theta/beta ratios range from 3.7 up to almost 10, again depending on age, recording site, recording technique, and specific attention difficulty. Recent research has shown in both children and adults diagnosed with ADD/ADHD that this ratio is out of balance; theta waves seem to dominate in the EEG. In fact, some researchers believe that people with ADD/ADHD may be having difficulty shifting out of a so-called theta state in which they are relaxed and feeling

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disconnected and dreamy, even when something that requires focus happens in the world around them. Being in a theta state isn’t by itself a bad thing. Have you ever been driving to work, a highly practiced activity that is almost automatic for many of us, and suddenly realized that you’ve arrived at the office without really being aware of the trip? That’s a theta state, and people often say they get some of their best ideas during this time. The problem is not being able to shift out of that state when something you need to focus on suddenly happens right in front of you—like that idiot who cuts you off, causing the need to stand on the brakes, for example. What about other states of mind that are characterized by changes in the ability to pay attention, such as being hypnotized? Can we see EEG changes in hypnotized subjects? Hypnosis is described as an altered state of consciousness characterized by a dramatic increase in focused attention and in the ability to block out distractions and irrelevant stimuli. Not everyone is equally susceptible to “hypnotic induction” or being put into a hypnotic trance. (Researchers tend to avoid using the word trance when describing hypnotized study participants because of the difficulty in defining exactly what a trance state is.) About 10 percent of the population is “highly susceptible” to hypnosis, another 10 percent is at the low end of the scale, and the remaining 80 percent is somewhere in between these two extremes. Highly susceptible people often find it very easy to block out the real world, even when they are not hypnotized, and they find it easy to escape into daydreams. Despite the similarity in description for a theta state and a hypnotic trance, theta rhythms in a standard EEG don’t differentiate between hypnotized and nonhypnotized people. You can’t tell if someone is hypnotized by looking at the waves in an EEG. However, EEGs can be used to measure how different regions of the brain are functionally connected to one another, in other

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words, how these regions talk to each other and share information. When you look at the EEG this way, the highly hypnotizable person stands out. Researchers found that theta rhythms in the attention circuit connecting the frontal and parietal lobes increased when susceptible people were hypnotized compared to when they were not. Beta rhythms in the “highly hypnotizable” were significantly decreased in both frontal and occipital lobes when these folks were hypnotized. Changes in the theta rhythms suggested a change in the top-down executive attention circuit. Changes in the beta rhythm in frontal and occipital lobes might be linked to the feeling of being out of control of one’s movements when hypnotized. The theta/beta ratio has also been linked to our very human love of risky behavior. In a measure of gambling called the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), participants are asked to choose a virtual card from four virtual decks of cards presented on a computer screen. After picking a card from one of the decks, the amount of money they’ve won or lost as a result of that pick is presented on the screen. Two of the four decks of cards will pay off with frequent large wins, but also with occasional very large losses. These two decks of cards are called the “disadvantageous decks” because players who stick with them will lose money over the long run. Picking cards from the other two decks (the “advantageous” decks) results in relatively frequent but small wins, and infrequent but even smaller losses, for a net gain over the entire game. The players need to figure out the hidden rules that determine how each deck pays off, and if they want to make as much money as possible, they must put that learning into practice by changing their picking strategy. They should start to pick more and more from with advantageous decks. Learning is measured on this task by subtracting the number of picks from the advantageous deck during the first twenty trials

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from the number picked on the last twenty trials. In theory, to learn which decks pay off you should pick at random from all four decks, so the number picked from the advantageous decks will be relatively small. Once you’ve learned how to win, all your picks should be from the advantageous decks, and the number of picks at the end will be very large. The larger this difference between beginning and end, the better you’ve learned the trick to winning. Not everyone learns to win on this task. Individuals with a diagnosis of ADD/ADHD tend to respond to this task by sticking with the disadvantageous decks—the decks that pay off big on relatively rare occasions—and they seem to ignore the even larger losses they suffer. There are two explanations for choosing “risky” behavior on the IGT. First, it is possible that the people that don’t learn to pick from the advantageous deck might just be hypersensitive to the size of the reward offered by picking from the disadvantageous deck. Second, it is also possible that they are disproportionately less put off by the size of the “punishment” (loss of money) when they lose. Either way, performance on this task is taken to be a measure of willingness to engage in risky behavior. It should be noted that it isn’t just people with attention problems that “fail” the IGT. There are plenty of people without ADD/ ADHD who choose the riskier option on this task. We all have different tolerances for risk, and we also pay attention to different aspects of the gamble. It’s completely possible that a gambler who feels lucky (who sees luck as a personal characteristic that they brought with them to the casino) might persist in choosing the riskier cards on this task convinced that luck will see them through to a profitable end. It’s also possible that believing you are inherently a lucky person, or that luck is, at least temporarily, with you makes you less upset by any losses you may suffer as you gamble. Research suggests that this might, in fact, be the case.

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In an international study, researchers at Duke University in North Carolina and Utrecht University in the Netherlands used the IGT to study the performance of students with no diagnosis of any kind of learning disability or other cognitive problem. They could predict which students would choose the riskier decks by looking at their frontal lobe theta/beta ratios on an EEG before the gambling even began. The higher the theta/beta ratio was before they gambled (more theta than beta waves), the poorer was their learning performance on the IGT. Students with high theta/beta ratios were more willing to take risks on the IGT. They concluded that the theta wave differences between the individuals who learned to win using the advantageous deck and those who went for the thrill of the disadvantageous deck indicated a difference in what was required for them to feel rewarded by their own behavior. Perhaps “resting state theta power reflects individual differences in the tendency to take risky decisions,” which suggests that there are individual differences in the frontal lobe executive attention circuit thought to be generating these frontal lobe theta waves. The students in this study who opted for greater risk might also have felt that they were lucky and expected to win in the end (perceived luckiness was not measured although I wish it had been). The drive to get the bigger reward may feel less risky if you see yourself as a lucky person. The gamblers in the study in chapter 3 felt that luck was a personal characteristic, and that the regular winners at the casino among them had more of it than the losers. Feeling lucky might just make taking a big risk feel less unpleasant. Research has shown that our frontal lobes are responsible for executive control of attention. Changes in attention and attention control might underlie our willingness to take risks and to feel rewarded by the consequences of our behavior. If a lucky person has

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more control over executive attention than does the unlucky person, the differences we see in the brain circuits that control attention are not really that unusual. If the person who believes she is lucky is less bothered by losses and more “jazzed” by wins than the rest of us, these changes in brain function are also not unexpected. The sad story of Phineas Gage showed that the prefrontal cortex also seems to be intimately involved in another aspect of our daily lives—our personality. Let’s look at personality and the brain and consider the possibility that people who believe in luck differ in personality from nonbelievers. If they have unique personalities, is it possible that they are using their brains in a different way than the unbelievers among us?

LUCK AND PERSONALITY I discussed attribution theory and what it had to say about those of us who believe in luck in chapter 3. Traditionally, believers were thought to have an external locus of control, using luck as an explanation for things that happened in their life that were unexpected, impossible to control, and unstable. The assumption was that nonbelievers were more rational, more likely to take probabilities into account, and considered their own talents and abilities when making attributions for unexpected events. In general, the traditional view in psychology has been that nonbelievers in luck are psychologically healthier than believers. New research suggests that believers in luck might see luckiness as a personal characteristic, a part of their personality. People who see themselves as lucky seem to be using that belief to generate hope and confidence when faced with an unpredictable and random problem that needs to be solved. Luck may still be perceived as random and outside of our control, but seeing yourself

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as a lucky person might make that randomness easier to bear and help believers figure out what to do about that unpredictable event. In this view, belief in luck is associated with better mental health and stronger coping skills compared to people who believed they are unlucky. The role of personality in luck is tricky to describe. The first hurdle is the need to define personality, and that’s no easy task. Psychologists define personality as patterns in our thoughts, our emotional response, and our behaviors that make us unique. These characteristic ways of interacting with the world come from inside us. They can be modified through experience and often are, but they’re a part of us in a way that learning how to sum numbers or conjugate verbs or memorizing dates in history are not. They are also fairly consistent across our entire life—they don’t suddenly change unless there’s some drastic change in our brain—witness poor Phineas Gage. The ratio of theta to beta waves in our EEG is indicative of other aspects of our personality, including our attention strategies or the way we choose to allocate our attention to the array of things out there in the big wide world. Some of us exercise more control over our attention than do others, and our degree of control over attention is a stable, long-term aspect of our personality. Researchers have found that the theta/beta ratio tends to be negatively correlated with the degree of control a person has over attention. People with a lot of attentional control tend to have low theta/beta ratios, and vice versa. This aspect of our personality is related to the way the attention control system in the brain functions. Another way that personality differs from person to person is in trait anxiety. I’m sure you’ve recognized that some people are more anxious than others; in fact, for some people, anxiety is a stable, defining aspect of their personality—that’s called trait anxiety.

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People with high levels of trait anxiety tend to see threats and danger in many situations. They worry about threats in situations that others don’t see as threatening, and they feel higher levels of anxiety in genuinely anxiety-inducing situations (when there really is a threat) than do people with lower levels of this trait. Because our characteristic level of anxiety affects how we allocate our attention, it is also related to how and when we use luck to explain events. Sonia Bishop found that people with high levels of trait anxiety had significantly reduced dlPFC activity compared to people with low levels of trait anxiety. This difference in frontal lobe function was particularly noticeable when the task participants were trying to handle didn’t require all of their attention. When not completely absorbed in the task at hand, highly anxious individuals were more distracted by irrelevant stimuli inserted into the task than were less anxious people. Individuals high in trait anxiety, with less activity in the dlPFC, were more easily swept away from the task at hand when distractions arose. Bishop suggests that these deficits in prefrontal cortex activity might explain the difficulties in concentration reported by patients with clinical anxiety. If being lucky requires being able to allocate attention effectively, Bishop’s results would also predict that the lucky among us are less anxious and better able to control our prefrontal attention systems than “unlucky” people. No matter what our personality may be, we all tend to make attributions of luck in hindsight, that is, after the event when we’re trying to figure out what it means. Attributions of cause to luck are often counterfactuals—something we assert as we look back and consider what might have happened. Typically, we use luck to explain the cause of an event when the counterfactual outcome is worse than what actually happened, when that counterfactual is very close, and when we see ourselves as having very little choice in our actions.

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Researchers at Georgetown University have proposed that the prefrontal cortex also plays a role in our use of counterfactual thinking: “Remembering the past and predicting the future depend on the ability to shift from perceiving the immediate environment to an alternative imagined perspective.” Aron Barbey and colleagues also suggest that the prefrontal cortex is essential in imagining how things might have been if we’d done something different and in assessing the consequences of those alternative behaviors. The pattern of our attributions is part of our individual personality profile. Social psychologists often refer to a person’s attributional style (or explanatory style) to explain the way we attribute the cause of events in the world. Some of us have an optimistic attributional style; we tend to explain positive events as the result of some internal characteristic of ourselves (an internal attribution), but negative events are not our fault (an external attribution). Optimists also tend to see positive events as likely to happen again (stable and global) and negative events as unstable accidents that are not likely to be repeated (unstable and local rather than global). Pessimists, on the other hand, tend to see positive events as external to themselves, but they blame themselves (make internal attribution) for negative events. Pessimists also tend to see negative events as both stable and global; they’re going to last forever and happen over and over again in all areas of their life whereas positive events are seen as temporary and accidental—the reverse of the optimist. Optimists and pessimists use luck as an explanation for events in different ways, and their brains process information in different ways as well. Research has shown that belief in good luck and optimism are positively related to each other. The stronger your belief in good luck, the more optimistic you tend to be. People who believe in good luck also tend to be hopeful.

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People who are at the extreme end of the pessimist scale are more vulnerable to becoming depressed, say Lyn Abramson and her colleagues. Depression is probably more accurately described as a set of disorders than as a single psychological illness, and Abramson describes one type of depression as “hopelessness depression.” Depression of this sort is characterized by feelings of deep sadness, a decreased willingness to start new projects or to engage in social interactions, low energy levels, apathy, and decreased movement in general. People suffering from hopelessness depression tend to be serious pessimists. They anticipate bad things happening to them and negative consequences coming from those bad events, and their internal self-attributions are also negative. They do not, as a general rule, believe in good luck. Pessimists may be using their executive attention systems in a different way than the optimists among us. Research has shown that the left and right frontal lobes (we have two frontal lobes, one in each hemisphere) are asymmetrically active in people suffering from hopelessness depression and more symmetrically active in the nondepressed. At the University of Wisconsin, researchers looked at EEGs recorded from a large sample of college students, none of whom had yet experienced even a minor episode of depression. They found that the more pessimistic the student was, the lower the activity in the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere was relative to the activity in the right hemisphere. They also found that they could predict which student was going to be depressed three years down the road by looking at the balance of activity in the left and right hemispheres. Both a seriously pessimistic outlook on life and asymmetrical activity in the frontal lobe predicted future episodes of hopelessness depression. Watching the brain attend to the outside world is just one step in understanding how we acquire and process information in our

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daily life. If we can understand this vital process, we can teach anyone anything. The way we allocate our attention has a direct effect on the information the brain receives. Shift your attention from event A to event B and the decisions the brain makes will also shift. As you’ll see in chapter 7, learning to pay attention in new and perhaps better ways could turn your luck around.

 LUCK AND YOUR BRAIN: PART II

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. ADAM SMITH

WHAT MAKES RATS HAPPY? In chapter 5, I described the history of the brain, how science came to the realization that the brain was important, and the discovery of the electroencephalograph, which allowed scientists to watch the brain work. To study the brain, neuroscientists needed to understand several aspects of brain function. First, they needed to know what the brain did—why we have one. Once they’d figured that out, they needed a way to observe the messages being sent from one cell to another. And finally, they needed to understand how the brain did what it did—exactly what the signals being sent by the cells of the brain are and how they result in actions, thoughts, imagination, and beliefs—like being lucky. In this chapter, I’ll explain how cells in the brain talk among themselves and the rest of your body, what these conversations look like, and what they can tell us about luck.

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First, I want to share another story of the role of dumb luck in science. In the media, scientists are portrayed as supremely focused individuals, fond of white lab coats and Coke-bottlethick glasses, and who, because of their close attention to detail, are less susceptible to the randomness of life than the rest of us. Laboratory investigations are carefully planned and painstakingly carried out so random chance can’t insert its chaotic self into the mix. But sometimes chaos reigns even in the lab, and some amazing discoveries in science result from just plain luck, such as the story of how psychologists James Olds and Peter Milner discovered “pleasure centers” in the brain. The story starts long before Olds and Milner’s famous 1954 study, the results of which have been called “the most important single discovery yet made in the field.” In fact, the story began when someone figured out that human beings will work hard to obtain things we find pleasurable and equally hard to avoid things that are painful. The ancient philosopher Epicurus formalized this very basic idea, teaching his students that happiness could be obtained by seeking simple, sustainable, and achievable pleasures and by avoiding pain. The Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (c. 1840) put his own stamp on this idea, saying that humans are ruled by two masters: pain and pleasure. Bentham also argued that these two motivators of human behavior could, and should, be studied scientifically. When the science of psychology came into being in 1879 in the laboratory of the German physiologist Wilhelm Wundt, psychological researchers took up where philosophers had left off and began to do just that. In psychology, the tendency for human beings to seek out pleasurable things and to avoid painful ones is called psychological hedonism, and it has played an important role in the study of how we learn new information and adapt to change in the world

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around us. Basic learning theory says that we will try to repeat behaviors that lead to pleasure, reward, or reinforcement, and we will stop doing behaviors that lead to pain or punishment. Just as Bentham suggested, pleasure and pain, reward and punishment, shape our everyday lives. Early neuroscientists were tremendously interested in the question of where in the brain this feeling of pleasure or reward, pain or fear might be generated. Two early explorers of the brain were Peter Milner and James Olds. Milner was the more established of the duo; he was already hard at work at McGill University trying to discover how the brain guided behavior when Olds, with a shiny new PhD in social psychology, arrived in Montreal. Olds wanted to study how the brain learned, and the reigning theory of the time had been proposed by Donald Hebb, Milner’s boss and the new head of the psychology department at McGill. Chairing a department is time consuming and not a job that allows for a lot of time for research, so Hebb sent Olds, who knew next to nothing about how the brain worked (social psychology is the study of our social groups and how the social world affects the individual, not brain physiology) to Milner, who knew quite a bit. Milner remembers Olds and the experiment he proposed like this: Anyone who knew Jim Olds will appreciate that he was not the sort of person to work out a theory and leave it at that. A theory for him meant an experimental program, and a neural theory obviously meant neurophysiological experiments. . . . He had not been around long before he gave me a copy of his synthesis [of Hebbian theory] and whilst I must have been deeply impressed by the behavioral aspects . . . I could see no future in [neuroscience] for anyone capable of the reckless and unjustified assumptions about brain functions incorporated into his model.

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It was painfully evident to Milner that Olds did not know how to approach the study he wanted to carry out. Milner taught Olds the basics, and then turned him loose in the lab to test one aspect of Hebbian learning theory—the idea that we find something rewarding because an assembly of cells in the brain are activated when we encounter something that has been pleasurable in the past. At the time, these activated neurons were thought to be in a structure called the reticular formation (RF), which snakes through the brainstem and up into the forebrain, sending collateral connections all over the brain. Olds wanted to stimulate these RF cells directly, using an electrode, to see if the experience of activity in this brain region was “rewarding” all by itself. Would a rat work to repeat stimulation directly to his brain in the same way that he would work to repeat getting food? Olds selected his first rat test subject and set up his experiment, apparently throwing everything Milner had taught him right out the nearest window. For reasons known only to Olds, he changed Milner’s procedure for making the electrodes that would be used to stimulate cells in the brain. That change in the shape of the electrode (making it bigger and heavier than the ones Milner taught him to make) necessitated a change in the surgical approach Milner had taught him for implanting the electrodes. And that change, in turn, resulted in a historic mistake—the electrode that Olds thought had been aimed at the RF missed. In fact, it missed by at least four millimeters, a hefty distance in a very small rat brain. (The typical adult rat brain is a bit less than an inch in length, about the size of a small shelled walnut.) Milner had already tried a similar experiment before Olds arrived. He found that stimulation of the RF was not rewarding (Milner’s electrode was actually in the RF). In fact, in the initial experiment, the rats would work to avoid stimulation here. Imagine Milner’s surprise when Olds came to him and said

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something to this effect: “Hey, come and look at this! The rat likes this.” Milner wrote later that it looked as though Olds’s rat was “deliberately seeking brain stimulation,” doing everything it could to repeat the tiny electrical zap to its brain. Whatever Olds had done differently had resulted in a brain state that was reinforcing, perhaps even pleasurable, for the rat. It is to the credit of both Olds and Milner that they simultaneously recognized that this lucky accident was something important (the electrode placement was, just by chance, in the right place in the brain, a region called the septal area). James Olds is a great example of Austin’s Type III luck, which is explained by the Kettering principle: to increase luck one should increase movement. Undeterred by the fact that he didn’t know very much about what he was attempting to do, Olds kept moving, chasing his idea no matter where it went. In fact, his lack of knowledge might have helped him in his experiment. He didn’t know what not to do, so he was free to try anything. And Milner, slaving away in the lab and inventing the proper procedures themselves, had the presence of mind not to let his very thorough preparation blind him to what Olds had discovered. Type II luck (the Pasteur principle: chance favors the prepared mind) can sometimes be a hindrance, not a help, keeping us from seeing what we don’t expect. The results of their experiments created an avalanche of research into how and why we feel pleased and rewarded, and that avalanche is still rolling today. James Olds and Peter Milner went on to catalog additional brain regions where electrical stimulation was rewarding and others where the same electrical current was distinctly unpleasant to the rat. The regions of the brain that Olds and Milner stumbled upon are now being examined by researchers who are trying to understand what happens in a brain when we learn and remember something, and why we have an often disastrous

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propensity to ingest chemicals that bring us harm, destroy our physiology, and isolate us from our families and friends. Perhaps the next treatment for drug addiction will be found in this neural pleasure circuitry. What Olds and Milner were doing was the reverse of what many early studies of brain function were trying to do. Instead of watching the brain work, they were trying to force the cells in a particular region of the brain to send a message somewhere else and observing the effect of that message on the rat’s behavior. Previous researchers had shown that the signal being used in the brain was electrical, so the idea that a tiny electrical jolt to the brain might mimic the message being sent was reasonable.

