8 Basic Functions That Humans Totally Fail At

You're thinking about your mum, your good old mum, and how much you love her. All of a sudden, the phone rings and it's mumsy hoping for a bit of a catch-up.

What are the odds of that, right?

Not high, sure, but certainly not miraculous, and you're definitely not psychic. It is our brains' inability to comprehend the complexities of probability and chance that almost always leads us down the path of superstition, miracles, gambling systems and psychic abilities.

The human brain is highly tuned to pick out patterns in day-to-day life. This is helpful for developing instinctual survival behaviours, such as running when you see the front half of a tiger coming round a corner (and not waiting around to confirm that the rest of it is there too), but it also means that we tend to spot patterns that aren't there, and attribute significance to random events.

In an article for Scientific American, Michael Shermer breaks it down like this: If we consider that most people experience an average of 43,200 "things" a day (that's one "thing" per second in a 12 hour day), that's one bit of sensory data coming in at the rate of one per second, and let's assume that 99.999% of them completely pass you by, unmarked, that's still the potential for 1.3 strange and unusual "miracles" in a month. Due to the brain's pattern spotting ability, you will notice this one instance and disregard the others.

Not only this, but we are much more likely to pay attention to results that support our world view, this is called confirmation bias. So, the more you believe in miracles, the more likely you are to spot them.