When people die, they’re not completely gone. They live on in our minds. We might wonder what they think of our decisions, or we might carry on imaginary conversations with them. They are as alive to us as someone who just stepped out of the room.

The continued representation of the dead in our heads may contribute to afterlife beliefs. (See chapter 5 of my book.) You can’t fully convince yourself that the person is kaput; your brain isn’t wiped clean so easily. In one study by Jesse Bering, even people who said the soul dies when the body does continued to assign mental states to a fictional character after his death. One subjected noted that of course there’s no afterlife and the dead character sees that now. So “Out of sight, out of mind” isn’t quite right when describing the departed. More like, “Out of sight, so the mind fills in the blanks.”

But what if the person is still in sight? What do we think of people in persistent vegetative states, who can breathe but can’t think? Mentally, they are dead, but since we’re very aware of the body still lying there, we can’t as easily imagine them as active characters in our lives. This combination of factors—a dead mind but a living body—may, ironically, lead us to think of people in a PVS as more dead than dead.

Kurt Gray, T. Anne Knickman, and Daniel Wegner recently tested this hypothesis, and wrote up their findings in the journal Cognition. In the first study, subjects were divided into three groups and read about a character named David who had a car accident and then (a) fully recovered, (b) died, or (c) ended up in a PVS with nearly his entire brain destroyed. Each group rated whether he had mental functions—whether he could have a personality or know right from wrong, etc.—on a scale from -3 (strongly disagree) to 3 (strongly agree). On average, living David scored 1.77 and dead David scored -0.29. But PVS David scored -1.73. People saw him as having less mind than dead David. So in a sense they saw PVS David as more dead than dead. But you could also say they saw dead David as not fully dead. The fact that they didn’t deny him a mind as much as they could have, the authors argue, indicates subtle afterlife beliefs.

In the second study, the researchers asked people about PVS David, dead David, or a dead David whose description mentioned his embalmed body lying in a coffin. Again, subjects—including both the most religious third and the least religious third—saw PVS David as having less mental capacity than dead David. But the least religious saw corpse David as being similar to PVS David (they strongly disagreed with his having a mind), whereas the most religious saw him as being similar to dead David (they slightly agreed with his having a mind). For those low in religiosity, a focus on his nonfunctional physical body helped them recognize the nonfunctionality of his mind, just as the image of a PVS David in a hospital bed did. The most religious subjects, however, had explicit beliefs about the afterlife that allowed them to overcome the corpse reminder and continue to picture David frolicking in heaven or wherever.

In the third study, subjects imagined themselves in a car crash, and either dead or in a PVS. They said they’d have less mind in a PVS, and also that being in a PVS would be worse for both themselves and their families. Further, the attribution of less mind partially explained the greater undesirability of a PVS. People see being a vegetable as a state worse than death, in part because they irrationally believe they’d have a fuller mental life if someone just pulled the plug. (Of course, their mental lives would be equally nonexistent.)

“These data do highlight one irony,” the researchers note: “People high in religiosity are more likely to see PVS as worse off than death, but are also more likely to advocate keeping such patients alive on life support.”

They also point out that focusing on the body interferes with attribution of mind in everyday life, too. The more you objectify someone (a woman in a bikini, say), the less capable you think she is of thought.

So I guess if you really really want to excise someone’s offensive personality from your memories, picture her (or him) as a corpse in a bikini. Don’t be alarmed, however, if the image results in a little mental scarring.

The research, now in press at The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, was conducted by Jonathan Jong and collaborators at the University of Otago in New Zealand. In their first study, they asked subjects to write about what will happen to them when they die, or what happens when they watch TV. Then they used a Supernatural Belief Scale (SBS), asking subjects if they believe in things like God and heaven.

If you say there are no atheists in foxholes, you’d probably guess that reminders of death (such as one might have in battle) would increase SBS scores (thus decreasing atheism). If you disagree with the aphorism, you’d probably guess that a death reminder would have no effect. The results, however, did not match either expectation. Compared to writing about TV, writing about death increased SBS scores among religious participants but decreased SBS scores among nonreligious participants. So maybe we should say there are no agnostics in foxholes?