MESSAGES IN THE BRAIN The brain is composed of cells, as is the rest of the body. Two kinds of cells are found in the brain: glial cells and neurons. Neurons are arguably the more important because they are capable of two remarkable things. Like many cells, they can receive messages from other cells, respond to commands issued elsewhere in the body to turn systems on or off, make proteins, release chemicals, or do whatever else needs to be done. What makes neurons truly amazing is the fact that they can create their own messages and send them along to some other location in the body. It’s these two functions, receiving messages and creating and sending new ones, that allow us to do all of the marvelous things that organisms with brains can do. The way neurons create and send messages involves an intricate dance of chemicals moving into and out of the neuron, creating a chemical-electrical signal along the way. A chemical-electrical signal is just exactly what you’d think it would be: an electrical

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signal created through chemistry. To visualize what’s happening, let’s tap a neuron on the shoulder and cut in on this dance just for a moment to see what the steps are. The initial message, letting the brain know something happened out there in the world, often comes from a neuron in one of our five sensory systems. For example, a flash of light to the eye, a physical signal, gets changed into a chemical-electrical signal by the machinery in your eye (the cells that make up the retina) and sent into the brain for further processing. A neuron receives a message from that visual system cell in the form of a packet of chemicals called neurotransmitters that are released onto it. These neurotransmitters interact with the receptors on the receiving neuron and tell it to either create a message of its own or to stop creating messages for a while. “On” and “Off,” excitation and inhibition, are the two basic messages that can be sent. If the incoming message is excitatory, it starts a chain of events in the receiving neuron, and a brand new chemical-electrical message is created and sent along a pathway to another set of cells. The individual messages a neuron sends, called action potentials, can be tracked with an electrode inserted next to, or sometimes into, the cell sending the message. The electrode transmits the flow of current in the chemical-electrical message to an oscilloscope so the researcher can see it. The oscilloscope displays a graph of the message being sent. Time (usually measured in milliseconds) is shown on the horizontal axis, and voltage (in millivolts) is shown on the vertical axis. It only takes milliseconds for the signal to be sent, so the researcher looking at the oscilloscope sees thousands of responses per second. These responses are often referred to as “spikes” because they are so compressed in time on the oscilloscope screen that the record looks quite spiky. A typical neuron can create about one thousand messages each second when it is “firing” or sending messages as fast as it can. Groups of neurons

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can and do work together, sharing the load and creating unique messages out of their interplay with other neurons. These messages fly around the central nervous system, telling other cells to fire or not to fire and, ultimately, telling our brain that something happened out there and telling our bodies what to do: our minds to be set, upset, or changed. Millions of action potentials zoom through your brain every second of every day. They might represent something that happened out in the world around you—there was an abrupt and unexpected sound over there! Or they might be one part of the brain comparing some event with another—did that sound happen at the same time as that leaf moved? Or the spikes might be your brain comparing what just happened with something that happened five minutes ago or twenty years ago—a large and hungry lion has been hanging out right around here, better be careful! These spikes might even be telling you what might happen in the next few minutes. The EEGs we talked about in chapter 5 and the variations of those EEGs we’ll talk about in this chapter are essentially recordings of large groups of neurons working together to respond to the world.

WHAT’S LUCK GOT TO DO WITH THAT NEURON? What does all of this have to do with luck? We already know that there is a relationship between being lucky and paying attention, and the first step in paying attention is noticing that something happened. Our five senses help us do that by responding to energy in the world (light, sound, pressure, etc.) and sending a message about that energy to the brain. The second step is paying attention to that event: not dismissing what happened as unimportant.

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We pay attention by focusing our sensory array on that sound or that fluttering leaf, or both. We use our memory of past experiences to tell us about the relative importance of the sound we just heard. Paying attention involves considering the probabilities and alternatives, looking for the cause of that event and perhaps even predicting what that cause might be before we even see the flash of tan fur or hear the warning snap of a twig. Being lucky in this situation might depend on how well you predict what’s going to happen next. Suppose you ignore the action potentials your senses are frantically sending to your brain. You don’t notice the sound of the twig snapping, you don’t go searching through your memory banks to recall what happened the last time you were near these bushes, you don’t predict a potentially dangerous agent lying in wait. Well, now you’ve done it—you are lunch. But if you attend to the world and use the information that is there, your predictions about what’s going to happen next might just save your life—you avoid the hidden lion and live to tell the tale of your lucky escape to the rest of the gang back at the fire.

ERPS AND ERNS I introduced EEGs in the last chapter, and now I’d like to add some waves to the mix. The standard EEG is a record of hundreds of thousands of action potentials, racing around the brain all the time. The EEG consists of four basic wave patterns—beta, alpha, theta, and delta—each varying one from another in terms of wave frequency (the number of waves per second) and amplitude. Until a computer sorts them all out, all four wave types are present simultaneously in an EEG recording, which is one reason they tend to look so confusing the first time you see one. EEGs

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provide researchers with a very broad measure of whole brain activity. However, seeing the whole brain operate can sometimes be troublesome if what you want is a picture of how a specific part of the brain is working to process a specific piece of information. Steven Luck (I could not have named him better if I’d tried), a prominent cognitive neuroscientist who studies brain activity using EEGs and other techniques at the University of California at Davis, puts it this way. The EEG “represents a mixed-up conglomeration of dozens of different neural sources of activity, making it difficult to isolate” just the activity that represents the brain working on a particular problem. Luck advocates using a special kind of EEG, called an event-related potential (ERP), to get around the coarseness of the standard EEG. The ERP focuses in on the brain’s response to just one, very specific event. It is a record of brain activity in response to a particular stimulus (a very brief click sound, for example, a word presented on a computer screen, or someone touching your hand). Luck says ERPs “provide a direct, instantaneous, millisecond-resolution measure of neurotransmission-mediated neural activity.” The ERP also consists of waves, like the waves in the EEG. In fact, theses event-related waves are embedded in the chaotic sea of activity that is the whole-brain EEG. The difference is that the waves in an ERP are evoked by a specific event—each time the event happens, the brain responds to that event—so the ERP waves are tied to a specific event in time. If I repeat the event— say, a click of sound—over and over again, I’ll evoke the same tiny wavelets from the neurons that respond to that click over and over again, predictable as clockwork. The rest of the EEG, reflecting everything else that’s going on at the same time, will happen randomly because the events that create all the rest of the EEG waves are not repeatedly presented. They happen only once, or at random, like the sound of a car on the street outside, the

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movement of a shadow in the window, the pressure of the EEG cap on your scalp, or that sudden itch on the side of your nose. The very early waves in the ERP are generated by the brain receiving information from the senses. The later waves, hundreds of milliseconds after the event, reflect the brain thinking about a stimulus (a cognitive event) and deciding to ignore it or noticing that one stimulus does not match another one or preparing to press a button to let the experimenter know that you detected that sound or that flash of light or that touch. When you set up to record an ERP, you outfit your subject with a goofy-looking cap that hold fifteen to twenty electrodes tightly to the scalp, and then you present an “event” to that subject, over and over again, recording the EEG. A computer then averages out all of the random activity not tied to the presentation of the sound or flash of light, leaving the researcher with a clear picture of the response of the brain to that one event. There are several waves in the ERP, and they are named for their direction (P for positive or “upward” and N for negative or “downward”) and their latency, that is, how long after the event that evoked them they show up in the EEG. So the P100 wave is a positive-going wave that appears about 100 milliseconds (ms) after the event that evoked it. The N100 wave is a negative-going wave that appears about 100–150 ms after the event, and so on. Researchers who study the brain using ERPs have determined that the early waves (P and N100, and P and N200) represent attentional selection mechanisms (think of it as your brain saying “Oh, I saw that!”), and the later waves (the P300 wave) represent the organization, interpretation, or categorization of the event that evoked them. Jaime Martin del Campo Rios and his colleagues used ERPs to investigate how believing yourself to be an unlucky person influenced the way the brain processed information. They asked their

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participants to fill out a survey measuring, among other things, how unlucky you think you are. Using their responses to the questions on this survey, the researchers created two groups. The first group saw themselves as unlucky, and the second group (the control group) was made up of those who didn’t report seeing themselves as particularly unlucky (or lucky for that matter). All of the participants were then given the Stroop test. In this test, participants might be presented with the word BLUE written in red ink and asked to report the color of the ink, not the word itself. We all know how to read, and our usual tendency when presented with letters arranged into a word we recognize is to read it. To be successful at this task, participants needed to think about things in a somewhat different way—they needed to inhibit the tendency to read and instead respond to the color of the ink. The researchers recorded the ERP elicited by the task as well as the number of mistakes made and the time it took participants to react to the stimulus. Typically, more mistakes are made and it takes longer to respond when the color of the ink does not match the word. The group who saw themselves as unlucky took longer to respond to the mismatched word/color stimuli and made more mistakes than the control group. The ERPs of these unlucky individuals also differed from the control group. The unlucky people were not directing their attention to the stimulus as quickly and seemed to be waiting longer to decide what to do about the conflict between the word and the color than did the controls. We can watch our brains figure out what’s happening in the world around us by looking at an ERP. Our perception of ourselves as lucky or unlucky can affect the way our brain processes information. Regardless of how lucky we might think we are, we’re not always correct in our interpretation or understanding of events. Sometimes we make mistakes, and when we do, when

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we miss-categorize or misunderstand an event, we can see that mistake in the ERP. Two researchers, William Gehring and Michael Falkenstein, both independently documented the existence of a particular kind of ERP known as an error-related negativity (ERN). Each in his own experiment was recording ERPs from volunteers who were performing Go/No Go tasks when they noticed what came to be called ERNs, an alarm that the brain sounds when you make a mistake. If you agreed to participate in a study using the Go/No Go task, you would be seated in front of a computer screen. The experimenter would tell you that several images would be presented on the screen in front of you. If the images were blue circles, for example, then you should press a specific key on the keyboard as quickly as you possibly can—the “Go” portion of the Go/No Go task. If the image presented is a red circle, however, you would be asked not to respond at all—a “No Go” response. Your job is to determine which image was presented, Go or No Go. This task is often used to assess how well you can stop yourself from responding, and it works beautifully for studying ERN waves. To study an EEG wave that occurs when you make an error, you need a task in which errors happen. As the experimenter, I need you to mess up, and I can pretty much guarantee that you will make mistakes on this task. Gehering and Falkenstein both noticed that they could see the mistake happen in the ERP they were monitoring. When the participant made a mistake and responded incorrectly to the image, a large, negative wave appeared on the recording. You can imagine the participant silently saying, “Dang! That was the wrong circle,” but it was too late to physically stop the action. In fact, researchers who study ERNs report that the mistake the person makes is often accompanied by language your mother probably told you

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not to use in public—another indication that a mistake has just been made. The ERN seems to be located in regions of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which detects errors and generates a signal to other brain areas that there has been a problem in our performance and our attention system needs some adjustment. The ACC is also part of the brain circuit responsible for our emotional responses to the world. We usually try to avoid making mistakes, especially in public (or when some guy in a white lab coat is watching us), so ERNs might reflect both our detection of a mistake and our emotional response to messing up. There is ample evidence to support this role for the ACC. For example, ERNs are larger in patients suffering from an anxiety disorder such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and chronic worriers, suggesting that high levels of anxiety might be making us more sensitive to the emotional consequences of making a mistake. Researchers also think the ERN might reflect our brain detecting a conflict between what we thought would happen next and what actually did happen next. In this case, the ERN might be a marker for the brain realizing that something has gone wrong and the situation needs to be reevaluated and control reasserted. Gehring and his colleagues have suggested that reducing anxiety will also reduce the size of the ERN, and research supports this idea. Michael Inzlicht’s lab at the University of Toronto has found that the depth of one’s religious conviction and belief was associated with lowered activity in the ACC (and so smaller ERNs) in response to errors. Inzlicht and his team state that “religious conviction curbs ACC activity because convictions act very much like an anxiolytic and buffer the affective consequences of errors and uncertainty.” David Amodio, at New York University, found that being politically conservative may have the same effect

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as religion when it comes to anxiety. His lab compared the size of the ERN in left-leaning liberals and right-leaning conservatives and found that the self-described liberals had a larger ERN when they made an error than did the conservatives. Researchers have found that people who see themselves as lucky, or who see luck as an internal characteristic, also tend to be less anxious overall. In the del Campo Rios study, the ERPs from the people who saw themselves as unlucky differed from the control group participants in the “late” waves of the ERP, specifically in the waves thought to be generated by the ACC. Belief in being unlucky may be associated with increased anxiety about our lack of control over a random and capricious universe and sound a larger neural alarm when we make a mistake. Humans tend to dislike and to avoid randomness; we are repelled by it. When we encounter it, we often search for an explanation that will restore our faith in an ordered and predictable world. Folks who see luck as a personal, internal characteristic might believe that they have some special skill that enables them to manipulate random events in the world, making them less anxious and perhaps less likely to respond to a mistake with a large ERN.

LUCK AND MIRROR NEURONS Neuroscientists have been hard at work studying how cells respond to stimuli out there in the big wide world and how they share information to allow us to pay attention. Let’s turn our attention to one of the hippest neurons around, the new star of the modern neuroscience laboratory, the mirror neuron. What can this peculiar cell tell us about luck? Discovery of mirror neurons is yet another story of chance favoring the prepared mind. In the late 1980s, a group of

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researchers in Parma, Italy, were investigating a strip of cortex in the frontal lobe of the macaque monkey. The area of the frontal lobe they were interested in is the premotor cortex (“pre” because it is anatomically “in front of ” the motor cortex, which is the main output line for the brain). Cells here carry the command to move down to the spinal cord and out to the muscles of the body. The plan for what movement to make is generated by the frontal lobe, and the premotor cortex is part of that planning circuit. The premotor cortex is a bit of a mystery area. Cells here talk to several brain regions, including the spinal cord, and this region might be sharing the load with the motor cortex in directing the control of movement. Researchers have found evidence that premotor neurons play a role in planning our movements and in guiding our movements toward a target. These cells are suspected of playing a role in a number of other aspects of behavior, but what they’re doing and how they’re doing it is still being debated. The group in Parma, headed by Giacomo Rizzolatti, wanted to see what these premotor neurons were doing when a macaque monkey performed a simple behavior such as grasping an object. Okay, we’re not macaques, but the organization of our brain and the macaque brain are remarkably similar. If Rizzolatti and his team could figure out what was happening in the monkey brain, they’d have a pretty good idea of what’s happening in a human brain. In addition, they could record from individual cells in a monkey brain, a technique called single-unit recording (recording the activity of one individual neuron or of a small group of neurons), which they could not do in human subjects. The assumption that they could translate from individual cells in the macaque to whole brain function in a human comes up again. I’ll come back to this later in the story. Researchers had already established that cells in a part of the premotor cortex fired when the monkey gripped an object—not

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a tremendous surprise in a “motor” area of the brain. This experiment was set up to explore grip-specific responses in more detail. Some cells would fire most for a pinch-grip (the thumb and forefinger pinching movement you’d make if you were trying to pick up a single blueberry), and other cells fired most strongly when the monkey used a whole-hand grip (like picking up an orange or a baseball). Some cells even responded when the monkey simply looked at an object he might grasp. The objects used were almost always food, so the monkey reliably responded to them. Not many monkeys are interested in baseballs, but they really like oranges. Rizollatti and his colleagues wanted to separate the response the neuron made to the sight of an object from the response made to pick up or grip the object. In this experiment, the monkeys were trained to press a button that turned on a light behind a oneway mirror, making a graspable object placed behind the mirror visible. The object was visible for about a second and a half, and then the light went out, the mirrored door opened, and the monkey could reach in and grasp the object and get the piece of food that was underneath the object. Then the researchers would reach into the box, put a new object in place, close the door, and ask the monkey to do it again. The delay before the door opened gave the monkey’s frontal lobe time to plan what kind of grasp to use to pick up the object, pull it in, and eat it. It also it gave Rizzolatti’s team the opportunity to see if the premotor cortex neurons were part of making that plan. What they found surprised everyone. Some of the cells in the premotor cortex were doing something very odd. These cells were firing when the monkey made the plan for grabbing the object, but they also fired after the monkey had grabbed the object and eaten it, while the monkey watched the experimenter manipulate the object. This was astonishing. The cells that were part of the process of planning a move to be made by the monkey were also

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responding when someone else made the movement. Rizzolatti and colleagues wrote up their findings and began designing new experiments to study these cells. The rest of the neuroscience community paid little attention to their results when the study first came out in 1988. In 1992 Rizzolatti’s team published another study of these unusual neurons, which they called mirror neurons. They suggested that these cells were part of a mechanism the brain uses to code “the meaning of the observed actions” of others and that “one of the fundamental functions of premotor cortex is that of retrieving [remembering] appropriate motor acts in response to sensory stimuli.” What happened next is one of the mysteries in science—an idea that had previously been ignored abruptly grabbed everyone’s attention. Suddenly mirror neurons leapt to the front lines of neuroscience; they were hot. Researchers in many fields began to talk about mirror neurons. Speculation about what humans might use them for began to show up even before researchers had tried to find them in a human brain. (Remember, Rizzolatti had found mirror neurons in the brains of pigtail macaque monkeys, not in humans.) First, neuroscientists had to demonstrate that human brains had mirror neurons. This is difficult because the technique used by the Parma researchers—implanting an electrode in the brain and recording from a single neuron—can’t be done to humans under “normal” circumstances. The surgical technique needed for single-unit recording is quite complicated, and the potential for permanent brain damage is far too high. The search for evidence of mirror neurons in human brains initially relied on studies of the activity of very large groups of neurons. A functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI) enables researchers to watch the brain work. Magnets make hydrogen atoms in the blood supply to the brain spin, and a computer translates that spin into a color-coded image. More blood supply

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to a specific region means that part of the brain is working hard, and that area will show up as bright red. These studies suggested that we do, in fact, have mirror neurons that respond as the neurons in the monkey brains did, but the fMRI technique can’t pin down exactly what one small subset of neurons is doing, let alone what just a few neurons are doing, with precision. It’s kind of like trying to see microorganisms in one drop of pond water with a magnifying glass. Yes, the view is better when it’s magnified, but you really need to get a lot closer to see the tiny life forms teeming within the water droplet. The jury was still out on the question of directly translating from monkeys to humans. The definitive study was eventually published in 2010. A group of patients with severe epilepsy that did not respond to drug treatment had recording electrodes implanted in their brains so doctors could identify the neural tissue that was generating their seizures. Once these seizure-generating locations were identified, the tissue could be removed in the hope that the seizures would abate. The patients volunteered to let a team of neuroscientists record the activity of individual cells while the electrodes were in place—a unique and very unusual opportunity to obtain singleunit recordings from a working human brain. The neuroscientists showed the patients pictures of human facial expressions smiling or frowning and three-second video clips of hands grasping objects, and they asked the patients to execute the same actions— all the while recording from their brains. Some of the more than one thousand cells they recorded behaved like the mirror neurons in the monkey studies. This small subset of cells fired both when the patient smiled and when the patient observed someone else smiling—the characteristic response of Rizzolatti’s mirror neurons. The neurons the team recorded were from a variety of neural regions. (The researchers had to limit their recording sites to the regions of the brain the

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doctors wanted to explore.) But none were found in the human equivalent of the region in the monkey brain that Rizzolatti’s team had been studying. Once they were demonstrated in the human cortex, speculation went wild. Mirror neurons were cited as explanations for all kinds of human behaviors, from language to lip reading, recognition of emotion in the facial expressions of the people around us, sexual orientation, cigarette smoking, obesity, love, and even the degree of male erection, just to name a few. The argument over what these neurons are doing for us rages on. The most popular assessment of the function of mirror neurons in the human brain, and for a long time, the dominant one, was that mirror neurons help us understand the meaning of the actions performed by other people. You can substitute the word “human” for the word “monkey” in the following quote by Rizzolatti because the same function is assumed to exist for humans: If one considers the rich social interactions within a monkey group, the understanding by a monkey of actions performed by other monkeys must be a very important factor in determining action selection. . . . The behavioral importance of a fast selection of the appropriate movements according to the movements of other individuals has probably favored this type of coding which allows a rapid recognition of the stimuli.

