 I was expecting an important call late last night, so I left my cell phone under my pillow, and when I woke up this morning, it was gone. The only thing that was there was this. Frickin' Bluetooth Fairy. It's your birthday! Happy birthday! Look, there's presents, balloons, these little cardboard hats that nobody thinks about as stunt hats in this context. Everybody's having a great time. And then the cake arrives. A beautifully iced dessert with your name written on it and tiny candles blazing merrily away. What happens now? Well, clearly the candles are going to have to be extinguished before the cake is consumed, unless you like the taste of wax and fire. But there is a very specific way in which they are supposed to be extinguished. You're supposed to pause for a moment, think of something that you want, then take a deep lungful of air and blow them all out in one breath. If you manage it, then congratulations, that thing you want will shortly be yours. Or so the story goes. Ignoring the fact that kids already have it easy enough without like ten candles sitting between them and a pony, it's kind of the strange idea that blowing out these particular candles in one breath will somehow alter the course of the universe to bring you whatever you can dream up in the five seconds before you do. Of course, nobody actually believes that, right? I mean, it's just part of the little ceremony that we have for celebrating someone's birthday. And yet, if you try to blow out those candles without making a wish, people will actually stop you and remind you to do so. Superstitions, like blowing out the candles on a cake, have a tendency to work their way into people's behavior without much opposition, almost as though we're primed to believe them. And in fact, psychology informs us that we are superstitious by nature. Apophenia is the name of a phenomenon that's pretty universal among human beings. The tendency to see patterns where there aren't any. If you've ever seen a figure in random cloud formations, or think that this looks like a human face on Mars, that's your brain trying to do one of the things that it does best, pattern recognition. And getting a little bit overzealous. Apophenia is where the vast majority of superstition comes from. Somebody will notice that two things happen at approximately the same time, and will leap to the conclusion that they must be causally related, even if they have nothing to do with each other. Our brains are sort of wired to try and make sense of the world, only sometimes there's no sense to be had. And that can make us uncomfortable. Superstitions can be seen as sort of coping mechanisms for the gap between how much of our lives we like to think we control, versus how much we actually control. But there's something troubling about this particular version of coping. Participating in superstitions is basically training ourselves over and over again to act mindlessly, to just do things without consideration, because somebody else told us that they would help, even if we know better. If your waitress has ever said, enjoy your meal, and you've responded, you too, you know how embarrassing it can be when reflex is substituted for thought. Superstitions function on that same principle, only they can be a lot more than embarrassing. Take someone who knocks on wood to prevent something bad from happening when they mention it. They probably don't know that they're supposedly summoning the spirits of magical creatures that live in trees. Instead, they're just repeating an action over and over again that they heard once would prevent bad things from happening. If you told them that they're actually making a request for fairies to do their bidding, they'd think that was stupid. They are actively endorsing a belief that they would think someone else was crazy for holding, and they have no clue that's what they're doing. Participating in superstition is a fantastic way to get into that situation of hypocrisy. If you wouldn't take your lucky horseshoe to Vegas and put your life savings on black, you probably shouldn't be hanging it over your door. At best, you're being inconsistent, and at worst, you're telling other people that something that you don't believe in is real. If you feel a compulsion to do something that you sincerely don't believe in, you should probably make the effort to excise it from your brain. It might make you nervous to say Macbeth or to open an umbrella inside, but if you don't believe in dangerous theater pixies or vengeful weather spirits, you owe it to yourself to shake off the traditions of Apophenia from centuries past and to live your life according to your understanding of the world. If you want to blow out candles on your birthday cake because it's fun, that's fine. If you don't want to open an umbrella inside because you might poke somebody's eye out or knock things off the thunk shelves, that's fine too, but we should all strive to act mindfully with a clear understanding of what we're doing, what its real effects will be, and whether or not both of those align with our beliefs. Because even though it's nice to think that blowing out candles on your birthday cake will get you a real portal gun, the cake is, well, you know. Do you do or have anything for the purpose of good luck? Would you bet your life savings on it? Or in your experience, is there really no such thing as luck? Please leave a comment and let me know what you think. Okay, I've been putting this off for long enough. A few weeks back, Matthew Chris made a fantastic video response to my episode on healthcare crazy talk. His interpretation of the Constitution is narrower than like 90% of the Supreme Court justices, but if you were looking for an alternate viewpoint on healthcare, I strongly recommend that you watch it. Also, last week I sort of made a big deal about how a nuclear war would wipe out all human life on Earth and apparently there's only about a 1% chance of that happening. Samuel Stringman was kind enough to point me at a study of the probabilities of various existential risks, which is very interesting reading. I included it in the video description. Be sure to check that out. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share, and I'll see you next week.