The researchers explained their results using what’s called Terror Management Theory (TMT). According to this set of hypotheses, reminders of death lead us to defend our cultural worldviews because the more we feel valued within a stable worldview the more we feel like part of something larger that will transcend our own deaths. Theism and atheism are just two of many worldviews, and so, ironically, affirming one’s atheistic worldview that there’s no afterlife appears to reduce anxiety about the end of this life.

But in the first study, subjects were asked about their supernatural beliefs explicitly, where answering a certain way can act as a defense mechanism. There might be another, more buried, part of atheists that begins to let in the idea of God. To find out, in the second study the researchers used a type of Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure such subtle superstition.

Subjects once again wrote about death or TV. Then they took an IAT requiring quick categorization of words. Reaction times indicate implicit associations between different types of words (in this case, synonyms for real; synonyms for imaginary; and words for supernatural entities, e.g., God, soul, Hell). Two main effects emerged. First, religious subjects showed a stronger association between the supernatural words and the reality words than nonreligious subjects did, indicating a stronger belief in the supernatural. (No surprise there.) And second, a reminder of death increased this association in both religious and nonreligious subjects. What’s more, thoughts of death increased implicit belief in supernatural entities just as much in skeptics as it did in the faithful.

A third study supported these results. Subjects wrote about death or TV, then categorized 20 nouns as real or imaginary as quickly as possible. The nouns included 10 religious words such as God, angel, heaven, and miracles. Religious subjects of course tended to categorize these words as real, and nonreligious subjects on average called them imaginary. But while a death reminder strengthened religious subjects’ implicit belief in religious concepts (by shortening their response times), it weakened the disbelief of the nonreligious (by slowing them down). According to the researchers, “Supernatural agents and related concepts might offer a unique buffer against death-related anxiety that tempts—albeit does not fully convince—the non-believer.”

I asked Jason Torpy, the president of The Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, for comment on the research. “People would be better served by seeking comfort in reality,” he said. “Fantasy-based coping can only delay the inevitable reckoning with the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’.” Perhaps, but some evidence indicates that a little bit of magical thinking can actually increase post-traumatic growth and decrease existential angst.

In any case, while atheists might not pray to God in the heat of battle, it seems likely that they’ll sense the shadow of this imaginary wingman anyway. Sometimes reality is not as comforting as it could be.

(For the story behind my stuffed red dragon, Blip, see chapter 1 of my book.)

Humans rely on other people in nearly every realm of life, from being raised, to obtaining food, to fending off rivals, to producing our own children, to being cared for in old age. And so we’ve developed a fundamental emotional need to belong. We find comfort in mere companionship and often seek it when isolated.

Nicholas Epley and collaborators have shown that loneliness leads us to anthropomorphize—to attribute human qualities where they don’t belong, which is a form of magical thinking (see chapter 6). For example, after watching a clip of Cast Away, people thought of their pets as more thoughtful, considerate, and sympathetic. And people who reported more frequently feeling isolated gave various gadgets (including Clocky, an alarm clock on wheels that runs away) higher ratings on scales of free will and consciousness.

But does such anthropomorphism actually quench our thirst for connection, the way real human contact does? Does it make us happier? Well, anyone with a dog will tell you yes, and research shows that being around pets can reduce stress. But can something even less human, such as a teddy bear, do the trick? That’s where the new research comes in.

Kenneth Tai, Xue Zheng, and Jayanth Narayanan at the National University of Singapore ran subjects in groups of four and asked them to pick two of the other three to work with. Subjects received false feedback telling them either everyone had picked them or no one had picked them. Later they were asked to rate a consumer product—a teddy bear. Half of them were asked to hold the bear while evaluating it. Among the socially excluded subjects, those who touched the bear expressed more positive emotions at the end of the experiment than those who didn’t—about as many as both groups of socially included subjects.