In essence, Rizzolatti and those who agree with his perspective are suggesting that we use mirror neurons to (almost literally) predict the future, to answer these kinds of questions: “What is that person doing?” and “What should I do in response?” Agents and actions need to be interpreted quickly, accurately, and efficiently for us to avoid becoming an entree on the dinner menu or the loser in the fight for resources. Even though our risk of being hunted by lions, tigers, and bears has diminished a great

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deal, the need to explain and predict what other members of our own species are doing remains. More recently, researchers have suggested one or two new functions for mirror neurons. Rather than allowing us to understand the actions of others, the new theories suggest that mirror neurons help us understand the actions of others by making predictions about the actions that person is going to perform next, or predictions about the goals of the actions of other people. We make these predictions by watching to our own movements and learning to guide and control our own bodies. Then we apply what we’ve learned about how and why we’ve moved to the actions of other people. Mirror neurons, responding both to our own actions and the same actions made by others, might let us very quickly make predictions about what’s going to happen next. Imagine playing catch with your kids. Your visual system tracks the flight of the ball back and forth between you and little Janie. Your motor system receives messages from the visual system and, on the basis of that information, tells the muscles of your body what to do to catch the ball. You need to perform the analysis and generate the commands for the movements before the ball gets to you, or you’re going to get smacked in the face. You need to predict where the ball will be and adjust the position of your arms and hands quickly to the appropriate position in space. The visual information coming in is, however, old news by the time the command to move has been generated. Even at the amazing speeds that neurons fire, the motor system is really basing its command to the muscles on information about where the ball was milliseconds ago. If we were to rely on just the visual input coming in when we make and execute our plan to move, we would never have invented games that involve objects being thrown at us. But if we can learn to predict what the movements other people make mean, and what movements we need to make to counter or complement them, we

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can snag the ball out of the air and toss it back to the waiting child who is learning to do the same thing with her mirror neurons. It’s as if we’re learning to predict the future—albeit only the next few seconds or so of the future, but the future nonetheless. Neuroscientists who study mirror neurons say that when we anticipate what’s going to happen next we’re engaging in predictive coding. According to these researchers, the “brain learns the relation between particular motor programs and how the body responds. Over time, it is possible to predict the outcome ahead of time.” The incoming information from our senses, despite being milliseconds behind the action, is used to detect and compensate for errors in the movements we’re making. Mirror neurons, that fire both when we issue a command to move our muscles and when we watch others behave, allow us to engage in what researchers call action recognition learning. In doing so, mirror neurons help us predict the future and understand the actions of others. So what role might mirror neurons play in luck? As I’ve suggested before, being lucky and feeling lucky might be indicative of a well-tuned attention system. People who seem to be lucky in life may well be paying attention to the stimuli around them in a different way than those who are unlucky. Perhaps being lucky is learned just as we learn to understand and speak a foreign language or visualize the geometric properties of objects or learn to read, play a musical instrument, touch-type, etc. If we can teach our brains how to anticipate and predict what’s about to happen, and do so efficiently and effectively, we may be rewarded more often by being right. If our decisions about what to do next turn out to be the right ones more often than not, perhaps our belief in our own effectiveness, in our own luckiness, will increase as well. Is there evidence that paying attention might affect the way the mirror neurons respond? Suresh Muthukumaraswamy and Krish

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Singh at Cardiff University in the UK think so. They recorded brain activity using a technique called magnetoencephalography (a combination of an MRI and an EEG) in several different situations. First, they got a baseline measure of brain activity during a task that did not require a great deal of attention; their volunteers were passively watching a video. Then they compared that baseline activity with activity generated during two tasks that required attention. First, participants were told to imitate the movements they saw, and second, they were shown a short series of three numbers and were asked to add them together. (It is not surprising that the participants reported that the math task required the most attention.) Accuracy mattered here, and the test subjects knew it. Activity in mirror neurons is enhanced by the need to pay attention, and both of these tasks were attention-grabbers. Muthkumaraswamy and Singh suggest that the mirror neuron system is “attentionally gated,” that is, it is activated by the need to pay attention. Practice directing one’s attention and becoming particularly skilled at attending to the world around us might simultaneously make us luckier (more likely to see connections between things) and activate our mirror neuron system, helping us predict what that other person is going to do next. Predictive coding involves not just making the plan but also assessing errors in the plan and coming up with a new plan to correct those errors if necessary.

LUCK AND LIPS Error detection and error correction are examples of what psychologists call top-down processing. When we use our memories, beliefs, and expectations to help us understand what’s happening and what will happen next, we’re engaging in top-down

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processing. If we’re still playing ball with little Janie and we accidentally throw her a ball that is way above her head, we can use top-down processing to correct that throw the next time. We learn how to predict the future or at least to predict the consequences of our actions. Our attention can be driven by something out in the world that grabs us (bottom-up processing), or we can use top-down processing to direct our attention to a specific location in space. Predictive coding is an example of top-down processing. Researchers have described another set of cells that are part of this top-down, attention-directing circuit. These cells are in a region of the brain called the lateral intraparietal (LIP) cortex. When we look out at the world, visual information is first processed in the very back of the brain in the occipital lobe and then sent “forward” for more processing. The LIP region of the cortex is one of these more forward areas, and cells there receive information about what our eyes are seeing. LIP cells also receive information from the prefrontal cortex (where plans are generated) and from a region in the frontal lobe called the frontal eye field, which controls the muscles that move the eye. LIP cells integrate this information and direct our gaze toward potentially beneficial stimuli in the world. How do you make a stimulus “beneficial”? The easiest way is to attach a reward to noticing it. Researchers might teach a monkey that she’ll see a stimulus in a moment or two if she directs her eyes to the left. If she’s looking in the proper direction when the stimulus appears, she earns a reward (a lovely piece of apple). Experiments with nonhumans have explored how the brain decides to focus attention on a specific target in space. Researchers have found that LIP cells integrate sensory and reward information. As a result, researchers think they are involved in both topdown and bottom-up information processing. LIP cells tell our eyes to move to where the stimulus we’re seeking will probably

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appear, or at least where we think the stimulus will appear. They’re helping us predict the future. They combine sensory information and information about benefits of directing our gaze in a particular direction. Recent research has shown that mirror neurons can be found in the parietal lobe in places where information from several sensory systems (visual, auditory, and touch) are being combined and the region of the brain where eye movements and attention are controlled. Perhaps these mirror neurons help us understand the behavior and goals of other humans and help us bond together in a cohesive social group. Learning from our experiences and using those experiences to predict what’s going to happen next and to understand the behavior of other members of our own species might be factors that have enabled us to survive as a species. We’re certainly not the fastest animal on the planet, neither are we the biggest or strongest. We don’t have the longest claws or the best night vision or even the sharpest teeth. Yet we have survived to become, if not the dominant primate on the planet, at least the one voted most likely to cause an end to life on the third rock from the sun. Many students of the human mind have pondered our place in the animal kingdom. Are we unique and qualitatively different from other animals on the planet? Or are we basically the same as chimps, monkeys, squirrels, and bees—just the lucky beneficiaries of “more” of whatever mental hardware or software is needed to think about the world? Charles Darwin maintained that any difference between humans and other animals was the result of our having more cognitive equipment, not different equipment altogether—a difference of degree, not of kind. But recently several scientists have proposed that the way we think, the ways we use our mind, is qualitatively different from all other animals. For example, Marc Hauser has suggested that that the way we use our ability to pay attention to the world around us, and what our

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remarkable brains do with the information that comes streaming in when we’re focused, separates us from all other animals on the planet. Hauser says that what he calls our humaniqueness comes from four cognitive abilities. The first is generative computation or our ability to put ideas, words, images, actions, etcetera together in endless combinations and in novel and unusual forms. The second difference he calls our capacity for promiscuous combination of wildly different ideas. The third factor features our use of mental symbols to represent the thoughts and ideas we play with, and fourth is our ability to think abstractly. Hauser maintains that no other animal can sever the ties that bind the mind to the immediate sensory world that surrounds us and soar off into the abstract and unknown future, imagining life on other planets, life after this life, and the meaning of our existence. Animals, he says, can learn from their experiences and use what they remember to plan what to do next. I imagine that only humans would maintain the belief that some force in the vast universe is “on their side,” directing events to turn out in favor of one particular human and for the benefit of just one person. When Olds and Milner looked for evidence of learning in the rat brain, I’m certain they did not anticipate that the rat might also be curious and look back. Olds and Milner let their imagination take them into the brain of the rat, interpreting electrical signals, predicting what they ought to see if the rat was learning, and pondering the impenetrable mind of another species of animal— all as a series of baby steps toward understanding ourselves.

 HOW TO GET LUCKY

It is a great piece of skill To know how to guide your luck Even while waiting for it. BALTASAR GRACIAN

MUSIC APPRECIATION FOR HORSES I’ve introduced you to some remarkably lucky people, people who seemed to keep luck in their back pocket. Their stories encapsulate what we—the boating enthusiasts, gamblers, hikers, and researchers of the world—know about luck. In this chapter, I introduce two more cognitive tools that can help us attract and maybe keep luck. Those tools are expectation (our belief, hope, or prediction that something will happen in the future) and attention (the way we focus awareness on a specific aspect of the world and how we process the information we gather). Let’s start with expectations and how they might influence our feelings about luck. One more story might help illuminate this idea. Since publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, which laid out his famous theory, man’s place in

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the natural order of life has changed. Prior to Darwin, there were two schools of thought on the nature of nature. The first idea was essentialism, which held that the essential characteristics of each species did not change over time. Each branch on the tree of life was separate, and nature was as it is now and ever shall be. The second theory was naturalism, which pointed out that species varied in the world today and that there was evidence of variation in both form and function over time. For example, long before Darwin, farmers had known they could affect the way future generations of their animals both looked and acted by carefully controlling breeding. Scientists had discovered that the fossil record of life on Earth was full of evidence that some species of animals had lived on our planet in the past but were no longer present today. Some species were extinct, suggesting that nature was not unchanging and static and that it could and had changed in the past. Nature, in this view, was wonderfully mutable. Darwin threw a monkey wrench into our worldview when he published data that supported the belief that species did change over time and that the species populating the world today could share a common ancestor in the past. He stunned the world when he added the suggestion that this idea applied to Homo sapiens as well as to all other forms of life. If, as Darwin suggested, all living organisms could potentially share our history and our biology, then maybe the things we can do with our brains—things like thinking, problem solving, and communicating—might be shared with other animals. Soon after the publication of Darwin’s work, scientists began to study the animal mind in the laboratory, and the question of animal intelligence became a popular subject of debate. In 1900, Wilhelm von Osten, a retired elementary school mathematics teacher in Germany, joined the debate when he decided to study the question of animal cognition on his own. His favorite

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carriage horse, a stallion named Hans, was his best and most famous pupil, and von Osten started by teaching Hans to count. He “asked” Hans to raise his right hoof once whenever he showed him a large pin that looked somewhat like a bowling pin. The word “asked” is in quotes because, obviously, von Osten couldn’t just verbally ask Hans to answer a question—first he had to teach Hans about numbers. Von Osten did this by showing the pin to Hans and then saying, loudly and clearly, “Raise the hoof—one.” Success was followed by bread and carrots as a reward. In the beginning, von Osten had to help Hans out, holding his hoof, raising it up, and lowering it, but eventually Hans learned to raise and lower his hoof, resulting in one “tap” of his hoof when he was shown one pin. Then von Osten made the task a bit more complex. He added a second pin and changed the command to “Raise the hoof—two,” with more bread and carrots for successful behavior. Eventually he began to replace the physical pins with symbols that represented quantity (numerals we’re all familiar with such as 8 and 4 etcetera.) Figure 7.1 shows Hans responding to these numerals. His trainer is just barely visible, standing next to Hans’s left rear leg. Von Osten used this technique to teach Hans to count, add, subtract, multiply, and divide, and he didn’t stop there. After training with the letters of the alphabet (another set of incredibly meaningful symbols, at least to humans), he also claimed that Hans could spell out words to answer questions. He could tell us what a horse thinks about! Hans learned that one tap of his hoof indicated the letter “A,” two taps meant “B,” and so on. Using this technique, Hans learned to name his colors (horses are not great with color; they lack a set of receptor cells in their retinas for red, but they can distinguish blue and green and some other basic hues) and even to distinguish between individual musical notes as well as musical intervals such as thirds and fifths. Hans was

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FIGURE 7.1 Photograph

of “Clever Hans” learning to add two numbers

together. Source: Karl Krall, Denkende Tiere (Thinking Animals), S. 362. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9007400.

apparently a traditionalist in his musical preferences. He disapproved of the use of the seventh in the modern music of his time, preferring a D minor seven chord (D, F, A, and the seventh, C) be played as a simple D minor (D, F, and A). Von Osten spent four years training Hans to reveal what he was thinking, and then he took his amazing animal on the road, wowing interested viewers in town squares across Germany. The horse became known as Clever Hans, and he attracted a great deal of attention from scientists as well. Several eminent thinkers of the day started out as skeptics but became believers when they watched Hans perform without any apparent cues from his

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trainer. Hans would even perform his amazing feats when someone other than von Osten was asking the questions—so, they reasoned, how could it possibly be a trick? Whether Hans’s abilities were real or a sophisticated scam eventually resulted in the formation of a committee to study the question of just what was going on. Carl Stumpf, a famous philosopher of the day, set up a panel of respected gentlemen, scientists, teachers, and military men to determine if Hans really was thinking like a human. The Hans Commission declared that they didn’t think the public was being tricked but that more study was needed. They couldn’t decide whether a signal was being given to Hans or not. A graduate student in Stumpf ’s lab, Oskar Pfungst, set up a series of tests to see if some heretofore unseen signal was being used. Given the placement of the equine eye on the side of the head, it’s difficult to be completely out of a horse’s line of sight. Even when the trainer was standing back by the animal’s hindquarters, Hans could still see him. This is quite unlike our vision; our eyes point forward, toward what is in front of us. We would have to turn around to see the person standing behind us. Hans’s trainer would be visible, marginally, but still able to be seen when standing by his left flank without Hans having to turn his head. Pfungst saw that to determine if Hans was coming up with the right answer, and not just responding to signals from someone else, he would have to isolate Hans from the humans involved. Pfungst tested Hans in several different situations: when the questioners were behind a curtain, when questioners other than the familiar von Osten were used, when Hans was wearing blinders and couldn’t see the questioner, and when questions that the humans in the room did not know the answer to were asked. As you might already suspect, Pfungst found that Hans’s behavior fell to chance levels if he couldn’t see the human asking him the questions. Hans had learned that tapping his foot

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resulted in bread and carrots, so he continued to tap when asked. However, when he couldn’t see the human asking the question, he tapped randomly. If the human in the room didn’t know the answer to the question beforehand, neither did Hans. Hans was smart. He’d learned to read some kind of signal to get his reward, but he wasn’t solving equations or expressing a preference in musical forms. Von Osten was furious. He loudly maintained that he was not signaling the horse, and lots of people who had witnessed Hans’s performances in the past loudly agreed with him. In fact, Pfungst and Stumpf were also stumped. Whatever the signal was, it wasn’t obvious. To more clearly understand what was going on, Pfungst made a careful set of observations of von Osten’s behavior when he was questioning Hans. Pfungst eventually described what is now known in psychology as the “Hans effect.” He determined that some very small, almost imperceptible head movements, some tensing of the muscles of the trainer’s body, some quick glances toward a particular target, a raised eyebrow here, a widening of the eyes there were made by the human trainer as Hans approached the correct number of taps in his response. These movements were so minute that the person making them didn’t realize this was happening, and because the trainer didn’t know he was sending these cues, he couldn’t stop doing it. Pfungst then took an additional step—he learned to ask questions of Hans himself. Even though he knew that he shouldn’t be helping Hans out, Pfungst made the same kind of involuntary small movements when the number of taps Hans made got closer to the correct answer. Pfungt’s own expectations were influencing his behavior every time, and he was powerless to prevent them from doing so. The signals being sent to the horse by the humans in the room were unconscious and involuntary. Hans was just smart enough to pick up on them. If you’ve ever participated in a

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psychology experiment and wondered why the experimenter was not in the room with you, it’s because of Clever Hans. The experimenter is trying not to influence your behavior with her or his own expectations.

THE POWER OF EXPECTATION In psychology, we define learning as a relatively permanent change in behavior that is the result of experience. When you learn, for example, to connect event A with result B, you are learning an expectation. Hans learned in just this way. Tapping his hoof was connected to the presentation of a food he really liked. If I take the food away, the learned behavior will change again. Now you and Hans have learned a new expectation—behavior is no longer linked to food. Psychologists would say that removing the reinforcement for the behavior (the food) has extinguished the behavior (the tapping). The simpler way to think about this is that everyone’s behavior changes as the result of the expectations we develop from experience. It’s not just humans who expect a particular answer; the horse must expect that performing this rather odd movement will result in a favorite food. Scientists also know that our expectations about what is going to happen can and do regularly influence our own behavior and the behavior of others. For example, let’s look at one of the oldest questions in psychology: nature vs. nurture. Is a particular ability or behavior the result of nature (our biology), or is it the result of the environment (learning)? In an attempt to answer this question, Robert Tryon trained rats to run a maze for a food reward. He then bred the rats who made the fewest errors when they learned a maze to each other to produce a line of “maze bright rats” in the next generation. He also bred the rats who made the

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most errors to produce “maze dull rats.” After several generations of selective breeding, Tryon claimed that nature (genetics) was making the most significant contribution to behavior in these animals. The maze bright rats ran the maze with significantly fewer errors than the maze dull rats because genetics had altered their brains and so their ability to think. However, a researcher at Harvard University noticed that Tryon had made an error in his experimental design, and the researcher thought the error might be the factor producing the results, not breeding or genetics. The problem was that the people testing the rats in the maze knew which rats were “bright” and which were “dull.” The Hans effect suggests that the expectations of the experimenters might have been unconsciously influencing their interpretation of the data so the bright rats seemed to be performing better than the dull ones. After all, a human is the one deciding exactly what an “error” is and how many of them a particular rat makes. Robert Rosenthal and Kermit Fode set out to determine if the expectations of the experimenters might be responsible for the differences in rat behavior. They did so with a wonderfully simple experiment. They asked a group of students to test rats in a maze. One set of rats was described to the students as “bright” rats. Students were told that these rats were the result of a selective breeding program like the one Tryon designed. The students were also told that these rats would do well in the maze and that they should expect them to learn the maze quickly. The other group of students were told that their animals were bred to be “dull” and to expect very little in the way of learning from them. In reality, of course, the rats were not part of any selective breeding program. They were ordinary rats randomly assigned to the two groups. But the results the students collected after diligently testing the rats for several days looked very much like the results

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Tryon had published. The so-called bright rats performed much better than the dull rats, making significantly fewer errors than the dull rats. So, what happened? Rosenthal and Fode said that this was an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The students who expected the rats to do well may have been more willing to give the rat the benefit of the doubt when trying to decide if the rat had turned into a blind alley (made an error), whereas the students scoring the dull rats may have counted an error when the rat simply hesitated near the blind alley. Sometimes what you expect to happen is exactly what you see.

LEARNING TO BE LUCKY Expectations influence our behavior every day and can unintentionally influence the behavior of those around us. It can be difficult to tease out exactly what is going on when we’re looking at the effect of expectations because we are often not even aware of our expectations. Does this mean that if I expect to be lucky in a particular situation I will be? Can you teach people how to be lucky? According to Richard Wiseman, a professor of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire in England, the answer to these questions is “yes.” Wiseman studies luck. He is particularly interested in understanding why some people believe themselves to be lucky and others are just as convinced that they have no luck at all. How are these two groups of people different from each other? Is it genetics? Is it the way they’re thinking about the world? Or is it the environment that surrounds them? Wiseman described four principles of luck. It turns out that both developing an expectation about the probability of your

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own success and learning to focus your attention contribute to being lucky. His “Luck School” focuses on these principles, teaching students to change their luck. And he’s had some remarkable success in transforming the unlucky among us into lucky people. Here are the characteristic ways that lucky people think, according to Wiseman. 1.

Lucky people create, notice (pay attention to), and act on the chance opportunities in their life. In fact, they’re more likely to attend to these chance events when they happen than are the unlucky among us.

2.

Lucky people trust and listen to their intuitions. They “go with their gut.” They use what they already know to drive their intuitive predictions about the world, and they listen to those intuitive expectations.

3.

Lucky people expect that they will be successful and that they will achieve their goals, and their expectations about the future help them to be lucky.

4.

When lucky people are unlucky—when something unwanted or awful happens—they learn from their mistakes, incorporating that experience into their expectations about the future. They are able to use their transformed expectations to change their bad luck into good for the next time.

Expectation and attention are so intimately intertwined in the process of understanding what is going on around us that researchers sometimes consider them to be one and the same thing. Let’s take a look at how attention and expectation weave together, and I’ll point out some of what neuroscientists are discovering about how the brain uses information from these two systems to guide and direct our behavior.

