This is apparently to be expected when you contribute things to a major media platform, but I was still shocked. Some of the conspiracy theories didn’t even make sense. When I wrote a piece to defend transgender people after a particularly vicious article attacking them (not one that I wrote, I hasten to add), I was accused of being part of an anti-transgender people conspiracy (because I didn’t defend them aggressively enough) and a pro-transgender people conspiracy (because I defended them at all). Not only am I involved in many conspiracies, I’m also actively opposing myself in the process.
It’s common for readers, seeing any article critical of their existing views or beliefs, to immediately conclude it’s the work of a sinister power hell-bent on suppression, rather than a prematurely balding bloke sitting on a sofa in Cardiff.
The arrival of the Internet and an increasingly interconnected society has been a great boon to conspiracy theorists; people can more easily find “evidence” for their theories on 9/11 or share their wild conclusions regarding the CIA and AIDS with like-minded types, without ever leaving the house.
Conspiracy theories aren’t a new phenomenon,3 so perhaps it’s a quirk of the brain that means people are so willing and able to be swallowed up by paranoid imaginings? In a way, it is. But, going back to the title, what’s this got to do with superstition? Declaring that UFOs are real and trying to break into Area 51 is a far cry from thinking a four-leaf clover is good luck, so what’s the connection?
An ironic question, as it’s the tendency to see patterns in (often unrelated) things that links both conspiracies and superstitions. There’s actually a name for the experience of seeing connections in places where there actually aren’t any: apophenia.4 For example, if you accidentally wear your underpants inside out and then later win some money on a scratch card, and from then on you only ever wear your underpants inside out when buying scratch cards, that’s apophenia; there’s no possible way your underwear orientation can affect the value of a scratch card, but you’ve seen the pattern and are going with it. Similarly, if two unrelated but high-profile figures die of natural causes or in accidents within a month of each other, that’s tragic. But if you look at the two individuals and find they were both critical of a certain political body or government and conclude that they were in fact assassinated as a result, that’s apophenia. At their most basic levels, any conspiracy or superstition can likely be traced back to someone constructing a meaningful connection between unrelated occurrences.
It’s not just the extremely paranoid or suspicious types who are prone to this, anyone can experience it. And it’s pretty easy to see how this could come about.
The brain receives a constant stream of varied information and it has to make some sense of this. The world we perceive is the end result of all the processing the brain does with it. From the retina to the visual cortex to the hippocampus to the prefrontal cortex, the brain relies on many different areas to perform several different functions all working in tandem. (Those newspaper reports about neuroscientific “discoveries,” implying that a specific function of the brain has a specific region dedicated to it and it alone, are misleading. This is only a partial explanation at best.)
Despite numerous brain regions being involved in sensing and perceiving the world around us, there are still major limitations; it’s not that the brain is underpowered, it’s just that we’re bombarded by exceptionally dense information at all times, only some of which has any relevance to us, and the brain has barely a fraction of a second to process it for us to use. And because of this, the brain has numerous short cuts it employs to keep on top of things (more or less).
One of the ways the brain sorts out the important information from the unimportant is by recognizing and focusing on patterns. Direct examples of these can be observed in the visual system (see Chapter 5), but suffice it to say that the brain is constantly looking for links in the things we observe. This is undoubtedly a survival tactic, stemming from a time when our species faced constant danger—remember fight or flight?—and no doubt sets up a few false alarms. But what are a few false alarms if your survival is ensured?
But these false alarms are what cause problems. We end up with apophenia, and add to that the brain’s fight-or-flight response and our tendency to leap to a worst-case-scenario conclusion and suddenly we have a lot on our minds. We see patterns in the world that don’t exist, then attach serious significance to them on the off chance they may negatively affect us. Consider how many superstitions are based on avoiding bad luck or misfortune. You never hear about conspiracies that are intended to help people. The mysterious elite don’t organize charity bake sales.
The brain also recognizes patterns and tendencies based on information stored in the memory. The things we experience inform our ways of thinking, which makes sense. However, our first experiences are during childhood, and this informs much about our later lives. The first time you attempt to teach your parents how to use the latest video game is usually enough to dispel any remaining idea that they’re all-knowing and omnipotent, but they can often seem like this during childhood. When we’re growing up, much (if not all) of our environment is controlled; practically everything we know is told to us by adults we recognize and trust, everything that happens does so under their supervision. They are our primary reference points during the most formative years of our lives. So if your parents have superstitions, it’s highly likely that you’ll pick them up, without having to witness anything that would support them.5
Crucially, this also means that many of our earliest memories are formed in a world that is seemingly organized and controlled by powerful figures who are hard to understand (rather than a world that is just random or chaotic). Such notions can be deeply entrenched, and that belief system can be carried into adulthood. It is more comforting for some adults to believe that the world is organized according to the plans of powerful authority figures, be they wealthy tycoons, alien lizards with a penchant for human flesh, or scientists.