Further, when given $10 and asked if they wanted to donate some anonymously to another subject, the excluded subjects gave more money if they had touched the bear. Their increased prosociality resulted from their better moods. (The experimenters did not, however, test the effects of bears deformed by evil.)

Given that isolation increases stress and cortisol production, and that petting dogs reduces blood pressure, the researchers suggest that touching a teddy bear might make you not just happier and nicer but healthier too. One more win for magical thinking.

Note, however, that even though your stuffed animals are probably better behaved and easier to clean up after than your friends, it’s probably a good idea to keep a few real people around. After all, you’ll need someone on your side when the bears rise up to conquer us all.

He quickly built a recording studio in the home and named it Le Pig—the killers had written “Pig” on the front door in Tate’s blood. There he recorded his album The Downward Spiral (an album I’ve listened to more than any other, thanks to my dark teen years), as well as part of his EP Broken and part of the album Portrait of an American Family by Marilyn Manson (no relation).

Whether Reznor bought the house for inspiration, as a publicity stunt, or (as he has claimed) simply because of an interest in American folklore, the history of the place had to have had some influence on his work. The house felt “sad,” he’s said—although he acknowledged that “that could just be my own insanity.”

If it’s an insanity, it’s not solely his own. Last October a paper was published suggesting we all have a tendency to believe emotions leave a trace in the physical environment—we believe in emotional residue.

The paper, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, reported on nine experiments that Krishna Savani of Columbia Business School and colleagues had carried out with students in America and India. Subjects reported, for example, that moving into a dorm room after the previous inhabitant had experienced family problems would make one depressed, or that entering a room just after a roommate had rejoiced about winning a scholarship (and then left) would make one happy. Subjects also said they’d feel the strongest residue if many people had experienced emotion in a location, and/or the subjects had a close relationship with those people. And in all cases, subjects said the traces would be felt even if the person picking up on them had no knowledge of the events transpiring in the space beforehand; subjects believed such reactions were more than just a placebo effect.

In the final experiment, the researchers checked to see if the expectation of emotional residue had measurable effects on behavior. So they invited subjects to take a survey and gave them a choice of two identical rooms to use. Let’s say a subject is scheduled to arrive Wednesday at 3:15. There would then be signs on the rooms’ doors saying “Recollection of HAPPY Life Events Study, Wed 1:00-3:00,” and “Recollection of UNHAPPY Life Events Study, Wed 1:00-3:00.” Subjects picked the happy room 63% of the time.

The researchers explain their results using what the psychologist Peter A. White calls the property transmission hypothesis. He says that, as a heuristic, we expect objects to transmit properties between each other. Which makes sense: paint brushes color things, ice cubes cool things, sponges wet things, etc. But White argues that this heuristic is applied so broadly that we expect even the subjective properties of people (their “essences”) to be transmitted through contact—a phenomenon called magical contagion. Hence the value of family heirlooms and celebrity memorabilia. (See chapter 1 of my book.)

In Savani et al.’s scenarios, there’s no particular object transmitting emotions from expresser to perceiver through contact, but property transmission sometimes acts without contact. Heat, light, and odor all radiate outward from their sources. So we might expect happiness or sadness or fear to radiate outward from people and fill a room, even seeping into its walls.

(As a footnote, Savani and his collaborators point out that belief in emotional residue may be more than just magical thinking. Our sweat smells different depending on our mood at the time of perspiration, so people can literally smell fear.)

If you’re looking to take advantage of emotional emanations, but feel lost now that the Tate house is demolished and the great American industrial album has been recorded, take heart: the New York Times reports that there is a profession called “smudging,” or “space clearing.” Basically, when people buy a home, they invite you over, you burn some incense, say some stuff about “energy” or “vibes,” and maybe wave your hands around a little. Here’s the trick: you then leave them with a bill for a couple of grand. I promise, when you get home, the smile on your face will be contagious.