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BOTTOM-UP AND TOP-DOWN Wiseman started with the simple fact that random events happen all the time. He noticed that lucky people respond to random events differently than do unlucky people. Lucky people seek out chance, pay attention when random events happen, and act upon these random events. Unlucky people often ignore randomness or think about acting on the event but, in the end, choose not to do so. Wiseman discovered that seeking out randomness in the world helps us become lucky. If you don’t put yourself out there, if you don’t try new things and new risks, you limit your opportunities to be lucky. Remember Austin’s Type II luck from chapter 1? Mixing action and movement together with random events increases the probability that new ideas will come together in new ways, creating new and potentially better, maybe even luckier results. Part of noticing the random opportunities all around us has to do with the way that we attend to and interpret what happens around us in general. Attention is the focus of a lot of research in psychology because it is so important to the decisions we make about what to do next. Psychology divides attention into two systems: attentional bias (AB) and attentional control (AC). AB operates from the bottom-up. If you’re a scientist, bottom-up processing is what happens when we see, hear, taste, smell, or feel something out there in the world and that information is sent “up” to the cortex to be deciphered. Bottom-up processing is described as being “stimulus-driven.” It begins with an event out in the world to which our sensory systems respond. That event biases our attention processing, pulling our attention to it. The AB system is responsible for detecting that something happened and for holding onto the relevant information in that stimulus.

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AC is an example of top-down processing. Once sensory information has been delivered to the cortex, a decision needs to be made and the appropriate commands sent to the rest of the body for that decision to be acted upon. The AC system is responsible for preparing and getting those commands to the body so the goal can be obtained. Our expectations play an important role in deciding what we should do about that event out in the world. Both systems are in operation all the time, and there are probably as many ways to use the AB system and the AC system as there are ways to be human. Let’s take a closer look at the bottom-up and top-down systems.

BOTTOM-UP PROCESSING We can’t pay attention to every single thing that we come across in a given moment. As you read this, your eyes see the letters on the page, but they also take in significantly less important information such as the colors of the edges of the book, your hand as you turn the page, the clothes you’re wearing as you sit with the book in your lap or the color of the desk or table beneath the book, and that smudge of chocolate smeared on the page from the cookie you were eating. Other sensory systems are busily noticing additional stimuli—the sound of a lawn mower somewhere in the neighborhood, the plane traveling overhead, the feel of the leather on the chair underneath you, and the occasional taste and aroma of the tea you’re drinking while you read. Obviously, we don’t need to pay attention to all of this. Limiting our attention to the most important stuff is an amazing ability. In fact, attention itself has been defined as the process of selecting the relevant or important information out of the booming, buzzing array of stimuli that surrounds us.

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In bottom-up processing, our attention is usually captured by anything bright, shiny, or moving out in the world. Researchers call this attention-attracting thing a salient feature of the outside world. Bottom-up processing happens automatically, and it happens because stimuli that are moving or are bright and shiny are easy to notice—they “pop out.” The brain uses this incoming information to build a saliency map, a layout of the world that surrounds us with the most important things highlighted. Our attention is focused on the location that elicits the most neural activity in this map because that thing is probably the most important. Researchers have tentatively identified a region of our old friend the prefrontal cortex, called the frontal eye field (FEF), as one of the places where this map is created. Cells in the FEF are responsible for preparing the commands needed to move the eyes to a specific location in space, so it makes sense that the map of where the important things likely are would be found here. Another brain region that might harbor this saliency map is the lateral intraparietal cortex (see chapter 6). Cells in the LIP and the FEF communicate with each other, and studies have shown that this circuit can be activated in the Oddball task. In this exercise, one thing is “not like the other,” as Bert and Ernie told us, and participants are asked to detect the stimulus that does not match all the others. Researchers found that LIP and FEF cells responded to the oddball stimulus even when the participant in the study had been taught to fix her vision on an unchanging part of the visual array and the oddball object was presented in the periphery—not where eyesight was focused. This suggested that the cells were not responding to top-down orders but instead were responding to bottom-up data. The oddball stimulus presented at the edges of vision was the shiny object that captured the viewer’s attention. When we look out on the world, our bottom-up system sends information about the possibilities out there up to the central

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processing units in the cortex, providing information about how many, how big, what color, what odors, what textures, and what sounds are associated with the objects around us. If you’re looking for a tasty snack, your eyes send up information about the cookies on the cooling rack in front of you, your nose tells you there’s chocolate and sugar involved, the skin on your fingers tell you that the cookies are hot and soft, and your ears tell you that the timer counting down the seconds until they’re cool enough to eat has just gone off. Now your cortex has to generate the commands necessary for you to retrieve a cookie, convey it to your mouth, and achieve the goal of diminishing your current hunger. Generation of that series of commands is top-down, expectation-driven processing. It depends on what you already know about cookies and eating them, and it must involve integration of prior knowledge with all that new sensory input about the cookies that are potential targets of your hungry self.

TOP-DOWN PROCESSING If bottom-up processing starts with something that captures our sensory systems, top-down attention starts with a goal. Katsuki and Constantinidis, who study attentional systems in the brain, say that “top-down . . . attention is a voluntary process in which a particular location, feature or object relevant to current . . . goals is selected . . . focused upon or examined.” When we focus our attention on a particular spot in the world around us, our topdown system ensures that the activity of cells receiving information about that spot is enhanced. At the same time, neural responses to irrelevant stimuli are suppressed. A complex series of cortical regions that include the prefrontal cortex, the FEF, and other cortical regions are involved in generating the top-down signal that ultimately guides our behavior.

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In fact, the same brain areas that receive information from the bottom-up system are involved in generating the top-down, goal-oriented signals that direct our behavior. The neurons in the FEF, for example, are thought to be part of a system that predicts the location of a reward. They are coding the expectation of a reward in that spot. These same cells also respond when a mistake is made in directing gaze, suggesting that they are also part of a neural circuit that is monitoring the success (or failure) of our actions. Perhaps lucky people are using this system differently, or better, than the less lucky among us, increasing the probability of successfully achieving that reward. The distinction between bottom-up and top-down attentional systems is arbitrary. It might be better to think of these two systems as “intricately intertwined . . . regardless of the origin of information, . . . attention is allocated to an object or location that evokes the highest activity at the moment.” Differences in the way we use bottom-up and top-down processing are part of what makes every person unique. One feature of the way we formulate plans for action is how we use what we already know in creating those plans. Sometimes we’re aware that we have a data bank of information that we have used in the past and can call on again in the present to solve a problem or decide how to act. On other occasions, we rely on intuition—knowledge we are not even aware we possess—to come up with a plan. Wiseman found that lucky people pay attention to their intuitions; they are not afraid to go with their gut.

GO WITH YOUR GUT (OR MAYBE YOUR FRONTAL LOBE?) Intuition—having a “gut instinct”—is the ability to recognize patterns in the nearly constant stream of sensations that flood our brain.

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We use our intuition to make decisions all the time. Researchers say we make decisions in two ways. Some decisions are deliberative, requiring careful thought and consultation with the knowledge stored in our memories. Psychologists refer to these decisions as “effortful,” conscious, and relatively time consuming. Other decisions are intuitive. They’re fast, don’t require conscious attention, and are every bit as useful as the decisions deliberately generated. Intuition is a vital part of the way we decide what to do next. We’ve all had the experience of knowing something without really knowing how or why we know it. Researchers describe intuition this way: People continuously, without conscious attention recognize patterns in the stream of sensations that impinge upon them. The result is a vague perception of coherence, which subsequently biases thought and behavior accordingly  .  .  . intuition relies on mental representations that reflect the entire stream of prior experiences.

That vague, fuzzy perception of possible meaning is intuition. Lucky people are more likely than the unlucky to pay heed to these fuzzy feelings and to let their intuition move them toward or away from what is happening around them. Laboratory studies of the neurobiology of intuition have presented participants with coherent and incoherent stimuli and asked them to make an assessment, as rapidly as possible, about what they have experienced. It is not surprising that we’re faster and more accurate in identifying the images that are coherent. We are relying on our intuition to rapidly decide that there is an object in the image and to determine what that object is. The feeling of coherence can be found across our sensory systems. For example, Kirsten Volz and her colleagues asked people to judge

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the coherence of sounds such as “the ringing of a church bell, the gurgle of a wastewater disposal line, or the rattling of cutlery.” Some sounds were presented without alteration, and others were distorted by randomly superimposing tiny intervals of noise or silence on the sound. Other sounds were rendered “incoherent” by playing them backward. Participants were asked to judge whether the sound represented an actual auditory event as quickly as possible as researchers mapped their brain activity using fMRI. Participants were faster and more accurate when the sounds were played without distortion and when the sounds were coherent (played forward rather than backward). The regions of the brain activated in this auditory task were similar to the ones seen in visual studies. The auditory sensory regions of the brain, the areas we typically use to identify sounds, were active, just as the regions used to identify or categorize a visual object were active in a visual task. But there was also activity in a somewhat unusual place, the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). Volz et al. concluded that the OFC was working as a “rapid detector and predictor” of what an object (any kind of object, visual, auditory, presumably tactile and gustatory) might be. The fact that the OFC was activated before the parts of the brain known to be involved in the recognition of objects suggested that the OFC was using only the most basic of information, the “gist” of the scene, to make its decision about whether the object was a “real” thing in the world. Maybe that old expression about going with your gut should read go with your orbitofrontal cortex. Several other researchers have linked the process of intuiting the identity of an object to activity in the OFC. This region of the frontal lobe receives information from each sensory system, and it seems to be involved in evaluating incoming sensory information and making decisions—in particular, emotional decisions— about what the object is.

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THE EXECUTIVE IN YOUR BRAIN The OFC has also been linked to several other kinds of decisions that we make rapidly and repeatedly, for example, deciding on the relative value of a particular object compared to another, keeping track of the consequences of our actions, remembering the rules that govern situations, switching from a rule that seems no longer helpful to a new and better rule, and even creating memories of the information generated by our sensory systems. All of these operations are collectively referred to executive functions. Decisions that guide and direct our everyday interactions with the world around us and that allow us to be flexible and to adjust our behaviors to achieve our goals all fall under the heading of executive functions. Patients who have suffered damage to the frontal lobe and the OFC (like our friend Phineas Gage) experience something called dysexecutive syndrome. The patient is often described as having failure in one or more executive functions: attention, working memory, planning and inhibitory control. Trouble in any or all of them can lead, more or less directly, to inabilities in decision-making, and organizing behavior. . . . The patient suffers from an overall constriction of the scope and complexity of behavior and of the thinking behind it.

Dysexecutive syndrome patients can’t ignore things in their world that are irrelevant to achieving their goal. As a result, they have tremendous difficulty making decisions that would allow them to achieve their goals. They also seem to feel obliged to pick up and use an object just because it happens to be there, not because it would be useful in achieving their goal. Faced with a task in a world crowded with possibilities, the patient with an OFC lesion

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is pulled off track, unable to suppress the urge to fiddle with useless items. They even have trouble stifling the urge to imitate the behavior of other people around them, regardless of what that person is doing. Loss of the ability to quickly judge what objects are and how they would benefit us makes achieving a goal difficult. Dysexecutive syndrome patients can’t focus their attention, can’t filter out the unimportant, and as a result tend to make bad decisions. But what about the rest of us who have an intact frontal lobe? Every ability that the central nervous system provides comes in a wide variety of strengths. We all vary in how much cognitive skill we have, and we vary even more in how well we’ve learned to use those skills. Another group of researchers has suggested that the lucky among us have learned to use their executive functions in a way that helps them achieve their goals—and that’s being lucky.

DYSEXECUTIVE LUCK John Maltby and a team of researchers at the University of Leicester in England proposed that believing yourself to be an unlucky person might be linked to your ability to use your executive functions. If you have difficulty applying your cognitive abilities to solving problems or hadn’t learned to apply your executive functions effectively, Maltby and his colleagues reasoned that you might be less successful in solving problems in general. That history of not being able to achieve your goals might make you believe you are unlucky. If this is true, researchers ought to see that people who think of themselves as unlucky would also tend to have deficits in executive function. A number of executive functions have been proposed, and the debate about how we use these cognitive talents rages on in labs around the world. Maltby and his colleagues tested three

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FIGURE 7.2  Illustration

M3

D4

R2

B5

of the number letter task.

functions that are generally agreed upon. The first is shifting, our ability to shift between tasks or between ways of thinking about solving a problem. When the demands of the task change, can we change our thinking? They used the Number Letter test to assess the ability of their participants to shift. In this test, participants see a 2 × 2 checkerboard pattern on the computer screen (figure 7.2). In the top left corner of the matrix, a number/ letter combination would appear (M3). If the stimulus appeared in one of the top two squares of the matrix, participants were asked to indicate if the letter shown was a consonant or a vowel and were told to ignore the number. If the letter was a consonant, participants were asked to press a specific key (b) on the computer keyboard, and if the letter was a vowel to press another key (n). As soon as a key was pressed, the stimulus would disappear and a new one would show up in the top right square. Because the new stimulus appeared in one of the top two squares, participants would press the appropriate key for a consonant or a vowel. The next stimulus would appear in the bottom right-hand box of the matrix. Now participants were asked to press the “b” key if the number is odd or the “n” key if the number is even—tasks have just been switched. Finally, the stimulus would appear in

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the bottom left-hand box of the matrix, and participants again responded to whether the number was odd or even. The movement of stimuli through the matrix is always the same, from upper-left clockwise to lower-left, with the top two squares requiring assessment of the letter and the two bottom squares assessing the number. Demonstrations of this test are available online, but if you’d like to try it, be careful! It’s harder than it looks. It is one of the more difficult tests of the ability to switch because it requires that you do so frequently and quickly. Maltby measured the time participants needed to respond with a key press and the number of errors they made. Good and effective users of the ability to switch take less time to hit the key and make fewer errors than do poor switchers. Maltby predicted that belief in being unlucky would tend to be paired with less effective use of this executive function. The second executive function Maltby assessed is inhibiting, the ability to not do something—to inhibit what psychologists often call a prepotent response, which is usually automatic. The best way to see inhibition of prepotent responses is through use of the Stroop task, and that’s the test of inhibition that Maltby used. I described the Stroop task in chapter 6, but here’s a brief reminder. If you participate in a Stroop task study, you’ll be presented with incongruous stimuli (color and word don’t match such as the word RED written in blue ink) and congruous stimuli in which they do match. To be successful at this task, you would need to inhibit your tendency to read first and instead respond with the less prepotent answer about the color of the ink. Again, the number of errors made provides a measurement of your ability to inhibit overlearned and automatic responses. Maltby predicted that people who are particularly poor at inhibiting these responses would also tend to see themselves as unlucky.

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The final executive function assessed by the researchers was divergent thinking, searching for alternative ways of solving a problem. The opposite kind of thinking is convergent thinking, thinking only about a limited number of possible solutions rather than letting consideration of the options available to us range widely. Humans typically use both kinds of thinking when solving a problem, but we differ in which method we prefer. The method we choose to use depends on the kind of problem we’re facing. When taking a multiple-choice test, it would not make sense to start considering options beyond the choices listed. In this situation, we do better when we use convergent thinking. If you plop us down in a totally novel environment and tell us we need to get back home, divergent thinking might offer more options toward achieving the goal. To test divergent thinking, Maltby used the Guilford Alternative Uses task. Participants were presented with an ordinary item, such as a ping-pong ball, and asked to list as many uses for that item as they could in a two-minute time period. Answers were scored based on originality, fluency (number of responses), flexibility (number of categories of use provided), and elaboration (the amount of detail in the description). Higher scores indicate greater divergent thinking. Maltby predicted that people who saw themselves as unlucky would not be able to come up with as many or as unusual uses for these items and would have a low score on the test. Maltby also measured belief in luckiness using a series of paper-and-pencil tests and questionnaires. For example, he used a measure of luckiness called the Darke and Freedman Beliefs Around Luck Scale, in which higher scores indicate a stronger belief in being unlucky, and the Dysexecutive Questionnaire (DEX), designed to assess how individuals see their own use of executive function. High scores on the DEX indicate greater

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executive dysfunction. In general, people who believed themselves to be unlucky tended to have higher scores on the DEX. In other words, the more unlucky you thought you were, the more dysfunction this test reported in your executive cognition. The unlucky among his participants also reported lower feelings of self-efficacy and less optimism. Unlucky participants were less extroverted and less open to new experiences than were people who thought of themselves as lucky. And as predicted, unlucky people performed more poorly on the tests of switching, inhibition, and divergent thinking. Seeing yourself as being unlucky was consistently paired with poorer executive function. What about those among us who see themselves as lucky? Does that belief affect our ability to plan for and achieve our goals? Liza Day and John Maltby examined the cognitive performance of a group of people who saw themselves as particularly lucky. They found that lucky people also tended to be more optimistic and more hopeful about the future than did the unlucky participants. The stronger the belief in good luck, the more likely the person was to attempt to achieve a goal and to persist in that attempt even in the face of difficulty. Believers in good luck were more confident that their goals would be achieved, even if they also thought a bit of luck might be necessary to get there in the end. That confidence seemed to be linked to seeing good luck as an internal characteristic that they had control over. Those who saw good luck as external and outside of their control reported less confidence in their ability to achieve a goal. Day and Maltby suggested that hope, optimism, and confidence might combine to make these lucky individuals more persistent in the face of difficulty and more willing to keep trying to achieve their goals than the unlucky or those who didn’t believe in luck at all. Maltby’s lab also looked for physiological evidence that supported his theory that executive function was altered in people

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who saw themselves as unlucky. His team recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) while people were using the executive function of inhibiting (refer to discussion of the Stroop task in chapter 6). Recall that the differences for people who saw themselves as unlucky and the control group were in the late waves of the ERP. These waves are generated by the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and reflect our emotional responses to the stimuli, perhaps indicating that the unlucky are more emotionally upset when making an error or perceive themselves as having less control over events than the control group. Marie Banich has proposed a model of executive function called the cascade of control model. It involves two regions of our cortex—the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex and the ACC. Working together, these two regions of the brain allow us to apply our executive function to problems like those in the Stroop task. First, the prefrontal cortex creates an attentional set—a bias in the way we pay attention to the world. The Stroop task requires that our attentional set be biased toward identifying the color of the ink used and that our automatic response of reading the word be suppressed. We learn how to create this bias in our attention, and our own personal history of success or failure in doing so influences how well we are able to create the bias when we’re confronted with a new problem like the Stroop task. The prefrontal cortex then sends commands to the ACC, which has two jobs to do. It has to create commands to respond to the demands of the task and then evaluate the accuracy of the response. If you make a mistake, the ACC sends a command back to the prefrontal cortex telling it to tighten up the top-down control of attention a bit. Poor performance by the prefrontal cortex due to prior learning, or in Maltby’s model a learned expectation that you won’t be able to carry out the task because you’re unlucky, means that the ACC has to sort through muddled and less

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precise information before it can select the appropriate response, and both reaction time and error rate go up. The fact that the ability to use the executive function is dependent, at least in part, on prior learning suggests strongly that future learning can have an effect as well. One of the most incredible things about humans is our ability to learn how to do things better. Wiseman is taking advantage of our flexible and adaptable minds when he enrolls students in his Luck School, teaching them to change their expectations, to pay attention to what goes on around them a bit more closely, and to rely on their intuition. You too can learn to be lucky.

