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he notes that mega-author Michael Crichton (a medical doctor and a writer who specializes in using science in such novels as Jurassic Park) eats the same thing for lunch every day while working on a new novel; and New York Giants football coach Bill Parcells, during his years in which the Giants were Superbowl champs in 1986 and 1991, would stop and purchase coffee at two different coffee shops on his way to the stadium before every game. Of course, many people have triskaidekaphobia, fear of the number 13 (in France there is even a company that provides emergency guests for dinner parties to make certain that thirteen people never sit at one table); others still shun black cats and avoid walking under a ladder. And chain letters are routinely distributed, even by intelligent, educated journalists such as Gene Forman of the Philadelphia Inquirer, who explained: “You understand that I am not doing this because I’m superstitious. I just want to avoid bad luck.” We understand perfectly.

The Medieval belief engine. Robert Fludd’s “Mystery of the Human Head” from his Ultrisque Cosmic Maioris Scilicet Et Minoris Metaphysica, published in 1617, is an early attempt to understand the workings of the mind through science. Fludd’s work is in the tradition of making correspondences between the macrocosm and the microcosm, between the universe and man. Here the celestial world, composed of God and angels, penetrates through the skull and into the soul. The four elements (left concentric circles—earth, water, air, and fire) communicate with the five senses. The “imaginable world” (middle concentric circles) corresponds to the metaphysical sensations, “as in dreams, by non-existent objects and, consequently, by the shadows of elements.” The Mundus Intellectualis—the world of the intellect—is linked to the imagination through a series of spheres. At the back of the skull is the sphere of “memorative, or pertaining to remembrance,” which Fludd shows connected to the intellect.

In his gripping tale of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer shows this relationship between uncertainty and superstition in the Belief Engines of the normally libertine and morally free-spirited Sherpas. When nearing the top of the mountain the Sherpas were overwhelmed by magical thinking. One action in particular was “forbidden by the mountain”—“sauce-making” (sexual liaisons between unmarried couples) in the tents above Base Camp. “Whenever the weather would turn nasty, one or another Sherpa was apt to point up at the clouds boiling heavenward and earnestly declare, ‘Somebody has been sauce-making. Make bad luck. Now storm is coming.’” Sandy Pittman, the New York socialite who nearly lost her life during the 1996 expedition, posted the following diary entry on her Everest Web page about the superstitious Sherpas:

… a mail runner had arrived that afternoon with letters from home for everyone and a girlie magazine which had been sent by a caring climber buddy back home as a joke … . Half of the Sherpas had taken it to a tent for closer inspection, while the others fretted over the disaster they were certain that any examination of it would bring. The goddess Chomolungma, they claimed, doesn’t tolerate “jiggy jiggy”—anything unclean—on her sacred mountain.

The Belief Engine is real. It is normal. It is in all of us. Stuart Vyse shows, for example, that superstition is not a form of psychopathology or abnormal behavior; it is not limited to traditional cultures; it is not restricted to race, religion, or nationality; nor is it only a product of people of low intelligence or lacking in education. There is variance in magical thinking among individuals, of course, but all humans possess it because it is part of our nature, built into our neuronal mainframe. We do not live in a Pleistocene environment, but our minds were built there and often function as if we do. Witness a recent craze for mediums who say they can talk to the dead. It is a classic case of the Belief Engine at work. Because of the remarkable popularity of this particular