—Frederick the Great

Superstitious belief continues to exist even as human civilizations evolve. The Chinese demonstrated their strong belief in the auspicious number eight by opening the Beijing Olympics on the 8th day of the 8th month of 2008 at 08:08:08 pm. Interestingly, the London Eye, which served as one of the symbols of the 2012 London Olympics, also demonstrates a common Western superstition in that the 32 capsules (representing the 32 London boroughs) actually number up to 33 because capsule 13 was left out to avoid having an “unlucky 13” capsule. People are generally skeptical about supernatural phenomena. There is an old saying in China, “Can’t either believe it totally or totally disbelieve it.” On this subject, Sir Francis Bacon said, “There is a superstition in avoiding superstitions”. While many people do believe that some supernatural phenomena are real, almost all of us recognize, at least much of the time, that superstitions are not real. Today, given the post-enlightenment nature of the modern world, we cannot help but wonder why superstition is so deeply rooted in our minds.

So far, many efforts have been made to illustrate the puzzling existence of superstition. Surprisingly, few studies have investigated whether there is a neural basis for superstitious beliefs. To uncover the neural substrates of superstitious beliefs, researchers from the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, used functional MRI to directly compare participants’ neural responses to monetary attractiveness with their responses to the value of an auspicious date. We found that the right middle/superior frontal gyrus showed greater deactivation whenever an auspicious-based choice was made and that the contrast between the auspicious-based and economics-based choices was negatively correlated with the participants’ rated wedding date-related superstitious belief, suggesting that a specific brain region carries decision signals which contribute to making decisions based on superstition and may be able to account for individual differences in superstitious behavior.

Two possible explanations might account for our findings. One is that people might have a lower internally attributed uncertainty about the future under the auspicious-based choice than under the economics-based choice. People who had greater difference on the internally attributed uncertainty between the auspicious-based choice and the economics-based choice will be more likely to adopt superstitious belief. The other is that rationality is suppressed when a person is being superstitious. It is possible that when faced with two options, participants are making a tradeoff between monetary cost and the potential reward associated with picking a "lucky" option. Rationality was suppressed when people made an auspicious-based choice. However, these interpretations are tentative and much more research needs to be done before drawing any firm conclusions.

In sum, these results are a starting point in uncovering the neural substrates of superstition and have predictive utility for future studies considering this issue.