Richard Wiseman
Published: 12:01AM GMT 09 Jan 2003

A decade ago, I set out to investigate luck. I wanted to examine the impact on people's lives of chance opportunities, lucky breaks and being in the right place at the right time. After many experiments, I believe that I now understand why some people are luckier than others and that it is possible to become luckier.

To launch my study, I placed advertisements in national newspapers and magazines, asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me. Over the years, 400 extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research from all walks of life: the youngest is an 18-year-old student, the oldest an 84-year-old retired accountant.

Jessica, a 42-year-old forensic scientist, is typical of the lucky group. As she explained: "I have my dream job, two wonderful children and a great guy whom I love very much. It's amazing; when I look back at my life, I realise I have been lucky in just about every area."

In contrast, Carolyn, a 34-year-old care assistant, is typical of the unlucky group. She is accident-prone. In one week, she twisted her ankle in a pothole, injured her back in another fall and reversed her car into a tree during a driving lesson. She was also unlucky in love and felt she was always in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Over the years, I interviewed these volunteers, asked them to complete diaries, questionnaires and intelligence tests, and invited them to participate in experiments. The findings have revealed that although unlucky people have almost no insight into the real causes of their good and bad luck, their thoughts and behaviour are responsible for much of their fortune.

Take the case of chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities, whereas unlucky people do not. I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities.

I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message: "Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper." This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than 2in high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.

For fun, I placed a second large message halfway through the newspaper: "Stop counting. Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win £250." Again, the unlucky people missed the opportunity because they were still too busy looking for photographs.

Personality tests revealed that unlucky people are generally much more tense than lucky people, and research has shown that anxiety disrupts people's ability to notice the unexpected. In one experiment, people were asked to watch a moving dot in the centre of a computer screen. Without warning, large dots would occasionally be flashed at the edges of the screen. Nearly all participants noticed these large dots.

The experiment was then repeated with a second group of people, who were offered a large financial reward for accurately watching the centre dot, creating more anxiety. They became focused on the centre dot and more than a third of them missed the large dots when they appeared on the screen. The harder they looked, the less they saw.

And so it is with luck - unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.

My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

I wondered whether these four principles could be used to increase the amount of good luck that people encounter in their lives. To find out, I created a "luck school" - a simple experiment that examined whether people's luck can be enhanced by getting them to think and behave like a lucky person.

I asked a group of lucky and unlucky volunteers to spend a month carrying out exercises designed to help them think and behave like a lucky person. These exercises helped them spot chance opportunities, listen to their intuition, expect to be lucky, and be more resilient to bad luck.

One month later, the volunteers returned and described what had happened. The results were dramatic: 80 per cent of people were now happier, more satisfied with their lives and, perhaps most important of all, luckier. While lucky people became luckier, the unlucky had become lucky. Take Carolyn, whom I introduced at the start of this article. After graduating from "luck school", she has passed her driving test after three years of trying, was no longer accident-prone and became more confident.

In the wake of these studies, I think there are three easy techniques that can help to maximise good fortune:

• Unlucky people often fail to follow their intuition when making a choice, whereas lucky people tend to respect hunches. Lucky people are interested in how they both think and feel about the various options, rather than simply looking at the rational side of the situation. I think this helps them because gut feelings act as an alarm bell - a reason to consider a decision carefully.

• Unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine. They tend to take the same route to and from work and talk to the same types of people at parties. In contrast, many lucky people try to introduce variety into their lives. For example, one person described how he thought of a colour before arriving at a party and then introduced himself to people wearing that colour. This kind of behaviour boosts the likelihood of chance opportunities by introducing variety.

• Lucky people tend to see the positive side of their ill fortune. They imagine how things could have been worse. In one interview, a lucky volunteer arrived with his leg in a plaster cast and described how he had fallen down a flight of stairs. I asked him whether he still felt lucky and he cheerfully explained that he felt luckier than before. As he pointed out, he could have broken his neck.

Richard Wiseman is a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire.

Posted on Wednesday, February 17, 2010 3:24 PM PT

By Diane Mapes, contributor

Marie Raymond sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night, heart pounding, freaked out by the sound of her name being shouted loud and clear. Other times she’ll be awakened by the sound of a huge crash, as if someone has broken a window or knocked over a set of dishes. 

“The sound is terrifying — super loud, like someone has broken in,” says Raymond, a 38-year-old arts administrator from Seattle. “But when I get up to look around, nothing’s amiss and everything’s quiet.” After dealing with it off and on for the last several months, Raymond believes she may have exploding head syndrome. She hasn’t seen a doctor about it, but has done some research online.

As strange as the name sounds, exploding head syndrome is actually a rare and relatively undocumented sleep phenomenon. While sleeping or dozing, a person with the condition hears a terrifically loud sound in their head, such as a bomb exploding, a clash of cymbals or a gun going off.

“It’s usually described as a loud bang or pop that occurs in the first third of the night,” says Dr. Neil Kline, sleep physician and representative of the American Sleep Association in Wilmington, Del. “It’s a sensory phenomenon. The individual senses that some type of explosion has occurred nearby, but ultimately realizes it’s in their head. It’s not associated with pain or with any disorder that we know of and there are no physiological medical consequences that are associated with it.”

Thought to be brought on by anxiety or extreme fatigue and occurring in clusters during stressful periods, exploding head syndrome is not dangerous, according to the American Sleep Association Web site.