Futility describes a British luxury liner, the largest in the world, with a top speed of 25 knots, a capacity of 3,000, and too few lifeboats. Despite being considered “unsinkable,” it went under after its starboard side struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic one night in April. (For reference, the Titanic was a British luxury liner, the largest in the world, with a top speed of 25 knots, a capacity of 3,000, and too few lifeboats. Despite being considered “unsinkable,” it went under after its starboard side struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic one night in April.) And guess what the name of the ship in Futility was: the Titanic! No, just kidding. That would be crazy. It was the Titan.

It’s easy to look at Futility and suppose that its author, Morgan Robertson, had a premonition. Other people claim to have foreseen the disaster. One woman screamed “That ship is going to sink!” as the vessel cruised by. The wife of one passenger had trouble sleeping the night of the accident, so she got on her knees and randomly opened her prayer book to “For those at Sea.” Other people had vague feelings of foreboding.

But it’s almost as easy to explain away those supposed premonitions. As I explain in my book, people are good at finding patterns in the world. If something bad happens, you can often locate some thought or event that appears to have presaged the incident. And we’re flexible, so anything having to do with water, or death, or coldness could, in retrospect seem to fit the theme of a shipwreck. We also have selective attention, so coincidences pop out and non-coincidences fade away; most of the time, you do not dream about an event before it happens.

Futility, I think, also illustrates what the mathematicians Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller have called the law of truly large numbers. The Titan-Titanic match-up is a pretty outrageous coincidence, but, they write, “with a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen.” With so many things happening in the world, and so many people writing about things that could potentially happen in the world, something like a Futility was bound to occur at some point in human history.

And it probably will again. Fingers crossed that Stephen King doesn’t turn out to be our next Nostradamus.

The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking

The shirt was a baseball jersey with the name and number of David Ortiz, a star player for the Boston Red Sox. The hole was a freshly jack-hammered void in the concrete of the New York Yankees’ expensive new stadium. In 2007 a mischievous construction worker had buried it there, and word had just got out. The Yankees, and their fans, wanted it gone.

On one level, their anxiety makes no sense. A shirt cannot bring down a stadium. That’s conscious, rational thought talking. On another level, their anxiety makes perfect sense. The team could not risk being cursed by Ortiz, a player who helped break the Curse of the Bambino. That’s the voice of magical thinking.

But what cognitive mechanisms would lead people to believe that a shirt representing a player could channel his essence? What’s the psychology behind voodoo?

One factor is that we’re not perfect at what’s called “appearance-reality distinction.” Babies try to grasp objects in photographs, and even adults scream when Freddie Krueger pops up on the big screen. Part of us doesn’t believe what we’re seeing isn’t real. This is why in one study people started to sweat when asked to cut up a mere photograph of a cherished childhood possession.

But an Ortiz jersey would be hard to mistake for the real Ortiz, so what’s the deal? It turns out that even symbols that represent reality abstractly can produce some of the experience in the brain of encountering reality directly. For instances, just reading the words lick, pick, and kick activates parts of the motor cortex controlling the tongue, fingers, and legs, respectively. Words such as mint, gunpowder, and fart activate the primary olfactory cortex. And reading words for musical instruments activates parts of the cortex responsible for auditory perception.

Obviously we don’t literally feel, smell, or hear these written words, but they trigger internal simulations of what they represent. To a certain small degree they generate real experiences, as if a mint leaf or a violin were in our presence. This may be why we call certain words “dirty words”—as if they themselves were filthy. And it may be why we treat a jersey representing Ortiz as having something of Ortiz in it—the association is strong enough that brain doesn’t fully grasp the difference. (I know, that seems weird, but so is the behavior we’re trying to explain.)

Now, even if the actual David Ortiz were buried in Yankee Stadium, how would that curse it? Well, as I explain in chapter 1, we believe in essences that can be transmitted trough contact or emanated like energy. So if the essence of Ortiz is suffused throughout the stadium, perhaps, we believe, its aura could affect events on the field.

