Do you ever touch wood for luck? I do it all the time, and yet I don't really believe it could make any difference to anything. Here's something else. Up in our attic, hanging on one wall, there is a game for children called 'Ring Board', which we've had in the family for more than 25 years. I used to play it with my kids. You have six rubber rings (sort of like that), and you have to throw them from a few feet away, aiming to land them on one of the several hooks protruding from the board hanging on that attic wall. Now, many years back I instituted the ritual that, whenever I'm up there - about once in six to eight weeks - cleaning the attic, as soon as I've finished and before coming back down, I have to test myself by throwing the rings and trying to land four of the six of them on the hooks in a single turn. Failing that, getting three of the six rings on the hooks in two separate turns will do. But until I've achieved either a four or two threes, I'm not 'allowed' back down into the house; it would be bad luck. This is purely of my own devising and enforcing. Mostly I'm done within a few minutes. Other times it'll take me maybe 10 minutes. There have been a few occasions, however, when I've been stuck up there for 20 to 25 minutes, cursing my own stupidity, but not leaving till I've got the four rings, or the two lots of three rings, successfully hooked.
You will now understand why I found this piece about magical thinking something of a relief. It shows that, despite the lunacy just described, I am altogether normal:
There is an element of magical thinking even in looking at pictures. Select a photo of someone you love. Now take a needle and stick it through their eyes. Impossible. The very thought makes us uneasy. It's not about mutilating the photo, it's the irrational fear of mutilating the person. We feel that there is the "essence" of the person, that the photo is more than lifeless card and chemicals. Anthropologists refer to this as the law of similarity, the sense that objects have a connection with the thing they resemble or stand for.
And:
The psychologist Bruce Hood puts it down to the way our brains are configured. Our survival depends on the ability to identify regularities in the world. Where patterns are uncertain or obscure the brain has a natural tendency to go beyond the information given, imagining hidden forces and causes.
Except that I don't think my Ring Board performance affects anything beyond the amount of time I'm stuck up there in the attic. I just want to score my four or two threes before leaving.