It can be disconcerting, though, stirring up images of a David Cronenberg movie. “Individuals can develop an aversion to falling asleep,” says Kline. “They’ll develop insomnia because they’re concerned by these occurrences. But they’re usually rare. I’ve never heard of it occurring regularly.”

First described in 1920 as a “snapping of the brain,” there is little to be found on the phenomenon in medical literature. Some patients experience a bright flash of light along with the loud explosion or crash, according to a 1989 study in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry that looked at 50 patients suffering from the syndrome. In almost every case there are physical aftereffects, such as “a sense of alarm, together with a cold sweat, labored breathing and tachycardia” (a rapid heart rate).

Or as Raymond puts it, you suddenly wake up “feeling like a character out of Poe.”

As for the explosions themselves, patients have described them as a shotgun blast, a thunderclap, a loud metallic noise, the clash of cymbals, a lightning strike or the sound of every door in the house slamming. Luckily, the crash, bang, or boom lasts only a few seconds and disappears as soon as the person awakens. Episodes, which are usually clustered over the course of a few days, will then disappear for months — or years — on end.

It’s unclear why stress would bring on a crashing sound in your head, although some have speculated that it may be the result of a movement of the middle ear component or of the eustachian tube.

J.M.S. Pearce, the British neurologist who coined the term, calls it a “mystery” requiring further study. He also felt the phenomenon was not as rare as some believe, perhaps due to people’s hesitancy to discuss it. “Many [patients] said they had been ashamed to mention it to their doctors or that their complaint had been greeted with incredulity if not frank disbelief,” he wrote in his 1989 study “Clinical features of the exploding head syndrome.”  “It is entirely benign, and I suspect quite common, but underreported.”

Exploding head syndrome is said to happen more often after the age of 50 (although there have been reports of it happening in children) and believed to be more common among women. Due to the rarity of the syndrome, though, it’s hard to establish any kind of parameters, says Kline.

“I’m not convinced there’s good data that describes the demographic of this phenomenon,” he says. “I’ve only had a few patients during my career who have described it and no one has ever asked to be treated for it.”

Since the phenomenon is often linked to stress, sleep experts suggest relaxation techniques  like exercise, reading before bedtime or yoga to help alleviate the episodes. According to studies, a few patients have also found relief by taking certain types of antidepressants. A 2001 study in the journal Current Pain and Headache Reports found “most sufferers require only reassurance that the spells are benign in nature.” 

But hearing a sudden loud banging in the middle of the night can be very frightening. “So if an individual is experiencing this and it’s disrupting their sleep or causing them anxiety, they should talk to their doctor about it,” Kline advises.

Despite the sensational name, there’s no danger that your head will actually blow apart.
“When most people hear of it, they visualize an individual’s head exploding,” says Kline That’s not what happens.”

Ever heard of Dunbar’s Number? According to British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, it’s the cognitive limit to the number of people you can be friends with. The number is 150, meaning your brain can only handle that many friends, and — shockingly enough — it also applies to Facebook.

Even if you have thousands of friends, that number is really meaningless as far as true friendships go, Dunbar told Times Online. He supports this with traffic data. “The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world,” he said.

This is a well-known concept. The company that produces Gore-Tex fabrics, Gore (as famously explained in Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point), keeps its employees divided into small teams because in very large teams the relationship between people starts to deteriorate.

The number is a bit different for boys and girls, Dunbar claims, without going into specifics. “There is a big sex difference though … girls are much better at maintaining relationships just by talking to each other. Boys need to do physical stuff together,” he said.

Personally, I keep the number of my Facebook friends very small, around 100 — I friend only the people I know IRL — but I don’t feel that having several hundred friends would be meaningless. After all, when you count in the relatives, business contacts and other acquaintances, I’m sure your social circle can grow well over 150. As far as real friendship goes, well, I’m not sure that Facebook is the best indicator, anyway.

First recorded in Chicago in 1994, this previously unreleased audio session with the renowned Robert Anton Wilson has been stored away for fifteen years…and almost lost entirely. If Bob knew how many synchronicities surround the rediscovery and release of this “lost” studio session, he would be chuckling in that half jolly, half mischievous way of his. If you believe in any kind of afterlife, maybe you can imagine him laughing right now. I like that image: Bob the laughing Buddha, still having one over on us from the great beyond.

Available from Original Falcon

This is quite possibly the oddest example of an illusory face I have ever discovered.

Seeing meaningful information in meaningless data is a psychological effect known as pareidolia or apophenia and this is an example that was published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1996:

The case of the haunted scrotum

A 45-year-old man was referred for investigation of an undescended right testis by computed tomography (CT). An ultrasound scan showed a normal testis and epididymis on the left side. The right testis was not visualized in the scrotal sac or in the right inguinal region. On CT scanning of the abdomen and pelvis, the right testis was not identified but the left side of the scrotum seemed to be occupied by a screaming ghostlike apparition (Figure 1). By chance, the distribution of normal anatomical structures within the left side of the scrotum had combined to produce this image. What of the undescended right testis? None was found. If you were a right testis, would you want to share the scrotum with that?

J R Harding
Consultant Radiologist, Royal Gwent Hospital

Link to PubMed entry for 'The case of the haunted scrotum'.

Looks a bit like Belial from the Frank Henenlotter's seminal (ahem) "Basket Case" to me...