A green signal, less traffic, pleasant weather, and a polite boss may be considered elements of good luck when you’re driving to your new job on the first day. Similarly, when you burn your toast one busy morning, trip over a piece of rock on your way to your building, or realise you forgot your wallet at home, you consider yourself being surrounded by bad luck that day.

Everything that the brain filters as ‘good fortune’ and ‘bad fortune’ is plainly heightened awareness of external cues. Luck isn’t something that exists around us, but is something that the brain creates. The brain collects cues from the external environment and identifies the patterns between them; thus categorising them into favourable and unfavourable elements.

It is an understanding that lucky people expect good things to happen and people who consider themselves unlucky expect unfortunate things to happen. Psychologist Richard Wiseman conducted an interesting experiment where he handed newspapers to a group of people divided into two groups – lucky and unlucky. He asked them to count the number of pictures spread across the newspaper pages. The ‘lucky’ ones completed the task in seconds, while the ‘unlucky’ people took longer. One headline in the newspaper said that a total of 43 images were used in the edition that day. The headline was itself a giveaway. While the ‘lucky’ noticed it, the ‘unlucky’ didn’t – they had ignored the headline altogether.

This is how the brain filters information that it doesn’t consider important or relevant. When this filtering occurs, it causes the brain to not be open to perceiving other helpful cues around it. The self-declared unlucky people seemed to have easily missed the headline as they functioned on their preconceived notion that manually counting the photographs would reduce their bad luck in some way.

What we consider luck and good fortune are mostly dependent on what our brains process around us. It observes patterns and connections, thus creating a conclusion that may not be accurate to the outcome. When the brain identifies a pattern of events, it releases dopamine – which excites the body for its new-found revelation. This leads to a phenomenon called Apophenia, which is the tendency of the brain to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things.

Apophenia works subconsciously. Imagine this. Your boss calls you in for a surprise meeting and awards you a raise. You notice you’re wearing your grandma’s blue-beaded bracelet. Your brain quickly considers it a signal, associating it with the success. You begin to believe that the bracelet acted as a ‘lucky charm’.

Considering something a lucky charm would work only until your thoughts are altered to believe that it controls your outcomes. People who believe they are surrounded by misfortune happen to focus on the worst possibilities and prepare themselves accordingly to minimise loss.

However, those that believe in good luck are subconsciously training their brains to prepare for the best possible outcomes – thus promoting overall optimism. The body being sensitive to these cues keeps the mind relaxed and open to receiving other helpful cues it may come across.

Luck isn’t magic or an invisible force in the air; it is merely the brain’s understanding of the various elements that lead up to an event. What you choose to focus on is what makes all the difference. The brain is a marvel that helps you create your own luck every day teaching you to believe that fortune favours you. And you’ll be happy seeing that no matter how much you drink of it, your glass always remains half full. – Image credit: freepik – editor@nrifocus.com

– Judith is a counselling psychologist, specialising in mindfulness therapy and researching the quirks of life.