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Why Your Brain Believes in Magic Even When You Don’t

A participant experiences a magic performance beneath a colourful illustrated face.

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    Serena Williams has said that she bounces the tennis ball five times before her first serve and twice before her second. Five. Then two. She says she has been doing it for as long as she can remember (MasterClass, n.d.). I promise this has something to do with magic. Because Serena is hardly alone.

    People knock on wood after saying something optimistic. They avoid saying certain things out loud because they might “jinx” them. They carry lucky objects, repeat routines before important moments, or feel strangely uncomfortable when they are forced to break a familiar ritual. And plenty of those people would also tell you: “I don’t believe in magic.”

    That contradiction is much more interesting to me than whether somebody literally believes in ghosts, spells or supernatural powers. Because magical thinking can appear in much more ordinary places. Sometimes it begins with something very simple: Two things happen. And your mind draws a line between them.

    Your brain is looking for causes

    We spend our lives trying to figure out what goes with what. What caused that? What predicts this? Should I do that again? Was that important? Most of the time, this is extremely useful.

    Touch a hot pan. Hand hurts. Maybe don’t touch the hot pan again. Excellent work, brain. But there is a problem.

    Two events can happen together without one causing the other. Research on causal illusions has shown that, under some conditions, people can experience a causal relationship between events that are actually unrelated (Matute et al., 2015). Which brings us to one of science’s favourite sentences: Correlation does not imply causation. More precisely: correlation alone does not establish causation. Which is usually the moment some part of my brain turns into Chief Wiggum and says: Whoa, slow down, egghead. So let’s make this unnecessarily simple.

    A very red example

    Imagine I put on a bright red shirt and play a chess match. I win. There could be plenty of explanations. Maybe I practised more. Maybe I played better. Maybe my opponent was tired. Maybe I got lucky. Maybe my opponent was secretly playing Candy Crush under the table.

    The red shirt has not transformed me into Magnus Carlsen. Scientific thinking asks us to slow down. The shirt was there. The win happened. That does not automatically mean the shirt caused the win.

    Now imagine I wear the same shirt another day. And I win again. Something small has changed. Not necessarily in the shirt. In the story. I wore the shirt. I won. I wore it again. I won again. Those events are starting to feel connected.

    Scientific thinking tries to slow down the jump from correlation to cause. Magical thinking can appear when a connection begins to feel influential before that causal relationship has actually been established. The shirt becomes lucky.

    The shirt is not the point

    Lucky shirts are only one version of this. Maybe you touch wood. Maybe you have a particular pen for exams. Maybe there is a song you always play before walking into something difficult. Maybe you refuse to celebrate good news too early because you’ll “tempt fate.” Maybe there is an object that somehow has good energy. Maybe you have to begin something in a particular way because every time you have done it that way, things have gone well. Psychologists use magical thinking to describe beliefs in which thoughts, wishes or rituals are treated as capable of influencing events without an established causal mechanism (American Psychological Association, n.d.).

    That sounds dramatic. In everyday life, it can be remarkably mundane. You might never call any of these things magic. You might even make fun of superstition. And still- someone says, “Don’t jinx it.” And for half a second you think: …fair. That is the strange middle ground I find fascinating.

    You can know better and still feel it

    Knowing and feeling do not always arrive at the same conclusion. You can rationally understand that a ritual cannot control an external event and still feel uncomfortable abandoning it. You can know the lucky object contains no measurable luck and still prefer having it there. You can know that saying something aloud cannot physically change the future and still hesitate before saying it. Psychologist Jane Risen has written about precisely this tension: people can recognise that a superstitious intuition is irrational without necessarily correcting their behaviour or the feeling that accompanies it (Risen, 2016). That is important.

    Magical thinking is not simply a category for other people who believe ridiculous things. Human behaviour is messier than that. We notice repetitions. We remember coincidences. We attach significance to things. We build stories about what worked. And sometimes the feeling of a connection arrives before we have enough evidence to justify it. You can doubt the connection. And still respond to it.

    The line appears

    There is a visual I keep returning to when I think about this. Imagine two events sitting separately. At first, nothing connects them. Then a dotted line appears. Maybe. Something similar happens again. The line becomes stronger. Eventually, the relationship can feel solid enough that we stop noticing how much interpretation went into drawing the line in the first place. That became part of the visual language for the video version of this idea: a dotted line for a possible association, a stronger line when the connection gains emotional significance, and eventually a solid line when the relationship is being experienced as causal.

    I like that image because it does not assume every line is false. Sometimes the connection is real. Sometimes it is coincidence. Sometimes we simply do not have enough information yet. The interesting part is how quickly the line can appear.

    A repetition becomes a pattern. A coincidence becomes significant. An object becomes lucky. A ritual becomes difficult to break. And maybe that is where believing in magic begins. Not necessarily when somebody decides that supernatural forces govern the universe. Much earlier. A coincidence feels important. A ritual starts to matter. Two events begin to belong together. And before you know it, your mind has already drawn the line.

    Related reading

    If you want to explore another way of seeing how ideas connect, read How to Organize Your Creative Thoughts, a practical introduction to using Obsidian to connect ideas, research and creative projects.

    References

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