In any case, the Ortiz jersey was excavated, and the Yankees won their World Series in 2009. But… in chapter 2, I reveal another curse allegedly placed on the Yankees by Gino Castignoli, the worker who buried the Ortiz jersey. Castignoli claims also to have worked on Derek Jeter’s apartment in Trump World Tower—and to have hidden some surprises in there. This would have been in early 2001, and you may recall that after winning the Series in 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2000, New York had an eight-year dry spell. Compared to the Ortiz curse, Castignoli told me, the Jeter jinx “actually worked longer.”

Around the world, everyone looks up at the same stars, trying to divine occult truths. But the kind of information they’re looking for depends on their personality and on their culture, according to new research.

Magical thinking often results from a need for control. We feel better about ourselves and our place in the cosmos when we can influence the affairs around us. And so when people feel anxious or uncertain they’re more likely to see illusory patterns (conspiracy theories, faces in the clouds, etc.), because when you spot a pattern you have something to act on. That’s what makes horoscopes so appealing. They give us a sense of what to prepare for, and often lend apparent insight into our daily lives.

But not everyone desires the same type of control. Westerners prefer what’s called primary control, the ability to make your surroundings adapt to you. Easterners prefer secondary control, the ability to adapt to your surroundings. (Of course there’s variation within every culture.) Therefore in the new studies, now in press in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, the researchers proposed that Americans are more interested in learning about themselves, because self-knowledge allows you to best implement your abilities, whereas Chinese prefer information about others, which allows them to adjust and fit in.

Cynthia Wang, Jennifer Whitson, and Tanya Menon made subjects in the United States and Singapore feel a lack of control. Then they showed them a horoscope purportedly personalized for the subject or for a friend of the subject. Feeling the need to regain control increased Americans’ belief in the personal horoscopes—they saw correlations between the description of their personality and their actual personality—but it didn’t increase their belief in their friends’ horoscopes. Meanwhile feeling a need for control had the reverse effect on the Chinese. Americans sought self-knowledge and Chinese sought insight into their friends.

Anyway, this stuff about primary and secondary control is really just a roundabout way of saying that “The Planet Has Needs For Your Deeds” is not something you’d find on a bottle of Tsingtao.

Divine responsibly, everyone!

The subject: John Logan, a playwright and screenwriter (recently: Hugo, Rango, Coriolanus). The scene: Bauman Rare Books on Madison Avenue.

Fingering an old book, Logan says, “Touching a leaf from a folio, or owning a quarto of ‘Hamlet,’ as I do, gives you a connection to the protean moment: you’re almost there at the creation.” This is an example of essentialism, as I describe in chapter 1. These old documents contain authenticity, or what Philip K. Dick calls historicity. They seem to have absorbed some essence of their previous owners or the events surrounding them. (The prime example I explore in my book is the piano John Lennon composed “Imagine” on, which people find healing to touch.) One question I raise is whether historicity derives from how we think about biological contagion—something invisible is being passed along–or whether it derives from our instinct for social networking—communion with a historic artifact signifies privileged access. It could be both.

Logan goes on to say, “With an adaptation, I always feel something—someone—on my shoulder. I have a bust of Shakespeare in my office, and when I wrote ‘Coriolanus’ I put a blindfold, a red hiking bandana, over his eyes.” Here he demonstrates a mixture of two types of magical thinking: dualism (chapter 5) and anthropomorphism (chapter 6).

Dualism leads us to believe we have souls that live on after brain death. Further, we maintain mental representations of other people after they leave the room and even after they die, so we continue to infer what they might be thinking about a given situation. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion describes how her permanent mental file for her departed husband leads her to keep his shoes in case he needs them again. Here, Logan worries that Shakespeare, whose mind he has no doubt constructed a mental simulation of, will disapprove of an adaptation.

And he uses Shakespeare’s bust as an avatar for his own mental model of Shakespeare, believing the inanimate object to have consciousness. That’s anthropomorphism. It doesn’t take much to trigger our face-identification system, or to trigger out attribution of person-like characteristics to faces. (Studies show that people are better-behaved around mere iconic images of eyes, as if they’re being watched.)

These elements of magical thinking, I argue, either are or result from features of our minds that have evolved to enable survival. The technical term for such a feature: an adaptation.