There are five 00 pairs, seven 01 pairs, seven 10 pairs, and five 11 pairs. If the sequence was truly random, then these pairs should be equal, but I was much more likely to alternate (fourteen times with either 10 or 01) key presses than to press the same key twice (ten times with either 00 or 11). The difference may seem small, but it becomes highly significant over more trials. If you break the sequence into the eight possible triplets, then the patterns become even more obvious.
Our brain has its natural rhythms that it likes to settle into. This is how the best rock-paper-scissors players succeed. To remind you, it’s a game between two players in which, after the count of three, each player has to produce a rock (fist), paper (open hand), or scissors (first two fingers open). Scissors beats paper, which beats rock, which in turn beats scissors. The object of the game is to guess what your opponent will produce. To succeed you have to be as random in the three options as possible. World champion players (yes, they do exist) are not psychic.17 They are expert at detecting patterns and generating their own random sequences, but this skill requires a lot of mental energy, especially from the frontal parts of the brain that control planning.18
It is just as difficult to think and act randomly by effort of will as it is to perceive a random world. Because our minds are designed to see the world as organized, we often detect patterns that are not really present. This is particularly true if we believe that patterns should be there in the first place. So someone who believes that supernatural forces operate in the world is on the lookout for examples of strange, inexplicable phenomena and conveniently ignores the multitude of mundane events that do not fit this interpretation. We forget every typical phone call but remember the unexpected one because it draws our attention. The flip side of mind design is that we also fail to realize that events that we think are highly unlikely are in fact not so unlikely. Meeting people at a party who share the same birthday seems unlikely. With this bias toward detecting patterns, someone who is inclined to supernatural belief has ample opportunity to see evidence for significant chains of events where there is none. This is the product of our mind design, and there is good evidence that we all differ in the extent to which we see order or chaos in the world. Later, I examine the idea that the difference between believers and nonbelievers may be due more to how they interpret the world than to what they have been told to believe.
In addition to organizing the world into patterns, mind design leads us to seek deeper, hidden causes operating in the world. Much of what controls the world is hidden from direct view, and so our minds have evolved to infer the existence of things we cannot see. We try hard to understand outcomes of events that have already happened and to which we were not privy. For example, imagine you arrive home to find a plate broken on the kitchen floor. How did this happen? you ask yourself. You start to reconstruct the order of events. The plate was on the table when you left that morning. Has someone else been in the house? Has there been an earthquake? Like a detective, you work backwards in time trying to reconstruct why something happened. This is how we interpret and understand a chain of events. However, such reasoning can also lead to mistakes. A human mind that links events in this way is always in danger of committing the mistake of post hoc, ergo propter hoc: ‘after this, therefore because of this’, which means that we tend to group events together in a causal way. We see the first event as having caused the second. There are two problems with this. First, we infer the actions of forces where there may be none, and second, we tend to link events that are not actually even related.
By linking events together, we see sequences in terms of cause and effect. For example, consider a very simple event involving objects colliding with each other. Imagine watching a game of billiards or pool. If we see a white ball strike a red ball, we see one event causing another. It’s the same for babies. If you show seven-month-old babies similar collision events, they interpret the first ball as causing the second to move, because if you reverse the sequence, they treat the reverse event as something different.19 Like adults, they see the red ball launching the white one. Nothing odd here you might think. In fact, you might say this is a very sensible way to interpret the world. However, the seventeenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume tells us that such intuitions are an illusion because you cannot directly see cause. You cannot actually see the forces at work. You only see one event and then another event. This may seem far-fetched until you consider cartoon animations. When we observe a cartoon ball striking another, we infer the same causal force, but of course there is none. A cartoon is simply a set of drawings. Our mind interprets the sequence as if one ball were colliding with another. It is an illusion that helps us understand the world in terms of real forces because we often do not or cannot observe them at work.
So your mind design forces you to see patterns and to think something caused the patterns to form. You infer that what may be completely unrelated events are connected in some way. Things that happen after each other appear to be caused by forces that may not exist. This is all the more true when the outcome is not predictable, as in a game of chance. When something unexpected happens, you instinctively look for whatever caused it to happen. This type of thinking explains superstitious behaviour: repeating actions or engaging in certain behaviours in an effort to control outcomes. For example, if you have a particularly successful day on the tennis court or at the poker table, you may feel a strong compulsion to duplicate whatever actions you took that day in an effort to repeat the success. It may be wearing a particular piece of clothing or sitting in a favorite seat. Soon these behaviours may become essential routines and obsessions.
Athletes are notorious for their superstitious rituals.20 Rituals usually start off as innocent habits – something we all have – but because they become linked to important outcomes (like winning a game), they can take over an individual’s life. The tennis ace Jelena Dokic was probably the most complicated in her rituals, or at least the most honest and open about them. First, she avoided standing on the white lines on court. (John McEnroe did the same.) She preferred to sit to the left of the umpire. Before her first serve she bounced the ball five times, and before her second serve she bounced it twice. While waiting for serves, she would blow on her right hand. The ball boys and girls always had to pass the ball to her with an underarm throw. Dokic made sure she never read the drawsheet more than one round at a time. Finally – and bear this in mind sports memorabilia collectors – she always wore the same clothes throughout a tournament. Pheweee!
Jelena is not alone. Every year when I monitor exams I see a number of intelligent young adults engaging in routines (one had to walk around her table three times) or producing a multitude of lucky charms and ‘gonks’ (troll-shaped soft toys) that they believe will improve their performance. Even if you don’t believe in these rituals and charms, what’s the harm in trying? Well, none, unless they take over your life and prevent you from achieving your goals, as illustrated by Neil the Hippie from the 1980s’ UK comedy about student life, The Young Ones:
I sat in the big hall and put my packet of Polos on the desk. And my spare pencil and my support gonk. And my chewing gum and my extra pen. And my extra Polos and my lucky gonk. And my pencil sharpener shaped like a cream cracker. And three more gonks with a packet of Polos each. And lead for my retractable pencil. And my retractable pencil. And spare lead for my retractable pencil. And chewing gum and pencils and pens and more gonks, and the guy said, ‘Stop writing, please.’21