 FORTUNE’S EXPENSIVE SMILE

Luck affects everything. Let your hook always be cast; in the stream where you least expect it there will be a fish. OVID

DO YOU FEEL LUCKY? One of the most difficult tasks for researchers is discovering a new idea or a new direction to explore. Some researchers advocate reading everything, some are proponents of networking with colleagues at conferences and department meetings, and some are fans of organized brainstorming sessions dedicated to creating lists of ideas for the next study in a lab. In my opinion, there is more than one way to go about finding your next research idea. I like a combination approach, relying on attention, memory, planning, reading, conversation, and just plain old random chance. I have the most fun when an idea slips up on me and is intriguing enough for me to follow where it leads. I started thinking

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about this book because of just such an idea. It began with a random question I asked the students in one of my classes. You probably remember the chaos of conversation, paper shuffling, chair squeaks, coughs, and questions about the party last night or the one coming up next weekend that happens before class officially begins. One day as the students fiddled around getting settled, I was thinking about the lecture I was about to give on probability and about an article I happened to read the previous day. The article was by a friend of mine, and the only reason I read it was because my friend was the author. It wasn’t a topic that would normally catch my eye. Random chance led me to notice my friend’s name and to read that particular article. My friend was writing about his attempt to replicate a study on perceptions of luck that was originally done in Germany. He tried the same experiment with his students here in the United States but did not get the same results at all. Belief in the power of a lucky charm had reportedly resulted in improved performance for the students in Germany, but not for the students here. I emailed my friend to ask why he thought the outcome here was so different, and we chatted briefly about culture, expectation, and the role of randomness in science. Then both of us went back to our daily lives. That conversation was bubbling in the back of my mind, however, as I halfway listened to the conversations going on around me and thought about probabilities and experimental evidence. Out of curiosity I asked the students in the row nearest me what they thought about luck and being lucky. Their responses surprised me enough to wonder what the rest of the students thought. So before we launched into a discussion of statistical dependencies, I asked how many of the students in the classroom thought of themselves as lucky people—only a few hands were raised. Hmmm. So I tried the reverse question: “How many of you see yourselves as unlucky?” To my astonishment, almost

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everyone in the room raised their hands. Really? You all see yourselves as unlucky? How can that be? You’re young, you’re smart, you’re attending an excellent college with an enviable reputation for producing leaders and scholars, you’re healthy, you’re right at the beginning of all of the exciting things that come with pushing out on your own. How can you see all of this as unlucky? I was so surprised by the responses I’d gotten that I decided to set up a series of experiments in my lab to see what was going on here. My article-writing friend worked at a school in the Upper Midwest, and I work at a school in the Deep South, so could this be a regional difference? Nope; we couldn’t replicate the original results of the German study in my lab either. I started to wonder just what being lucky or unlucky might entail. Then I started reading about believing in luck and the power of expectations, pattern recognition, agency, and all the rest. Because my training is in neuroscience and I think brains are absolutely the coolest thing going, I also dug into the research on how the human brain handles the random events in our lives. And here we are. So what have I discovered?

LUCK, FEAR, AND THE UNKNOWN The term luck is often used as a synonym for “random chance.” Randomness, as uncomfortable as it makes us feel, surrounds us every day. Randomness is scary because it is unknowable, unexpected, and unpredictable. It is difficult to understand, and humans tend not to like things we don’t understand. Nicolas Carleton says that our fear of the unknown might be the fundamental fear that underlies all others. He defines fear of the unknown as our tendency to feel afraid when we don’t have the information we need to be able to understand what is happening and what will

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happen next. It is “triggered by the perceived absence of salient, key or sufficient information.” We are driven to be curious about the world and to explore it to reduce our uncertainty. There are psychological benefits in being curious about what we don’t know. Researchers have found that satisfying our curiosity reduces uncertainty and activates the same system in the brain that responds to reward and reinforcement. Like food when we’re hungry, when we reduce what we don’t know, we feel less uncertain, less anxious, and more in control of our life. Naming what we don’t understand, or what scares us, is an extraordinarily human thing to do. Putting a word to it also tames randomness. It’s as if we say to ourselves, “There. That’s better. Now I know what to call you, you scary thing. Still don’t quite understand you, but I know what to call you when you drop by next time.” After a while, simply naming the randomness seems to make us feel as though we’ve dealt with it. Naming things also tames the brain’s emotional response centers, reducing activity in the amygdala, a brain structure that specializes in fear. Throughout the history of our species, we’ve imbued supernatural beings with power over random events and devised elaborate rituals and magical objects to try to tilt the universe in our favor. Our brains have the difficult task of figuring out what, if anything, the randomness means and what we should do about it. We use every cognitive ability we have and can throw at the problem to determine what happened, what caused it to happen, and what should happen next. The decision made and the action taken or suppressed is defined by us, after the fact, as luck—good or bad. Our primate brains want there to be order and reason in the world. Our brains are designed to search for patterns and to direct our attention and our thinking toward those patterns, seeking perfect knowledge of what will happen next. At the same time, we stoutly refuse to acknowledge that what we know is imperfect

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and might not even be real. We stubbornly persist in believing and behaving as though we actually do have control. In Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Taleb argues for a stoic’s response to randomness—meeting random events with “wisdom, upright dealing and courage” and saying “the only article Lady Fortuna has no control over is your behavior.” I agree with this sentiment—to a degree. However, I also think that both Richard Wiseman and James Austin have approaches with merit—we can learn to be better at seeing the opportunities that randomness creates, better at putting ourselves in the path of randomness, and better at accepting the risk inherent in any action, even inaction. Think about all the times in your life that you have encountered randomness. I’m sure you did the best you could whether that opportunity slipped past you or dropped right in your lap. We all do our best, and none of us knows if what we did was “right” until after we’ve done it. In writing this book, I have also discovered that there is no one single or “best” way to deal with randomness. The way we handle randomness varies from person to person. We don’t all share the same experiences or the same history, so naturally our expectations, our fears, what we seek out in the world, and what we try very hard to avoid are different for each of us. What every person on the planet does share, however, is a brain designed to look for patterns and consistency in a random and inconsistent world. I don’t think we see the true nature of the world when we look out on it. We see what we expect to see, what we want to see, and sometimes what we’re afraid to see. That’s part of the nature of being human. If we seek pattern and can see that pattern in the events that shape our life, we’re happy. It’s like the placebo effect in medicine. If I believe that this little green pill will make me feel better, and when I take it, I feel better, does it really matter what is in the pill? Not to me. If I believe my day will go more smoothly

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when I wear these shoes, and I have a terrific day with them on my feet, does the fact that believing in lucky shoes is irrational really matter? Personally, I can’t see how it does. There’s nothing inherently wrong with believing in luck. In fact, counting on luck to give you that extra boost in a sticky situation can be beneficial. Believing in luck may give us a feeling of control we would otherwise be without. Feeling in control might lead us to better performance, more success, and more favorable outcomes. It also may lead to a stronger belief in luck the next time we’re in a pickle. “Nothing succeeds like success,” and we have a strong tendency to repeat what has worked in the past, even if what worked in the past was irrational.

PLASTIC BRAINS Expectations about ourselves, and in particular about the probability of our own success in achieving a goal, can and do influence how we make decisions. We’ve learned our expectations, usually the hard way. But the hard way is really the only way to learn anything. We attempt a solution to a problem, and we wait to see if that solution will have a good or a bad outcome for us. We never know until the outcome becomes evident. This is what makes relying on luck so darn expensive. When fortune smiles on us, it is almost always after the fact, after we’ve committed ourselves to a course of action and invested our time and effort in a particular solution. The good news is that we can modify our expectations and our attention. We can learn to pay attention better, to ignore the irrelevant, to suppress the inappropriate response, and to provide our decision-making systems with better information. Brains are plastic—they are modifiable. That plasticity is what makes us

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human, and it helps us survive. When we encounter something that we’ve never seen before, such as a horse expressing an opinion about musical forms, we can focus our wonderfully clever brains and figure out what the horse is really doing. Being lucky means being willing to ride the rolling waves of randomness that we encounter. Being lucky means being in the right place at the right time, but it also requires us to improve our skills, our talents, and our ability to think to make the most of what we’re able to do. We cannot rely solely on random chance to see us through. We must apply our minds to achieve our goals and be ready to accept, act on, and even embrace random chance when it happens. Reliance on luck becomes a problem when skill, ability, training, effort, and work are abandoned in favor of depending on the roll of the dice or the turn of a card. Fortune’s smile can be quite dear. To capitalize on randomness, you first have to put yourself out there, right smack in the random line of fire. This is risky. You can get pulled up short with bad luck or blessed with good luck, but the outcome remains unknown until the end of the event. Luck is defined by the aftermath of your actions. If it all works out and you got what you wanted, then hurray for you! Good luck! If it didn’t, learn from your mistakes so you can try again. Experience changes both our mental functioning (the way we think) and our neural functioning (the way our brain responds to our experiences). You can’t have one without the other. Every event you encounter in the world that you decide you have to deal with changes, either temporarily or permanently, the way you think and the way your neurons work. Memory is a relatively permanent change in the brain that is the result of experience. The experts have had a lot to say about why we feel lucky and how to increase the probability that we will be lucky in a given situation. In chapter 1, James Austin proposed four types of luck,

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each type a combination of hard work and random chance. When randomness is mixed with effort, movement, and preparation, our odds that the outcome will be interpreted as beneficial and lucky increase. Sarah Kessans and Emily Kohl were exceedingly lucky, embodying all four types of luck in their boating adventure. They both saw the Woodvale transatlantic race as an opportunity, not something to be avoided at all costs. They noticed the event and set about making the race a reality. Their personalities led them to interpret this dangerous race as an adventure, something desirable and exciting, not terrifying and potentially lethal. That spirit of adventure made entering the race to begin with much more likely. Both Austin and Wiseman would say that they embraced the randomness of the race, trusted their gut instincts (as well as established expert opinion) about how to prepare, prepared like mad, and expected a positive outcome—not just of the race but also of being stranded on an upturned boat in the middle of the Atlantic. Some of us carry talismans in our eternal effort to sway fortune, fate, and the gods in our favor. Psychologists suggest that believing in something as inherently illogical as luck, and in the power of a piece of jewelry to influence it, makes us feel less anxious. When we’re less anxious, we can devote more of our mental energy to solving the problem. Success is a feed-forward loop; it breeds itself, and we feel lucky. Joan Ginther got lucky because her persistence, preparation, and personality led her to see scratch-off lottery cards as an opportunity, not a waste of time, effort, and money. By dint of her study of statistics and probability, she was prepared to wait for the long-run outcome—to win she would have to scratch off more than just a handful of cards. Frano Selak survived seven attempts by random chance to bump him off. Was it good luck to have survived, or bad luck to

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have been involved in so many accidents? Selak interpreted the events in his life as bad luck, but the reporters telling the world about his cheating death found it to be remarkably good luck. Helmut and Erika Simon almost literally stumbled on Ötzi, the Ice Man, by random chance, and Hans Berger, James Olds, and Peter Milner had the perspicacity to notice that the answer to the questions they were asking might be in what went wrong rather than what went right. They were paying attention. As was Oskar Pfungst in his careful investigation of Clever Hans, which led to a deeper understanding of how expectation can affect what we see and what we know about the world, and how we interpret randomness. Luck is the way you face the randomness in the world. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, we had the power all along. If we are open to it, accepting, not anxious or afraid, willing to learn from mistakes and to change a losing game, we can benefit from randomness. We can gain a modicum of control over this aspect of life, even if we can’t control the universe on a large scale. Randomness will happen no matter what we do—chaos theory rules in our universe. Knowing how to roll with the punches; now that’s lucky.

GOOD LUCK, BAD LUCK, WHO KNOWS? There is time for one more story before I go. This one traces its roots back to the fourth century in China and the tradition of Taoism. Founded by the philosopher Lao Tzu, Taoism proposes that one can achieve happiness by living a simple, natural life and “becoming one with the unplanned rhythms of the universe.” Doesn’t that sound like random chance? These unplanned rhythms are called “the way” or “the Tao.”

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This story of a farmer illustrates the Taoist view of life, and it goes like this. An elderly, hard-working Chinese farmer and his son had a single horse. They used the horse to plow the field, to sow the seeds, to grow the crop, and to transport the crop to the market. The horse was essential for the farmer to earn his living. One morning the horse broke through the fence and ran away into the woods. When the neighbors found out that the only horse the farmer had ran away, they came to comfort him. They said: “Your only horse has run away just before the planting season. How will you till the land? How will you sow the seeds? This is unfortunate. This is bad luck.” The farmer replied: “Good luck, bad luck. Who knows?” A few days later the farmer’s horse returned from the woods along with two other wild horses. When the neighbors found out the news, they said: “Now you have three horses! You can till the land much faster with three horses. Maybe you can buy more land and sow more crops and make more money. Or you can sell the other two horses. Either way, you will be a rich man! This is good luck!” The wise farmer replied: “Good luck, bad luck. Who knows?” The next morning the farmer’s son started training the wild horses so they could help till the land. When attempting to mount one of the wild horses, he fell down and broke his leg. This was just before sowing season, and the son would not be able to help the farmer plant his crop. The neighbors came once again and commented: “This is really unfortunate. This is bad luck.” The wise farmer repeated: “Good luck, bad luck. Who knows?” A few days later the king’s men visited each village in the kingdom. A war had started between their kingdom and a neighboring enemy state. The king’s men were enlisting the eldest son from each family to join the army to help defeat the enemy state. When they came to the farmer’s house, they saw the son with

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the broken leg. He would not be of much use in the army, so they didn’t take him. He was the only eldest son in the entire village who was not forcibly taken by the king’s men to fight the war. The neighbors, some of them with teary eyes, came once again to the farmer and commented: “Your son breaking his leg was really fortunate. He is the only one who was not taken. What a stroke of good luck.” The farmer calmly replied: “Good luck, bad luck. Who knows?”

NOTES

1. WHAT IS LUCK? 1. Sarah Kessans, email message to author, May 21, 2014. 2. The Women’s Transatlantic Doubles Record in 2005 was held by Stephanie Brown and Jude Ellis in the Telecom Challenge 1 out of New Zealand. They rowed across the Atlantic Ocean in fifty days, seven hours, and zero minutes. 3. According to NASA, Hurricane Epsilon, November 29–December 8, 2005, was not only part of the record-breaking hurricane season of 2005 but is also the longest-lasting December hurricane on record. 4. Kessans, email. 5. Loma Grisby, Champ Clark, and Ellen Tumposky, “Very Lucky and Very Alive. Hit by a Huge Wave, Rescued by a Tall Ship,” People 65 no. 10 (March 2006): 101. 6. Kessans, email. 7. U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “What Is a Rogue Wave?,” last updated April 9, 2020, http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/ facts/roguewaves.html. 8. Kessans, email. 9. Oxford English Dictionary (compact ed., 1971), s.v. “luck.” 10. Margaret Rouse, “Random Numbers,” WhatIs.com, last updated September 2005, http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/random-numbers. 11. Wilhelm A. Wagenaar, “Generation of Random Sequences by Human Subjects: A Critical Review,” Psychological Bulletin 77 (1972): 65–72, doi .org/10.1037/h0032060.

1 9 61 . What Is Luck?

12. Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (New York: Pantheon, 2009), 170–71. 13. Stephen Jay Gould, “Glow, Big Glowworm,” in Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (New York: Norton, 2010), chap. 17, Kindle. 14. Gould, “Glow, Big Glowworm,” location 3953, Kindle. 15. Gould, “Glow, Big Glowworm,” location 7177, Kindle. 16. Jerzy Neyman and Egon S. Pearson, “On the Use and Interpretation of Certain Test Criteria for Purposes of Statistical Inference,” Biometrika 20A (1928): 175–240, 263–94, doi: 10.2307/2331945. 17. Carl Gustav Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (New York: Routledge, 2006), Kindle. 18. Peter Brugger, “From Haunted Brain to Haunted Science: A Cognitive Neuroscience View of Paranormal and Pseudoscientific Thought,” in Hauntings and Poltergeists: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, ed. James Houran and Rense Lange ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001), 204. 19. Michael Shermer, “Patternicity: Finding Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless Noise,” Scientific American, December 2008, doi: 10.2307/26000924, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/patternicity-finding-meaningful -patterns/. 20. Nouchine Hadjikhani, Kestutis Kveraga, Paulami Naik, and Seppo Ahlfors, “Early (M170) Activation of Face-Specific Cortex by FaceLike Objects,” NeuroReport 20 (2009): 403–7, doi: 10.1097/WNR .0b013e328325a8e1. 21. Michael Shermer, “Agenticity,” Scientific American 300 no. 6 ( June 2009): 36, doi:10.2307/26001376. 22. Nicolas Rescher, Luck: The Brilliant Randomness of Everyday Life (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995). 23. “Puget Sound Citizens Believe in Luck O’ the Irish: Residents Gear Up for Saint Patrick’s Day and Hope for a Little Green” (2013). Ipsos MarketQuest Survey, accessed March 20, 2014, http://www.ipsos-na .com/download/pr.aspx?id=12550. 24. David W. Moore, “One in Four Americans Superstitious: Younger People More Superstitious Than Older People,” Gallup, October 13, 2000, http://www.gallup.com/poll/2440/One-Four-Americans-Super-stitious .aspx. 25. James Austin, Chase, Chance and Creativity: The Lucky Art of Novelty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

2 . A B rief Histor y of Luck1 97

26. The odds are defined as the ratio of the number of ways to not draw the specific hand to the number of ways to draw it. There are four ways to draw a royal flush (10, J, Q, K, A all in the same suit) in a fair deck of cards, one for each of the four suits. There are 2,598,960 five-card hands possible in n! 52! = = 2,598,960 , a deck of fifty-two cards calculated as k! (n - k ) ! 5! ( 47!) so the odds against drawing a royal flush are 2,598,960 to 4 or 649,739 to 1. 27. Stuart W. Leslie, Boss Kettering (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 45. 28. “Louis Pasteur,” todayinsci.com, accessed January 15, 2021, https:// todayinsci.com/P/Pasteur_Louis/PasteurLouis-Quotations.htm. A special thank-you to my husband, Christopher Robinson McRae, for providing both the quote in French and the English translation. A professor of languages, he spoke five of them (French among them) and was my very own in-house wordsmith. 29. Austin, Chase, Chance and Creativity, 75.

2. A BRIEF HISTORY OF LUCK 1. Paul Weber, ”Mystery Surrounds 4-Time Texas Lotto Winner,” NBC News, July 13, 2010, https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna38229644. 2. John Wetenhall, “Who Is the Lucky Four-Time Lottery Winner: Mysterious Texas Woman has Won Over $20 Million in Lotteries,” ABC News, June 7, 2010, https://www.abcnews.com/id/11097894. 3. Vincent Trivett, “ ‘Lucky’ Woman Who Won Lottery Four Times Outed as Stanford University Statistics Ph.D.,” Business Insider, August 11, 2011, https://www.businessinsider.com/4-time-lottery-winner-not-exactly -lucky-2011-8; University of Hawaii, “Grains of Sand on All the Beaches of the Earth,” updated June 22, 2014; http://web.archive.org/web /20080120012722/http://www.hawaii.edu (christianity-science.gr); “US National Debt,” May 25, 2014, http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock; “Current World Population,” December, 28, 2020, https://www.worldmeters .info/world-population/. 4. Nathanial Rich, “The Luckiest Woman on Earth: Three Ways to Win the Lottery,” Harper’s, August 2011, 64. 5. Tom Leonard, “She’s the Maths Professor Who’s Hit a Multi-Million Scratchcard Jackpot an Astonishing FOUR Times . . . Has This Woman

1 9 82 . A B rief Histor y of Luck

6.

7. 8.

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10.

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Worked Out How to Win the Lottery?,” Daily Mail, August 12, 2011, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2025069/Joan-Ginther -Maths-professor-hits-multi-million-scratchcard-lottery-jackpot-4-times .html; Rachel Quigley, “ ‘Lucky’ Woman Who Won Lottery Four Times Outed as Stanford University Statistics PhD,” Daily Mail, August 9, 2011, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2023514/Joan-R-Ginther -won-lottery-4-times-Stanford-University-statistics-PhD.html; Tom Leonard, Daily Mail, August 12, 2011. Richard Connelly, “Joan Ginther, Serial Lottery Winner: Lucky or a Genius Who Gamed the System?,” Houston Press, August 9, 2011, http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/2011/08/texas_lottery_winner _genius.php. Justin L. Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (New York: Altamira Press, 2010), 4, 31. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (London: Neale, 1911), s.v. “prayer,” http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/972. Bierce wrote The Devil’s Dictionary (originally titled The Cynic’s Word Book) as a comic reference work, inspired by Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. His definitions reflect his rather sardonic view of humanity and often point out our foolishness and our foibles. Bierce himself is the unlucky center of one of the greatest mysteries of American literature. In 1913, at the age of seventy-one, Bierce embarked on a tour of the Civil War battlefields he’d fought in as a member of the Ninth Indiana Infantry Regiment. For reasons unknown, Bierce apparently extended the tour, crossing over into Mexico, where he vanished without a trace. Rollo May, Freedom and Destiny (New York: Norton, 1999), http:// books.google.com/books/about/Freedom_and_Destiny.html?id =JbXdTiHUnzsC. Richard W. Bargdill, “Fate and Destiny: Some Historical Distinctions Between the Concepts,” Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 26 (2006): 205, doi: 10.1037/h0091275. Jean Clottes, “Paleolithic Cave Art in France,” Bradshaw Foundation, accessed May 26, 2014, www.bradshawfoundation.com/clottes. David J. Lewis-Williams and Jean Clottes, “The Mind in the Cave— the Cave in the Mind: Altered Consciousness in the Upper Paleolithic,” Anthropology of Consciousness 9 (1998): 13–21.

