Songs From The Wood

Bebel Gilberto’s second album, self-titled, is brilliant. I love the songs, the mood, the lyrics and of course, her voice. It sat on the shelf for near fourteen months, untouched. The third track on that CD is titled Aganju, a song with a nice lilting melody that makes me want to sway to the music. I had swayed to it on the afternoon of June 24th last year, loading up the dishwasher, after a meal alone, after my weekly half marathon, my parents asleep, Shanthala at work and Kitty sunning himself outside. I remember looking at the blue of the sky, the blue of the pool, the soap on my hands, the sound of the tap, a little ache in my legs. I had started working part time since February of that year and had just been promoted to Distinguished Engineer, a fairly prestigious rank within Cisco. Life was good and I was content with life. It was the last time I was so purely happy, a happiness, a contentment untouched by loss. Kitty would be dead in two days, life as I knew it, over.

Since he died, I couldn’t play the CD. Something inside me would shudder every time I glanced at the CD as I searched for a song to play. A few weeks back, I finally played the CD, but skipped the third track anyway. A part of me felt that I’d be tempting fate by playing that track. We’ve been blessed with Maya since then and slowly, I’ve been emerging from Kitty’s death. I was afraid of rocking the boat. I knew this was superstitious claptrap, stuff that I didn’t believe in, but yet I didn’t play Aganju. Two days ago, I played that one too.

I frequently read PsyBlog, a blog that attempts to disseminate new and classic psychology research concerned with understanding our mind, ourselves. The article in today’s entry is titled “Superstitious? Why Even Rational People Hate to Tempt Fate”. It presents the research of psychologists Jane Risen and Thomas Gilovich, who were curious to determine why even very rational people act superstitious and how widespread the behavior really was. Based on their studies on some Cornell University students on the question of whether tempting fate would lead to a bad ending, they contend that even very intelligent, rational people think that tempting fate will lead to bad endings. For example, if I flaunt my confidence in being admitted to a top tier school by wearing a shirt with the logo of that top tier school, many people believe that I’m reducing my chances of being admitted i.e. I’ll fail because I tempted fate. Risen and Gilovich conclude that the reason why people believe in not tempting fate is because our mind tends to remember bad outcomes more clearly and quickly than positive outcomes or non-events.

This leads to the “availability error“, a cognitive bias in which we base our predictions on how quickly we remember certain events. For example, it seems to be a common prejudice that women are bad drivers. If I ask a random person if they believe the statement that women are bad drivers, many people would respond positively because they can recall the times they witnessed a bad driver to be a woman faster than they can recall the times when they witnessed the good driver to be a woman or the times when they witnessed a bad driver to be a man. This of course also shows how important the culture is in influencing our thinking (by planting the idea that women are bad drivers). This is how stereotypes are born and sustained. When we were in India, I observed that on Monday mornings, the commute to work was much easier as there was substantially less traffic than usual for that time on other days of the week. Our driver explained to me that on Mondays, “Rahu Kala” – considered an ominous period to start or end a journey in Indian astrology – lasts from 7 am or so till 9 am. So most people wait till 9 am to start for work. As the author of PsyBlog says: “We absorb superstitions from around us, especially vigilant for their occurrence and reinforced by any events that fit the pattern, conveniently forgetting events that don’t fit. Then the fast, automatic processes of our minds automatically anticipate the regret we might feel in the future, trapping us in a reinforcing loop.”

It is now well accepted that the brain has two ways of making decisions, a fast, automatic, instinctive, “from the gut” way and the slower, more reasoned and well thought out way. Superstitions are rooted in the former way of thinking. When we’re stressed or intellectually challenged, we tend to rely more on the automatic, instinctive way to make decisions. So, when we’re under stress, when the outcome of an event matters a lot to us, we tend to act more superstitiously than we’d otherwise be. The famous bestseller, Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, addressed this automatic, instinctive way of thinking, talking about its advantages and disadvantages. In another neuroscience blog, The Frontal Cortex, the author addresses this same issue. He points to a study by the Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis in which car shoppers were asked to choose the best car from amongst four cars when supplied with multiple pieces of information about each car. One group of shoppers was given time to carefully consider all the information before deciding while another group was asked to make a snap judgement. The kicker in that experiment was that when people were provided with a lot of factors to consider in their selection, the snap judgement group tended to pick the best car more often (60% to 25%) than the carefully considered lot. The theory is that when confronted with a lot of choices, the instinctive part automatically selected the factors that were crucial to the person and ignored the extraneous factors. The careful considerer instead mulled over all the factors longer instead of prioritizing. Both superstition and good decision making in the presence of information overload spring from the same functioning of the brain. It is also the same way clever marketeers can make us feel good in parting our money.

So, what was the outcome of my tempting fate by playing Aganju ? In the night, Maya rolled off the bed in her sleep and fell to the floor. Ready to sleep, Shanthala had removed the pillow that prevented Maya from falling off, but had turned around for a few seconds distracted by something on the floor. When Shanthala called out for me, my first reaction was fear. I had tempted fate and was now to be punished. Luckily, Maya was fine though wide awake now and Shanthala spent an hour awake with her, trying to put her to sleep, while I was on a conference call.