2 . A B rief Histor y of Luck1 9 9

13. David J. Lewis-Williams and T. A. Dowson, “On Vision and Power in the Neolithic: Evidence from the Decorated Monuments,” Current Anthropology 34 (1993): 55–65. 14. Edward Merrin, “The Olmec World of Michael Coe,” November 10, 2011, http://www.edwardmerrin.com/2011/11/Olmec-world-of-michael-coe .html. 15. Michael D. Coe and Rex Koontz, Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002). 16. Coe and Koontz. Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs. 17. B. A. Robinson, “Religions of the World. Vodun (a.k.a. Voodoo) and Related Religions,” last updated February 7, 2010, http://www.religious -tolerance.org/voodoo.htm. 18. Douglas J. Falen, “Vodun, Spiritual Insecurity, and Religious Importation in Benin,” Journal of African Religion 46 (2016): 453–83, at 456. 19. Jaco Beyers, “What Is Religion? An African Understanding,” Theological Studies 66 no. 1 (2010): 1–8, doi: 10.4102/hts.v66i1.341; Falen, “Vodun, Spiritual Insecurity, and Religious Importation in Benin.” 20. Per Ankh Group, “Egyptian Art,” 2005, http://www.perankhgroup.com /egyptian_art.htm. 21. Geraldine Pinch, Handbook of Egyptian Mythology (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2002). 22. Egyptian-Scarabs, “Weighing of the Heart Ceremony,” 2008, http:// www.egyptian-scarabs.co.uk/weighing_of_the_heart.htm. 23. Pinch, Handbook of Egyptian Mythology. 24. Greek Gods and Goddesses, “Tyche,” September 13, 2018, https:// greekgodsandgoddesses.net. 25. Jona Lendering, “Mural Crown,” Livius.org, last modified September 24, 2020, https://www.livius.org/articles/concept/mural-crown/. 26. Greek Gods and Goddesses, “Morai,” October 23, 2019, https://Greek godsandgoddesses.net. 27. R.A. L. Fell, Etruria and Rome (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1924). 28. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Fate: Greek and Roman Mythology,” April 26, 2019, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Fate-Greek-and-Roman -mythology. 29. William Smith, ed., Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, 2nd ed. (Boston: Little Brown, 1859): 1051–52.

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30. 1 John 2–17, Bible, revised standard version. 31. N. S. Gill, “Who Was the Roman Goddess Fortuna?,” ThoughtCo, last updated November 5,2019,https://www.thoughtco.com//roman-goddess -fortuna-118378. 32. Temple Purohit,“Why is Lakshmi and Ganesha Worshipped Together?,” October 13, 2016, https://www.templepurohit.com/lakshmi-ganesha -worshipped-together/; Upinder Singh, A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century (Uttar Pradesh, India: Pearson Education in South Asia, 2009). 33. Lizhu Fan and Chen Na, “Resurgence of Indigenous Religion in China,” University of California, San Diego, 2011, 1–39, http://fudan-uc.ucsd .edu/_files/201306_China_Watch_Fan_Chen. 34. Fan and Na, “Resurgence of Indigenous Religion in China,” 25. 35. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Caishen: Chinese Deity,” September 16, 2019, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Caishen; “Tsai Shen—God of Wealth and Prosperity,” 2016, https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld /Chinese_Customs/Tsai_Shen. 36. Ulrich Theobald, “Religions in China Fu Lu Shou Sanxing: The Three Stars of Wealth, Status and Longevity,” China Knowledge, December 22, 2012, http://www.chinaknowledge.de/Literature/Religion/persons -sanxing.html. 37. “Norns,” Mythology.net, October 26, 2016, https://norse-mythology .net/norns-the-goddesses-of-fate-in-norse-mythology/. 38. Aaron C. Kay, Danielle Gaucher, Ian McGregor, and Kyle Nash, “Religious Belief as Compensatory Control,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 14 (2010): 37–48, doi: 10.1177/1088868309353750. 39. Scott Atran and Ara Norenzayan, “Religious Evolutionary Landscape: Counterintuition, Commitment, Compassion, Communion,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (2004): 713. 40. Kay et al., “Religious Belief as Compensatory Control,” 216.

3. LUCK AND PSYCHOLOGY: ON BEING A SOCIAL ANIMAL 1. Chris Littlechild, “Luckiest or Unluckiest Man in the World?,” Ripley’s, August 20, 2018, https://www.ripleys.com/weird-news/unluckiest-man/. 2. Hauke Von Goos, “Stirb langsam: Wie ein kroatischer Musiklehrer sieben Unglücke überlebte” [Die hard: How a Croatian music teacher

3 . Luck and Psychology: On Being a Social Animal 201

3.

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6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

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outlived unlucky seven], Der Spiegel, June 15, 2003, https://www.spiegel .de/panorama/stirb-langsam-a-f8cfd7e5-0002-0001-0000-000027390339; “Frano Selak—Truly the World’s (Un)Luckiest Man,” Before It’s News, January 2, 2013, http://beforeitsnews.com/watercooler-topics/2013/01 /frano-selak-truly-the-worlds-unluckiest-man-2431330.html. Andrew Hough, “Frano Selak: ‘World’s Luckiest Man’ Gives Away His Lottery Fortune,” Telegraph, May 14, 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk /news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7721985/Frano-Selak-worlds-luckiest -man-gives-away-his-lottery-fortune.html. Hough, “Frano Selak.” Laura A. King, “Social Psychology,” chap. 13 in The Science of Psychology: An Appreciative View (New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2008), 432. Jean-Paul Sartre, “No Exit,” in No Exit and Three Other Plays, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 45. Michael Tomasello, “The Ultra Social Animal,” European Journal of Social Psychology 44 (2014): 187–94. King, “Social Psychology.” Harold H. Kelley, “The Process of Causal Attribution,” American Psychologist 28 (1973): 107. Fritz Heider, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations (New York: Wiley, 1958). Heider, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, 79. Bernard Weiner, “An Attributional Theory of Achievement Motivation and Emotion,” Psychological Review 92 (1985): 548–73. Bernard Weiner, “The Development of an Attribution-Based Theory of Motivation: A History of Ideas,” Educational Psychologist 45 (2010): 32. Heider, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, chapter 6, 164–73. Michael S. Steinberg and Kenneth A. Dodge, “Attributional Bias in Aggressive Adolescent Boys and Girls,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 1, no. 4 (1983): 312–21. American Psychological Association, “Hindsight Bias—Not Just a Convenient Memory Enhancer but an Important Part of an Efficient Memory System” (press release), 2000, http://www.apa.org/news/press /releases/2000/05/hindsight.aspx. American Psychological Association, “Hindsight Bias,” para. 1. Edward E. Jones and Victor A. Harris, “The Attribution of Attitudes,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 3 (1967): 1–24.

2023 . Luck and Psychology: On Being a Social Animal

19. Gideon B. Keren and Willem A. Wagenaar, “On the Psychology of Playing Blackjack: Normative and Descriptive Considerations with Implications for Decision Theory,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 114 (1985): 66. 20. Heider, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, 91. 21. Karl Halvor Teigen, “How Good Is Good Luck? The Role of Counterfactual Thinking in the Perception of Lucky and Unlucky Events,” European Journal of Social Psychology 25 (1995): 281–302. 22. Nicolas Rescher, Luck, the Brilliant Randomness of Everyday Life (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995) 32. 23. Karl Halvor Teigen, “Luck: The Art of the Near Miss,” Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 37 (1996): 156–71. 24. Keren and Wagenaar, “On the Psychology of Playing Blackjack,” 66. 25. Keren and Wagenaar, “On the Psychology of Playing Blackjack,” 152. 26. Teigen, “Luck: The Art of the Near Miss.” 27. Matthew S. Isaac and Aaron R. Brough, “Judging a Part by the Size of the Whole: The Category Size Bias in Probability Judgments,” Journal of Consumer Research 41 (2014): 310–25. 28. Karl Halvor Teigen, “When a Small Difference Makes a Big Difference: Counterfactual Thinking and Luck,” in The Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking, ed. David R. Mandel, Denis J. Hilton, and Patrizia Castellani (London: Routledge, 2005), location 3206, Kindle. 29. Teigen, “How Good Is Good Luck?,” 288. 30. Daniel Kahneman and Dale Miller, “Norm Theory: Comparing Reality to Its Alternatives,” Psychological Review 93 (1986): 136. 31. Neal J. Roese, “Counterfactual Thinking,” Psychological Bulletin 12 (1997): 133–48. 32. Karl Halvor Teigen, Pia C. Evensen, Dimitrij K. Samoilow, and Karin B. Vatne, “Good Luck and Bad Luck: How to Tell the Difference,” European Journal of Social Psychology 29 (1999): 981. 33. Joanne McCabe, “At 27 Foot Is This the World’s Biggest Icicle?,” Metro, March 5, 2010, http://metro.co.uk/2010/03/05/is-27-foot-icicle-in-scotland -the-worlds-biggest-146526/. 34. Dale T. Miller and Saku Gunasegaram, “Temporal Order and the Perceived Mutability of Events: Implications for Blame Assignment,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 59 (1990): 1111–18. 35. Teigen, “Luck: The Art of the Near Miss.” 36. Teigen, “Luck: The Art of the Near Miss.”

4 . Luck and Psychology: Magical Thinking203

4. LUCK AND PSYCHOLOGY: MAGICAL THINKING 1. Brenda Fowler, Iceman: Uncovering the Life and Times of a Prehistoric Man Found in an Alpine Glacier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 2. W. Ambach, E. Ambach, W. Tributsch, R. Henn, and H. Unterdorfer, “Corpses Released from Glacier Ice: Glaciological and Forensic,” Journal of Wilderness Medicine 3 (1992): 372–76. 3. Fowler, Iceman, 7. 4. Bob Cullen, “Testimony from the Iceman,” Smithsonian 33 (2003): 42–50. 5. David Leveille, “Researchers May Have Cracked the Case of How Ötzi the Iceman Died,” The World, April 6, 2017, https://www.pri.org/stories /2017-04-06/researchers-may-have-cracked-case-how-tzi-iceman -died. 6. “Annual net ablation” or melting of glacial ice in the Oetztal Alps was especially high in 1958, 1964, 1982, and in 1991 when Ötzi was discovered. Ambach et al., “Corpses Released from Glacier Ice.” 7. Fowler, Iceman, 36. 8. H. V. F. Winston, Howard Carter and the Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamun, rev. ed. (London: Barzan, 2007). 9. “Times Man Views Splendors of Tomb of Tutankhamen,” New York Times, December 22, 1922. 10. Winston, Howard Carter. 11. Tour Egypt, “Egypt: The Curse of the Mummy,” accessed September 27, 2014, http://www.touregypt.net/myths/curseof.htm; Wikipedia, s.v. “Curse of the Pharaohs,” last modified December 2, 2020, http://en .wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_the_pharaohs. 12. “Is There a Curse of Ötzi?,” magonia.com, accessed December 10, 2020, oetzi-iceman-curse.pdf. 13. “Two Famous Diamonds,” Hawke’s Bay Herald, April 25, 1888. 14. Wikipedia, s.v. “Hope Diamond,” last modified November 28, 2020, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope_Diamond. 15. “Great Omar,” accessed September 12, 2014, http://cool.conservation-us .org/don///dt/dt1633.html. 16. Wikipedia, s.v. “Curse of the Bambino,” last modified November 18, 2020, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_the_Bambino. 17. Wikipedia, s.v. “Curse of the Billy Goat,” last modified November 26, 2020, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_the_Billy_Goat.

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18. “Bunkered Champions,” The Economist, June 11, 1994, 92; Wikipedia, s.v. “Sports Related Curses,” last modified December 7, 2020, http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports-related_curses. 19. Richard Wiseman, “UK Superstition Survey,” 2003, http://www.rich -ardwiseman.com/resources/superstition_report.pdf. 20. David W. Moore, “One in Four Americans Superstitious: Younger People More Superstitious Than Older People,” Gallup, October 13, 2000, http://www.gallup.com/poll/2440/One-Four-Americans-Super -stitious.aspx. 21. Karlyn Bowman, “Are Americans Superstitious?,” Forbes, May 8, 2009, http://www.forbes.com/2009/03/06/superstitious-ufo-alien-conspiracy -opinions-columnists-superstition.html. 22. Peter Aldhous, “Ten Sports Stars and Their Bizarre Pre-Game Rituals,” New Scientist, May 19, 2009, https://www.newscientist.com/article /dn17158-ten-sports-stars-and-their-bizarre-pre-game-rituals/. 23. Joseph Lin, “Top Ten Sports Superstitions,” Time, June 9, 2010, http:// keepingscore.blogs.time.com/2011/10/19/top-10-sports-superstitions /slide/the-ritual/. 24. B.  F. Skinner, “  ‘Superstition’ in the Pigeon,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 38 (1948): 168–72, at 171. 25. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 12. 26. Psychological Dictionary (April 7, 2013), s.v. “What Is Magical Thinking?,” http://psychologydictionary.org/magical-thinking/. 27. Matthew Hutson, The Seven Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane (New York: Penguin Books, 2012). 28. Paul Rozin, Linda Millman, and Carol Nemeroff, “Operation of the Laws of Sympathetic Magic in Disgust and Other Domains,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 50 (1986): 703–12. 29. Emily Pronin, Daniel Wegner, Kimberly McCarthy, and Sylvia Rodriguez, “Everyday Magical Powers: The Role of Apparent Mental Causation in the Overestimation of Personal Influence,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 91 (2006): 218–31. 30. Pronin et al., “Everyday Magical Powers,” 229. 31. Jennifer A. Whitson and Adam D. Galinsky, “Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception,” Science 322 (2008): 115–17, at 117.

4 . Luck and Psychology: Magical Thinking205

32. George Gmelch, “Baseball Magic,” Elysian Fields Quarterly 11 no. 3 (2002): 36. 33. Jeffrey M. Rudski and Ashleigh Edwards, “Malinowski Goes to College: Factors Influencing Students’ Use of Ritual and Superstition,” Journal of General Psychology 134 (2007): 389–403. 34. Timothy J. Gallagher and Jerry M. Lewis, “Rationalists, Fatalists, and the Modern Superstition: Test Taking in Introductory Sociology,” Sociological Inquiry 71 (2001): 1–12. 35. Ellen J. Langer, “The Illusion of Control,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32 (1975): 311–28. 36. Stuart Vyse, Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 37. Aaron C. Kay, Jennifer A. Whitson, Danielle Gaucher, and Adam D. Galinsky, “Compensatory Control: Achieving Order Through the Mind, Our Institutions, and the Heavens,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 18 no. 5 (2009): 264–68, at 264–65. 38. Kay et al., “Compensatory Control,” 267. 39. Michaéla C. Schippers and Paul A. M. Van Lange, “The Psychological Benefits of Superstitious Rituals in Top Sport: A Study Among Top Sportspersons,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 36 (2006): 2532–53. 40. Keith D. Markman, Matthew N. McMullen, and Ronald A. Elizaga, “Counterfactual Thinking, Persistence and Performance: A Test of the Reflection and Evaluation Model,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44 (2008): 421–28. 41. Liz Day and John Maltby, “Belief in Good Luck and Psychological Well-Being: The Mediating Role of Optimism and Irrational Beliefs,” Journal of Psychology 137 (2003): 99–110. 42. John Maltby, Liz Day, Diana G. Pinto, Rebecca A. Hogan, and Alex M. Wood, “Beliefs in Being Unlucky and Deficits in Executive Functioning,” Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013): 137–47. 43. Lysann Damisch, Barbara Stoberock, and Thomas Mussweiler, “Keep Your Fingers Crossed! How Superstition Improves Performance,” Psychological Science 21 (2010): 1014–20. 44. Damisch et al., “Keep Your Fingers Crossed!,” 1019. 45. Robert Calin-Jageman at Dominion University in Illinois and his colleagues have tried to replicate Damisch’s study using students in the United States but have been unable to demonstrate any significant

20 64 . Luck and Psychology: Magical Thinking

change in putting performance. Calin-Jageman is currently expanding his investigation to include the other four tasks that Damisch investigated. He tells me that, so far, he has been unable to replicate Damisch’s results. Several of my students attempted to replicate the original German study, but we were also unable to replicate the results. 46. Laura J. Kray, Linda G. George, Katie A. Liljenquist, Adam D. Galinsky, Philip E. Tetlock, and Neal J. Roese, “From What Might Have Been to What Must Have Been: Counterfactual Thinking Creates Meaning,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 98 (2010): 106–18. 47. Kray et al., “From What Might Have Been to What Must Have Been,” 109.

5. LUCK AND YOUR BRAIN: PART I 1. Clifford F. Rose, “Cerebral Localization in Antiquity,” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences (2009) 18: 239–47. 2. Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, s.v. “Berger, Hans,” 2008, http://www.encyclopedia.com. Berger’s mother, Anna Rückert, was the daughter of Friedrich Rückert (also known by his pseudonym “Freimund Raimar”), a German poet who was well known for his translations of oriental literature and philosophy. 3. faqs.org, “Hans Berger Biography (1873–1941),” accessed October 1, 2014, http://www.faqs.org/health/bios/26/Hans-Berger.htmlixzz3EpoSxvLr. 4. nitum, “Biography of Hans Berger,” September 29, 2012, http://nitum. wordpress.com/2012/09/29/biography-of-hans-berger/. 5. W. Grey Walter, The Living Brain (New York: Norton, 1963). 6. Florin Amzica and Fernando H. Lopes da Silva, “Cellular Substrates of Brain Rhythms,” chap. 2 in Niedermeyer’s Electroecephalography, 7th ed., ed. Donald L. Schomer and Fernando H. Lopes da Silva (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 20–62. 7. Amzica and Lopes da Silva, “Cellular Substrates of Brain Rhythms,” 24–54. 8. Susan Savage-Rumbaugh and Roger Lewin, Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind (New York: Wiley, 1996). 9. Malcom MacMillan, “Phineas Gage—Unravelling the Myth,” The Psychologist 21 (2008): 823–31. 10. Malcom MacMillan, An Odd Kind of Fame: Stories of Phineas Gage (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 93.

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11. MacMillan, “Phineas Gage—Unravelling the Myth,” 829. 12. Peter Raitu and Ion-Florin Talos, “The Tale of Phineas Gage, Digitally Remastered,” New England Journal of Medicine 351 (2004): e21, doi: 10 .1056/NEJMicm031024. 13. “Cognitive Functions and Organization of the Cerebral Cortex,” in Neuroscience, 6th ed., ed. Dale Purves, George J. Augustine, David Fitzpatrick, William C. Hall, Anthony-Samuel LaMantia, Richard D. Mooney, Michael L. Platt, and Leonard E. White (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 627–42. 14. Joaquin M. Fuster, The Prefrontal Cortex, 4th ed. (Amsterdam: Academic Press, 2008). 15. Martijn C. Arms, Keith Conners, and Helena C. Kraemer, “A Decade of EEG Theta/Beta Ratio Research in ADHD: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Attention Disorders 17 (2013): 374–83, doi: 10.1177/1087054712460087. 16. Geir Ogrim, Juri Kropotov, and Knut Hestad, “The Quantitative EEG Theta/Beta Ratio in Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Normal Controls: Sensitivity, Specificity and Behavioral Correlates,” Psychiatry Research 198 (2012): 482–88. 17. “ADHD Brain Waves are Different” January 5, 2021, http://simplywell -being.com/being-adhd/adhd-brain-waves-are-different. 18. Bob Walsh. “Why Are Some People More Hypnotizable?,” January 30, 2009, http://ezinearticles.com/?Why-Are-Some-People-More-Hypnotizable ?&id=1938666. 19. Graham A. Jamieson and Adrian P. Burgess, “Hypnotic Induction Is Followed by State-Like Changes in the Organization of EEG Functional Connectivity in the Theta and Beta Frequency Bands in HighHypnotically Susceptible Individuals,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (2014): article 528, doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00528. 20. Antoine Bechara, Antonio R. Damasio, Hanna Damasio, and Steven W. Anderson, “Insensitivity to Future Consequences Following Damage to Human Prefrontal Cortex,” Cognition 50 (2014): 7–15. 21. Stijn A. A. Massar, J. Leon Kenemans, and Dennis J. L. G. Schutter. “Resting-State EEG Theta Activity and Risk Learning: Sensitivity to Reward or Punishment?,” International Journal of Psychophysiology 91 (2014): 172–77. 22. Massar et al., “Resting-State EEG Theta Activity and Risk Learning,” 175.

20 85 . Luck and Your B rain: Par t I

23. Gideon B. Keren and Willem A. Wagenaar, “On the Psychology of Playing Blackjack: Normative and Descriptive Considerations with Implications for Decision Theory,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 114 (1985): 133–58. 24. Kendra Cherry. “What Is Personality?,” Verywell Mind, August 12, 2020, https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-personality-2795416. 25. Steven B. Most, Marvin M. Chun, and David M. Widders, “Attentional Rubbernecking: Cognitive Control and Personality in EmotionInduced Blindness,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 12 (2005): 654–61. 26. Peter Putnam, Bart Verkuil, Elsa Arias-Garcia, Ioanna Pantazi, and Charlotte van Schie, “EEG Theta/Beta Ratio as a Potential Biomarker for Attentional Control and Resilience Against Deleterious Effects of Stress on Attention,” Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience 14 (2014): 782–91. 27. Sonia J. Bishop, “Trait Anxiety and Impoverished Prefrontal Control of Attention,” Nature Neuroscience 12 (2009): 92–98. 28. Aron K. Barbey, Frank Krueger, and Jordan Grafman, “Structured Event Complexes in the Medial Prefrontal Cortex Support Counterfactual Representations for Future Planning,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, B 364 (2009): 1291–1300. 29. Liza Day and John Maltby, “With Good Luck: Belief in Good Luck and Cognitive Planning,” Personality and Individual Differences 39 (2005): 1217–26. 30. Lyn Y. Abramson, Gerald I. Metalsky, and Lauren B. Alloy, “Hopelessness Depression: A Theory-Based Subtype of Depression,” Psychological Review 96 (1989): 358–72. 31. Robin Nusslock, Alexander J. Shackman, Eddie Harmon-Jones, Lauren B. Alloy, James A. Coan, and Lyn Y. Abramson, “Cognitive Vulnerability and Frontal Brain Asymmetry: Common Predictors of First Prospective Depressive Episode,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 120 (2011): 497–503.

6. LUCK AND YOUR BRAIN: PART II 1. Richard F. Thompson, “James Olds,” chap. 16 in Biographical Memoirs (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1999), 247, https://www .nap.edu/read/9681/chapter/16262.

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2. Tim O’Keefe, “Epicurus (341–271 B.C.E),” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed March 16, 2016, https://www.iep.utm.edu/epicur/. 3. William Sweet, “Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832),” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed March 16, 2016, https://www.iep.utm.edu /bentham/. 4. Peter M. Milner, “The Discovery of Self-Stimulation and Other Stories,” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 13, no. 2–3 (1989): 61, doi:10 .1016/S0149-7634(89)80013-2. 5. Milner, “The Discovery of Self-Stimulation,” 62. 6. Steven J. Luck, An Introduction to the Event-Related Potential Technique, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). 4, 12. 7. Jaime Martin del Campo Rios, Giorgio Fuggetta, and John Maltby, “Beliefs in Being Unlucky and Deficits in Executive Functioning: An ERP Study,” PeerJ ( June 2015): e1007, doi: 10.7717/peerj.1007. 8. William J. Gehring, Brian Goss, Michael G. H. Coles, David E. Meyer, and Emanuel Donchin, “The Error Related Negativity,” Perspectives in Psychological Science 13, no. 2 (2017): 200–204. 9. George Bush, Phan Luu, and Michael I. Posner, “Cognitive and Emotional Influences in Anterior Cingulate Cortex,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4, no. 6 (2000): 215–22. 10. William J. Gehring, Yanni Liu, Joseph M. Orr, and Joshua Carp, “The Error-Related Negativity (ERN/Ne),” in The Oxford Handbook of Event-Related Potential Components, ed. Steven J. Luck and Emily S. Kappenman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 231–91; Michael Falkenstein, Jörg Hoorman, and Joachim Hohnsbein, “Inhibition-related ERP Components: Variation with Modality, Age and Time-on-task,” Journal of Psychophysiology 16 (2002): 167–75. 11. Michael Inzlicht, Ian McGregor, Jacob B. Hirsh, and Kyle Nash, “Neural Markers of Religious Conviction,” Psychological Science 20 (March 2009): 385–92, at 386. 12. David M. Amodio, John T. Jost, Sarah L. Masters, and Cindy M. Yee, “Neurocognitive Correlates of Liberalism and Conservatism,” Nature Neuroscience 10 (2007): 1246–47, doi: 10.1038/nn1979. 13. Nathalie Andre, “Good Fortune, Opportunity and Their Lack: How Do Agents Perceive Them?,” Personality and Individual Differences 40 (2006): 1461–72; del Campo Rios et al., “Beliefs in Being Unlucky and Deficits in Executive Functioning.”

21 06 . Luck and Your B rain: Par t II

14. G. Rizzolatti, R. Camarda, L. Fogassi, M. Gentilucci, G. Luppino, and M. Matelli, “Functional Organization of Inferior Area 6 in the Macaque Monkey. II. Area F5 and the Control of Distal Movements,” Experimental Brain Research 71 (1988): 491–507. 15. G.  di Pelligrino, L. Fadiga, L. Fogassi, V. Gallese, and G. Rizzolatti, “Understanding Motor Events: A Neurophysiological Study,” Experimental Brain Research 91(1992): 176–80, at 179. 16. Roy Mukamel, Arne D. Ekstrom, Jonas Kaplan, Marco Iacoboni, and Itzhak Fried, “Single-Neuron Responses in Humans During Execution and Observation of Actions,” Current Biology 20 (2010): 750–56. 17. Gregory Hickok, The Myth of Motor Neurons: The Real Neuroscience of Communication and Cognition (New York: Norton, 2014). 18. di Pelligrino et al., “Understanding Motor Events,” 179. 19. Hickok, The Myth of Motor Neurons, 231. 20. Erhan Oztop and Michael A. Arbib, “Schema Design and Implementation of the Grasp-Related Mirror Neuron System,” Biological Cybernetics 96 (2007): 9–38. 21. Suresh D. Muthukumaraswamy and Krish D. Singh, “Modulation of the Human Mirror Neuron System During Cognitive Activity,” Psychophysiology 45 (2008): 896–905. 22. Muthukumaraswamy and Singh, “Modulation of Human Mirror,” 901. 23. Fumi Katsuki and Christos Constantinidis, “Bottom-Up and TopDown Attention: Different Processes and Overlapping Neural System,” The Neuroscientist 20, no. 5 (2014): 509–21. 24. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (Digireads.com, June 2019). 25. Marc Hauser, “Humaniqueness and the Illusion of Cultural Variation,” in The Seeds of Humanity,Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Princeton University, November 12, 2008, https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents /a-to-z/h/Hauser_08.pdf.

7. HOW TO GET LUCKY 1. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, accessed May 1, 2019, http:// darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F373&viewtype=side &pageseq=1. 2. Oskar Pfungst, Clever Hans. The Horse of Mr. Von Osten, trans. Carl L. Rahn, 245, suppl. material Carl Stumpf, “Mr. Von Osten’s Method of

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Instruction” (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), Kindle; Laasya Samhita and Hans J. Gross, “ ‘The Clever Hans Phenomenon’ Revisited,” Communicative and Integrative Biology 6, no. 6 (2013): e27122-1–3. Robert C. Tryon, “Genetic Differences in Maze-Learning Ability in Rats,” 39th Yearbook, National Society for Studies in Education 1 (1940): 111–19. Robert Rosenthal and Kermit L. Fode, “The Effect of Experimenter Bias on the Performance of the Albino Rat,” Behavioral Science 8 (1963): 183–89. Richard Wiseman, The Luck Factor (London: Arrow Books, 2004). Michael W. Eysenck, Nazanin Derakshan, Rita Santos, and Manuel G. Calvo, “Anxiety and Cognitive Performance: Attentional Control Theory,” Emotion 7 (2007): 336–53. Laurent Itti, “Visual Salience,” Scholarpedia 2, no. 9 (2007): 3327, http:// www.scholarpedia.org/article/Visual_salience. Fumi Katsuki and Christos Constantinidis, “Bottom-Up and TopDown Attention: Different Processes and Overlapping Neural Systems,” The Neuroscientist 20, no. 5 (2004): 509–21. Earl K. Miller and Timothy J. Buschman, “Cortical Circuits for the Control of Attention,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 23, no. 2 (2013): 216–22. Katsuki and Constantinidis, “Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention,” 514. Tobias Teichert, Dian Yu, and Vincent P. Ferrera, “Performance Monitoring in Monkey Frontal Eye Field,” Journal of Neuroscience 34, no. 5 (2014): 1657–71. Katsuki and Constantinidis, “Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention,” 518. Kirsten G. Volz and D. Yves von Cramon, “What Neuroscience Can Tell About Intuitive Processes in the Context of Perceptual Discovery,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 18, no. 12 (2006): 2077–87, at 2077. Phan Luu, Alexandra Geyer, Cali Fidopiastis, Gwendolyn Campbell, Tracey Wheelers, Joseph Cohn, and Don M. Tucker, “Reentrant Processing in Intuitive Perception,” PloS ONE 5, no. 3 (2010): e9523. Kirsten G. Volz, Rudolf Rubsamen, and D. Yves von Cramon, “Cortical Regions Activated by the Subjective Sense of Perceptual Coherence of Environmental Sounds: A Proposal for a Neuroscience of Intuition,” Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience 8, no. 3 (2008): 318–28, at 320.

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16. Volz, Rubsamen, and von Cramon, “Cortical Regions Activated,” 319. 17. Jaoquin M. Fuster, The Prefrontal Cortex, 4th ed. (London: Elsevier Academic Press, 2008). 18. Fuster, The Prefrontal Cortex. 19. Fuster, The Prefrontal Cortex, 189–90. 20. John Maltby, Liz Day, Diana G. Pinto, Rebecca A. Hogan, and Alex M. Woods, “Beliefs in Being Unlucky and Deficits in Executive Functioning,” Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013): 137–47. 21. You’ve probably noticed that there’s a bit of a chicken and the egg problem here. Are people who see themselves as unlucky unwilling to apply the full force of their cognitive abilities to a problem (“Why should I bother to try to get what I want, I’m just going to fail anyway”), or are people with limited cognitive abilities more likely to fail and so more likely to see themselves as unlucky? Which comes first, the belief in being unlucky or the problem with cognitive ability? Maltby left separating this chicken from her egg for another study. 22. Liz Day and John J. Maltby, “With Good Luck: Belief in Good Luck and Cognitive Planning,” Personality and Individual Differences 39 (2005): 1217–26. 23. Jaime Martin del Campo Rios, Giorgio Fuggetta, and John Maltby, “Beliefs in Being Unlucky and Deficits in Executive Functioning: An ERP Study,” PeerJ 3 (2015): e1007, doi 10.7717/peerj.1007. 24. Marie T. Banich, “Executive Function: The Search for an Integrated Account,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 18, no. 2 (2009): 89–94.

8. FORTUNE’S EXPENSIVE SMILE 1. Lysann Damisch, Barbara Stoberock, and Thomas Mussweiler, “Keep Your Fingers Crossed! How Superstition Improves Performance,” Psychological Science 21 (2010): 1014–20. 2. Robert J. Calin-Jageman and Tracey L. Caldwell, “Replication of the Superstition and Performance Study by Damisch, Stoberock, and Mussweiler, 2010,” Social Psychology 45 (2010): 239–45. 3. R. Nicolas Carleton, “Fear of the Unknown: One Fear to Rule Them All?,” Journal of Anxiety Disorders 41 (2016): 5–21, at 5.

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4. Celeste Kidd and Benjamin Y. Hayden, “The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity,” Neuron 88, no. 3 (2015): 449–60. 5. Matthew D. Liberman, Naomi I. Eisenberger, Molly J. Crockett, Sabrina M. Ton, Jennifer H. Pfeifer, and Baldwin M. Way, “Putting Feelings Into Words: Affect Labeling Disrupts Amygdala Activity in Response to Affective Stimuli,” Psychological Science 18 (2007): 421–28. 6. Nassim Nicolas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (New York: Random House, 2005), 248, 249. 7. Elizabeth Pollard, Clifford Rosenberg, and Robert Tignor. Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the World: From the Beginnings of Humankind to the Present, vol. 1, concise ed. (New York: Norton, 2015). 8. Tushar Vakil, “Good Luck. Bad Luck. Who Knows?,” November 14, 2018, https://www.tusharvakil.com/2018/11/14/the-zen-story-good-luck-bad -luck-who-knows-and-the-lesson/.

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CHAPTER 1: WHAT IS LUCK? Austin, James. Chase, Chance and Creativity: The Lucky Art of Novelty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Brugger, Peter. “From Haunted Brain to Haunted Science: A Cognitive Neuroscience View of Paranormal and Pseudoscientific Thought.” In Hauntings and Poltergeists: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, ed. James Houran and Rense Lange. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001. Gould, Stephen Jay. “Glow, Big Glowworm.” In Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History, chap. 17. New York: Norton, 2010. Kindle. Grisby, Loma., Champ Clark, and Ellen Tumposky. “Very Lucky and Very Alive. Hit by a Huge Wave, Rescued by a Tall Ship.” People 65 no. 10 (March 2006): 101. Hadjikhani, Nouchine, Kestutis Kveraga, Paulami Naik, and Seppo Ahlfors. “Early (M170) Activation of Face-Specific Cortex by Face-Like Objects.” NeuroReport 20 (2009): 403–7. doi: 10.1097/WNR.0b013e328325a8e1. Jung, Carl Gustav. Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. New York: Routledge, 2006. Kindle. Leslie, Stuart W. Boss Kettering. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. “Louis Pasteur.” Today in Science, accessed January 10, 2001. https://todayinsci .com/P/Pasteur_Louis/PasteurLouis-Quotations.htm. Mlodinow, Leonard. The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. New York: Pantheon, 2009.

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CHAPTER 7: HOW TO GET LUCKY Banich, Marie T. “Executive Function: The Search for an Integrated Account.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 18, no. 2 (2009): 89–94.

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CHAPTER 8: FORTUNE’S EXPENSIVE SMILE Calin-Jageman, Robert J., and Tracey L. Caldwell. “Replication of the Superstition and Performance Study by Damisch, Stoberock and Mussweiler, 2010.” Social Psychology 45 (2010): 239–45. Carleton, R. Nicolas. “Fear of the Unknown: One Fear to Rule them All?” Journal of Anxiety Disorders 41 (2016): 5–21. ——. “Into the Unknown: A Review and Synthesis of Contemporary Models Involving Uncertainty.” Journal of Anxiety Disorders 39 (2016): 30–43. Damisch, Lysann, Barbara Stoberock, and Thomas Mussweiler. “Keep Your Fingers Crossed! How Superstition Improves Performance.” Psychological Science 21 (2010): 1014–20. Kidd, Celeste, and Benjamin Y. Hayden. “The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity.” Neuron 88, no. 3 (2015): 449–60. Lieberman, Matthew D., Naomi I. Eisenberger, Molly J. Crockett, Sabrina M. Ton, Jennifer H. Pfeifer, and Baldwin M. Way. “Putting Feelings Into Words: Affect Labeling Disrupts Amygdala Activity in Response to Affective Stimuli.” Psychological Science 18 (2007): 421–28. Pollard, Elizabeth, Clifford Rosenberg, and Robert Tignor. Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the World: From the Beginnings of Humankind to the Present, vol. 1, concise ed. New York: Norton, 2015. Taleb, Nassim Nicolas. Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets. New York: Random House, 2005. Vakil, Tushar. “Good Luck. Bad Luck. Who Knows?” November 14, 2018. https://www.tusharvakil.com/2018/11/14/the-zen-story-good-luck-bad -luck-who-knows-and-the-lesson/.

INDEX

Italic page numbers indicate illustrations or tables. AB. See attentional bias abnormal meaningfulness, 15 Abrams, Stacey, 56 Abramson, Lyn, 130 abstract thinking, 113, 157 AC. See attentional control ACC. See anterior cingulate cortex action potentials, 109, 138–40 action recognition learning, 153 actor-observer bias (AOB), 57 ADD. See attention-deficit disorder ADHD. See attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder Adrian, Edgar Douglas, 108 advantage, 8–9 African Yoruba, 34–35 Agathos Daimon, 37 Agbe, 34 agency, 28, 185 agency detection, 27–28 agenticity, 16 alpha waves, 109 ambiguous situations, 55, 88, 92 American Fire, 3–6, 8 Ammit, 37

Amodio, David, 145–46 ancestor worship, 35 Ancient Egypt, 35–37 Ancient Rome, 39–40 animal sacrifice, 35 animal spirits, 33 anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), 145–46, 181–82 AOB. See actor-observer bias apophenia, 15 Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten, 107 athletes: Chicago Cubs baseball team, 82–83, 103; lucky charms and, 84–85; rituals and, 84–85; superstition of, 93–94, 97. See also specific athletes Atropos, 38 attention, 119–20, 125–26, 183; AB and AC systems, 168–69; attentional set, 181; expectation and, 167 attentional bias (AB), 168–69 attentional control (AC), 168–69 attention-deficit disorder (ADD), 120–21, 124

232Index

attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), 120–21, 124 attribution errors: in ambiguous situations, 55; AOB, 57; FAE, 57; hindsight bias, 56; hostile attribution bias, 55–56; selfserving bias, 55 attributions: attribution style, 129; internal/external attributions, 52, 54, 129; luck and, 57–67; situational attributions, 52; stable attribution, 53; unstable attribution, 53 attribution theory, 126; ability, difficulty, effort, luck in, 53; dimensions in, 52–53; in psychology of luck, 49–54; in psychology of luck and magical thinking, 92–94; research, 56; social situations interpreted with, 50–51 Aurora, 4 Austin, James, 18–20, 108, 119, 136, 168, 187, 189–90 Aztecs, 33–34 bad luck, 1–3, 7, 191–93; belief in, 99, 146; Bes, for repelling, 36; Fortuna and, 40; as negative, 58–59; studies, 63–67, 64, 65; superstition and, 84. See also curses Bagolini, Bernardino, 79 Banich, Marie, 181 bao ying, 41–42 Barbey, Aron, 129 Bargdill, Richard W., 29–30 Barrett, Justin, 27–28 behavior: behavioral change, 118, 164; expectation influenced by, 166–67; mirror neurons and, 156; risky behavior, 123–26 belief: in bad luck, 99, 146; Darke and Freedman Beliefs Around

Luck Scale, 179–80; in gods/ goddesses, 44; in good luck, 98–99; in luck, 88, 179–80; in magical thinking, 96–103 Bentham, Jeremy, 133 Berger, Hans, 111, 191; EEG discovery, 107–8, 132; electrical impulses in brain and, 104–8; mental telepathy and, 105–6; search for P-energy, 106–7 Bes, 35–36 beta waves, 109–10, 121, 123, 125, 127 bias: AB, 168–69; AOB, 57; hindsight bias, 56; hostile attribution bias, 55–56; selfserving bias, 55 Bierce, Ambrose, 28, 198n8 Billy Penn’s Curse, 83 Bishop, F. Z., 21 Bishop, Sonia, 128 Bishop, Texas (town), 22–26 blood sacrifice, 33–34 Boggs, Wade, 84–85 Borg, Bjorn, 85 bottom-up processing, 155, 168–71 brain: action potentials in, 109; alpha waves, 109; Berger and electrical impulses in, 104–8; beta waves, 109–10, 121, 123, 125, 127; delta waves, 110; EEG as picture of, 108–10; ERN, 144–46; ERP, 141–44, 181; frontal lobe, 112, 113–14, 116–17; happiness and, 132–37; LIPs, 154–57, 170; lobes of cortex, 112, 112–14; luck, EEG, and, 110–11; magical thinking and, 87–88; messages in, 137–39; occipital lobe, 112, 113; parietal lobes, 112, 113; plastic brains, 188–91; pleasure centers, 133; rat experiments, 134–37; study of, 114–16; temporal lobes, 112, 113; theta waves, 110, 121–23, 125, 127;

Index233

tour of, 111–19. See also neurons; prefrontal cortex brainstorming, 183 Cai shen, 42 calendars, 33 Calin-Jageman, Robert, 205n45 card playing, 86, 123–24; royal flush, 18, 197n26 Carleton, Nicolas, 185 Carnarvon (Lord), 78–79 Carter, Howard, 78–79 Cartier, Pierre, 81 cascade of control model, 181 causeless-ness, 57 Celanese chemical plant, 26 Celtic gods, 43 chance, 8–9, 12, 23, 183–84; fortune and, 30; in gambling, 59–60; random chance, 1, 17–19; randomness and, 16 change, 29, 33, 38; adapting to, 133; behavioral, 118, 164 chaos theory, 191 charms. See lucky charms Cherokee divinities, 43 Chicago Cubs (baseball team), 82–83, 103 Clever Hans (horse), 160–64, 161, 191 close counterfactual, 69–71 Clotho, 38 Coast Guard, U.S., 5 cockroach study, 88–89 cognitive flexibility, 117 cognitive psychology, 27 coincidence, 41 collective unconscious, 15 compensatory control, 97 Connelly, Richard, 25–26 Conrad, Klaus, 15 Constantinidis, Christos, 171 content analysis, 63–67, 64, 65 convergent thinking, 179

conversation, 132, 183, 184 Corelli, Marie, 78–79 correlation statistics, 66–67 cosmic accounting, 41–42 cosmic order, 33, 35 counterfactuals, 126; characteristics of, 68–72; close counterfactual, 69–77; degree of choice in, 71–72; distant counterfactual, 69–70; downward counterfactuals, 69, 98, 101; factual outcomes compared to, 67–68; PFC and, 129; in psychology of luck, 67–72; Selak and, 72–73; Teigen’s study of, 69–72; temporal order in, 71; upward counterfactuals, 68–69, 71, 97–98 curiosity, 186 curses: Billy Penn’s Curse, 83; Curse of Bill Barillko, 83; Curse of Bobby Layne, 83; curse of mummy, 74–80; Curse of the Bambino, 82; Curse of the Billy Goat, 82–83, 103; Great Omar curse, 81–82, 102; Hope Diamond curse, 80–81, 102; luck and, 80–83; Open Curse, 83; Ötzi and, 79–80; Tutankhamun and, 78–79, 102 Daily Mail, 25 Damisch, Lysann, 99–100, 205n45 Darke and Freedman Beliefs Around Luck Scale, 179–80 Darwin, Charles, 156, 158–59 Davies, Jo, 20 Day, Liza, 98–99, 180 Decima, 39 decision-making: decision to be lucky, 72–73; intuition in, 173; statistical decision-making, 15 degree of choice, 71–72 Del Campo Rios, Jaime Martin, 142–43, 146

23 4Index

delta waves, 110 depression, 130 desires, 7, 55, 115 destiny, 29–30; ming yun and, 41; Shai, ruling over, 36–37. See also fate Devil’s Dictionary, The (Bierce), 198n8 DEX. See Dysexecutive Questionnaire Dickinson, Emily, 1, 17 dispositional invariances, 51 distant counterfactual, 69–70 divergent thinking, 179 dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), 116–18, 117, 128 downward counterfactuals, 69, 98, 101 dreams, 7, 104; daydreams, 122 Drunkard’s Walk, The (Mlodinow), 10 Durga, 41 dysexecutive luck, 176–82 Dysexecutive Questionnaire (DEX), 179–80 dysexecutive syndrome, 175–76 Edison, Thomas, 106 Edwards, Ashleigh, 94 electroencephalograph (EEG): Berger discovering, 107–8, 132; brain, luck, and, 110–11; ERN, 144–46; ERP, 141–44, 181; as picture of brain, 108–10; waves in, 121–22, 127 emergency position indicating radio beacon (EPIRB), 5 entoptic phenomena, 31–32, 32 epilepsy, 150–51 EPIRB. See emergency position indicating radio beacon ERN. See error-related negativity ERP. See event-related potential error-related negativity (ERN), 144–46

essentialism, 159 ethnographers, 28 Etruscans, 37–38 event-related potential (ERP), 141–44, 181 events: causes of, 8; fortuitous happening of, 8; negative, 129; outside limits of control, 8; patterns in, 10–12, 26, 187; positive, 129; probability of, 60; random, 33, 39, 146, 168, 185–86; supernatural and, 27; unexpected, 126 executive functioning: altering of, 180–81; cascade of control model, 181; divergent thinking, 179; inhibiting as, 178; PFC for, 120; shifting as, 177–78 expectations: attention and, 167; behavior influenced by, 166–67; influence in attracting luck, 158–64; power in attracting luck, 164–66, 185; of success, 186 Fa, 35 factual outcomes, 67–68 FAE. See fundamental attribution error Falkenstein, Michael, 144–45 false negative, 15 false positive, 15 fate, 17–18, 29–30; Greeks and, 38; Nortia and, 38; rituals and, 34; Tykhe and, 37–38 fear, 104, 110, 134; luck, unknown, and, 185–88 feelings, 95, 104; luck as, 59–60 FEF. See frontal eye field FFA. See fusiform face area Fielding, Henry, 21, 22, 23 FitzGerald, Edward, 81–82 fMRI. See functional magnetic resonance image Fode, Kermit, 165–66

Index235

Fooled by Randomness (Taleb), 186 Forbes (magazine), 84 fortuitous happening of events, 8 Fortuna, 40, 44 fortune: chance and, 30; gods/ goddesses for, 29–30, 37–38, 40–42; good fortune, 6, 8; misfortune, 36, 37, 44, 45, 80; smile of, 188 Frazer, James: on Law of Similarity and Law of Contagion, 87; on religion and magic, 86–87 Fritz, Kurt, 79 frontal eye field (FEF), 170–72 functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI), 149–50, 174 fundamental attribution error (FAE), 57 Fu shen, 42–43 fusiform face area (FFA), 16 Gage, Phineas, 115–16, 118–19, 120, 175 Galinsky, Adam, 93 gambling: chance in, 59–60; Gambler’s Fallacy, 11; IGT, 123–25; luck and, 59; Texas Lottery Commission, 22–23, 25. See also card playing; lotteries Ganesha, 41 Gehring, William, 144–45 generative computation, 157 Ginther, Joan: allocations of cheating, 25–26; explanation for wins, 24–26; Inside Job theory and, 24; lottery wins of, 22–26, 44, 190; luck of, 24–27; winning chances of, 23 glial cells, 137 glowworms: nonrandom arrangement of, 13–14, 14; randomness and, 12–14 Gmelch, George, 93–94

gods/goddesses: belief in, 44; Celtic gods, 43; Cherokee divinities, 43; Egyptian statuary, 36; for fortune, 29–30, 37–38, 40–42; in history of luck, 28–30; Maori divinities, 43; Mesoamerican gods, 33–34; Vodun gods, 34–35. See also specific gods and goddesses Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 74, 78 Go/No Go task, 144 good luck, 1–3, 7, 191–93; belief in, 98–99; Fortuna and, 40; Ganesha and, 41; good fortune, 8; losses and, 63; lucky charms and, 83–86; as positive, 58–59; studies, 63–67, 64, 65. See also Ginther, Joan; Kessans, Sarah; Kohl, Emily; Selak, Frano Gould, Stephen, 12–14 Great Omar curse, 81–82, 102 Greeks, 37–38 Gu, 34 Guilford Alternative Uses task, 179 gut instinct, 172–74. See also intuition Haitian voodoo study, 90–91 hallucinations, 31–32 Hans Commission, 162 Hans effect, 163, 165 happiness, 8, 42, 43, 191; brain and, 132–37 Harlow, John M., 115–16 Harper’s Magazine, 24 Hauser, Marc, 156–57 Hebb, Donald, 134 Hebbian learning theory, 134–35 Heider, Fritz, 51, 58, 60 Henn, Rainer, 79 hindsight bias, 56 Hoelzl, Rainer, 79–80 Hope, Thomas, 81 Hope Diamond curse, 80–81, 102 hostile attribution bias, 55–56

236Index

Houston Press, 25 humaniqueness, 157 Hurricane Epsilon, 3, 195n3 Hurricane Katrina, 3 Hutson, Matthew, 87–88 hypnosis, 122–23 icons, 28, 36 IGT. See Iowa Gambling Task illusion of control, 95 illusory patterns, 93, 96 imagination, 10–11 India, 41 inhibiting, as executive function, 178 Inside Job theory, 24 internal/external attributions, 52, 54, 129 intuition, 167; in decision-making, 173; defined, 172–73; study of, 173–74 Inzlicht, Michael, 145 Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), 123–25 James, LeBron, 85 Jonah, 39–40 Jung, Carl, 15 Katsuki, Fumi, 171 Kay, Aaron, 44, 96, 97 Kelley, Harold, 51 Kemp, Brian, 56 Keren, Gideon B., 59 Kessans, Sarah: capsized boat rescue, 2–8, 190; on luck, 19–20; winning race of, 20 Kettering, Charles, 18 Kettering Principle, 18, 136 Kohl, Emily, 19; capsized boat rescue, 2–8, 190; winning race of, 20 Kray, Laura, 101 Lachesis, 38 Lakshmi, 41

Langer, Ellen J., 95 Lao Tzu, 191 Lascaux caves, France: hallucinations and, 31–32; record of Stone Age life, 30–32; for rituals, 31 lateral intraparietal cortex cells (LIPs), 154–57, 170 Law of Contagion, 87, 89, 90 Law of Similarity, 87, 89, 90 laws of probability, 9–11 learning: action recognition learning, 153; to be lucky, 166–67; defined, 164; Hebbian learning theory, 134–35; from mistakes, 167 Legba, 34–35 Lewin, Roger, 110 LIPs. See lateral intraparietal cortex cells Lisa, 34 locus of causality, 52 lots, drawing of, 39–40 lotteries: Ginther’s wins, 22–26, 44, 190; Selak’s win, 47; Texas Lottery Commission, 22–23, 25 Loy, Tom, 80 luck: accident and, 58–59; action and movement in, 18; attributions and, 57–67; belief in, 88, 179–80; definition for, 8–9; EEG, brain, and, 110–11; fear, unknown, and, 185–88; as feeling, 59–60; gambling and, 59; of Ginther, 24–27; hard work and random chance, 1, 17–19; human condition and, 16; Kessans on, 19–20; LIPs and, 154–57; mirror neurons and, 146–54; movement and preparation in, 19; neurons and, 139–40; operation of, 7; personality and, 126–31; PFC and, 119–26; random and accidental, 18; randomness and, 9–17; reliance on, 189; as serendipitous

Index237

coincidence, 20; Type I, 18, 20; Type II, 18, 20, 108, 136, 168; Type III, 19–20, 136; Type IV, 19–20, 119; types of, 17–20, 108, 119, 136, 168, 189–90; Wiseman’s principles of, 166–67. See also bad luck; fortune; good luck; psychology of luck; psychology of luck, magical thinking and luck, attracting of: bottom-up processing and, 168–71; dysexecutive luck and, 176–82; gut instinct and, 172–74; influence of expectation in, 158–64; learning to be lucky, 166– 67; OFC in, 175–76; overview, 158–63; power of expectation in, 164–66, 185; top-down processing and, 171–72 luck, history of: African Yoruba in, 34–35; in Ancient Egypt, 35–37; in Ancient Rome, 39–40; in China, 41–43; gods/ goddesses in, 28–30; Greeks and Etruscans in, 37–38; in India, 41; Mesoamerican gods in, 33–34; overview, 27–28; Paleolithic luck in, 30–33; Vodun gods and, 34–35 Luck, Steven, 141 lucky charms, 28, 102; athletes and, 84–85; good luck and, 83–86; studies on, 100; talismans, 84, 190 Lu shen, 42–43 Ma’at, 37 magic: Frazer on, 86–87; magic words, 28 magical thinking. See psychology of luck, magical thinking and magnetoencephalography, 154 major/minor spirits, 34 Maltby, John, 98–99, 176–81, 212n21 Maori divinities, 43 Mawu, 34

May, Rollo, 29 McLean, Evalyn Walsh, 81 meaningfulness, 15, 28, 101 memory, 48, 183, 189; working memory, 117, 175 mental telepathy, 105–6 Mesoamerican gods, 33–34 Millman, Linda, 88–89 Milner, Peter, 133–37, 157, 191 ming yun, 41 mirror neurons: arguments over, 151; as attentionally grated, 154; discovery of, 146–47; luck and, 146–54; for meaning of observed actions, 149; for predictions, 152–54; for understanding of behavior and goals, 156 misfortune, 36, 37, 44, 45, 80 Mlodinow, Leonard, 10 Moirai, 38, 39 moral reciprocity, 42 Morta, 39 Mussweiler, Thomas, 99–100 Muthukumaraswamy, Suresh, 153–54 National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, 6 naturalism, 159 near-death experiences, 45–48, 54, 57, 190–91 negative events, 129 Nemeroff, Carol, 88–89 neurons, 109, 112, 114; creating and sending messages, 137–39; luck and, 139–40; premotor neurons, 147–48; single-unit recording of, 147. See also mirror neurons neurotransmitters, 138 New York Times, 78 Neyman, Jerzy, 15 Nicklaus, Jack, 83 Nona, 39 nonorder, 11 Norns, 43

23 8Index

Norse mythology, 43 Nortia, 38, 40 Number Letter test, 177, 177–78 object properties, 52 OED. See Oxford English Dictionary OFC. See orbitofrontal cortex Olds, James, 133–37, 157, 191 Olmecs, 33 omens, 3 On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 158–59 Open Curse, 83 optimists, 99, 129–30, 180 orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), 117, 118, 174; in attracting luck, 175–76 Orisha, 35 Ötzi: curse and, 79–80; discovery of, 74–78, 97, 102, 191 Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 8–9, 11 Paleolithic art, 32 Paleolithic luck, 30–33 pareidolia, 15–16, 93 Pasteur, Louis, 19 Pasteur principle, 136 patternicity, 15 patterns: detection of, 27; in events, 10–12, 26, 187; illusory patterns, 93, 96; as meaningful, 28; pattern recognition, 185; search for, 186 Pearson, Egon, 15 P-energy. See psychic energy perception, 10–11 personality: attribution style, 129; luck and, 126–31; personality profile, 95–96; PFC and, 126–31 person properties, 51 pessimists, 129–30 PFC. See prefrontal cortex Pfungst, Oskar, 162–63, 191 placebo effect, 187 planning, 99, 113, 147–48, 175, 183 plastic brains, 188–91

pleasure centers, 133 poisoned drink, sugared drink study, 89–90 positive events, 129 positive thinking study, 91–92 prayer, 28, 102 predictions, 39, 104, 140; mirror neurons for, 152–54; predictive coding, 153–54 prefrontal cortex (PFC): counterfactuals and, 129; dlPFC, 116–18, 117, 128; for executive functioning, 120; FEF, 170–72; luck and, 119–26; OFC, 117, 118, 174–76; personality and, 126–31 premotor neurons, 147–48 prepotent response, 178 prior experience, 7, 173 probability, 184; advanced knowledge of, 62; of events, 60–61; misunderstanding of, 61–62; Teigen’s studies of, 60–62, 61 promiscuous combination of ideas, 157 Pronin, Emily, 90–92 prosperity, 8, 37, 38, 40–42 psychic energy (P-energy), 106–7 psychological hedonism, 133 psychology of luck: attribution errors in, 55–57; attributions and luck in, 57–67; attribution theory in, 49–54; counterfactuals in, 67–72; decision to be lucky, 72–73; introduction, 45–48; overview, 48–49; Teigen’s content analysis studies, 63–67, 64, 65; Teigen’s probability studies, 60–62, 61 psychology of luck, magical thinking and: attribution theory for, 92–94; belief and, 96–103; cockroach study, 88–89; curse of mummy and, 74–80; good luck and lucky charms in, 83–86;

Index239

Haitian voodoo study, 90–91; luck and curses, 80–83; luck and magical thinking, 86–96; for meaning in life, 101; poisoned drink, sugared drink study, 89–90; positive thinking study, 91–92; role control study, 93; stress in, 94–95; as wired into brain, 87–88 Purcell, Edward, 13 randomness, 191; absence of, 26; anxiety and, 44; avoidance of, 146; chance and, 16; collective unconscious and, 15; glowworms and, 12–14, 14; laws of probability and, 9–11; luck and, 9–17; mathematical definitions of, 9; as nonorder, 11; pareidolia and, 15–16; personal handling of, 187; random chance, 1, 17–19; random events, 33, 39, 146, 168, 185–86; as scary, 185; in streaks and clusters, 10 rat experiments, 134–37 religion, 27–28; cultural function of, 43–44; Frazer on, 86–87. See also gods/goddesses Remington, Tara, 20 Rescher, Nicolas, 16, 58 reticular formation (RF), 135 Rich, Nathaniel, 24–26 risky behavior, 123–26 rituals: athletes and, 84–85; of baseball players, 93–94; compensatory control, 97; fate and, 34; Lascaux caves for, 31; Skinner and, 85–86 Rizzolatti, Giacomo, 147–51 rogue waves, 4–6, 8, 20 role control, 93 Rosenthal, Robert, 165–66 Rowing It Alone (Veal), 2 royal flush, 18, 197n26 Rozin, Paul, 88–89

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (FitzGerald), 81–82 Rudski, Jeffrey, 94 Ruth, Babe, 82 Sakpata, 34 saliency map, 170 salient feature, 170 Sangorski, Francis, 81–82 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 49 Savage-Rumbaugh, Susan, 110 Schippers, Michaéla, 97 Selak, Frano, 68; accidents and near-death experiences of, 45–48, 54, 57, 190–91; counterfactuals and, 72–73; lottery win of, 47; as luckiest man in world, 45–48, 63; memory of, 48 self-serving bias, 55 sensory information, 7 serendipitous coincidence, 20 Shai, 36–37 Shermer, Michael, 15–16 shifting, as executive function, 177–78 Shiva, 41 Shou shen, 42–43 Sianis, Billy, 82–83 Simon, Erika, 74–75, 77, 102, 191 Simon, Helmut, 74–75, 77, 80, 102, 191 Singh, Krish D., 153–54 single-unit recording, 147 situational attributions, 52 Skinner, B. F., 85–86 social psychology, 49, 51, 53, 56, 58, 129, 134. See also psychology of luck Sors, 39–40 Spindler, Konrad, 80 stable attribution, 53 statistical decision-making, 15 Stavros S. Niarchos, 5 Stoberock, Barbara, 99–100 Stone Age, 30–31

240Index

stress: in psychology of luck and magical thinking, 94–95; superstition and, 94–95 Stroop task, 143, 178, 181 Stumpf, Carl, 162–63 success, 37, 40, 42, 188; explanation for, 7, 55; feed-upward loop for, 190 Sula, 4 superhuman agents, 28 supernatural causes of events, 27 superstition, 78; of athletes, 93–94, 97; bad luck and, 84; benefit of, 97; performance and, 99–100; personality profile, 95–96; stress and, 94–95 Sutcliffe, George, 81 synchronicity, 15 Taleb, Nassim, 186 talismans, 84, 190 Taoism, 191–93 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste, 80–81 Teigen, Karl Halvor: content analysis studies, 63–67, 64, 65; correlation statistics of, 66–67; counterfactuals study, 69–72; probability studies, 60–62, 61 temporal order in counterfactuals, 71 Texas Lottery Commission, 22–23, 25 Texas Lotto, 22 Tezcatlipoca, 34 theta waves, 110, 121–23, 125, 127 Titanic, 82 top-down processing, 154–55, 171–72 trait anxiety, 127–28 trepanation, 106–7 Tropical Storm Zeta, 4 Tryon, Robert, 164–66 Tutankhamun: curse and, 78–79, 102; discovery of, 78 Tykhe, 37–38, 40, 44 Type I luck, 18, 20

Type II luck, 18, 20, 108, 136, 168 Type III luck, 19–20, 136 Type IV luck, 19–20, 119 unexpected events, 126 Unfinished Business, 20 unknown, 102, 157; curiosity about, 186; fear, luck, and, 185–88 unstable attribution, 53 upward counterfactuals, 68–69, 71, 97–98 Van Lange, Paul, 97 Veal, Debra, 2 ventralmedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), 117, 118 Vodun gods, 34–35 Volz, Kirsten, 173, 174 Von Osten, Wilhelm: animal cognition and, 159–60; training Clever Hans the horse, 160–64, 161 Vyse, Stuart, 95–96 Wagenaar, Willem, 59 Waitomo Caves, New Zealand, 12–13 Walter, W. Grey, 108 Warnecke, Dieter, 80 Weighing of Heat ceremony, 37 Whitson, Jennifer, 93 Wiseman, Richard, 83–84, 166–68, 182, 187, 190 Wizard of Oz, 191 Woods, Tiger, 83 Woodvale Events Transatlantic Rowing Race, 2–8, 19–20, 190 working memory, 117, 175 Wundt, Wilhelm, 133 Yggdrasil, 43 yuan fen, 41–42 zones of inhibition, 13–14