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Last week's discussion of the New York Times article on superstitious behavior and magical thinking got me wondering....

A Bryn Mawr alum friend of mine is going to have surgery soon to remove a part of a gland that may or may not be cancerous. But my first reaction upon hearing this was not to worry (although that came later); I thought immediately "I need to leave an offering to Athena for her!" What exactly would this offering to Athena do? Almost nothing at all from a medical standpoint; that's what the surgery is for, right? But from the perspective of a concerned and ultimately pretty powerless friend, leaving offerings to Athena feels like doing my part, however small.

And then I read the Times article. "Magical thinking"--behaviors like leaving offerings to Athena--occurs most often when people feel most helpless, it claims. So now my need to leave an offering makes more sense; because I can't do anything that would help in the medical sense now, I resort to superstition. But now, think about how superstitions and magical thinking are reinforced. You perform an action (like leaving an offering) once-the input. After you leave the offering, the desired event happens-you pass your test, your friend turns out to be okay-that's the output. Logically, there's no reason why adding the same input every time should lead to the same output. But you keep leaving offerings every time. If the desired event happens, your offerings helped. If it doesn't, then you may have left the wrong offerings, not left them soon enough-anything but the logical explanation.

This principle is called a variable schedule of reinforcement, and it's well known in psychology as a great way to enforce behaviors; among other things, it's what makes gambling so addictive. But I'm wondering if this principle can be applied to the nervous system too. The brain leads up to perform certain actions-inputs. Most of the time those actions produce one certain output, but in certain circumstances they produce others-a variable schedule of reinforcement. Because the actual output depends on a wide range of variables that we may or may not completely understand, we keep performing the actions over and over, hoping for the output we desire.

People talk so much about predictable outputs from certain inputs, but maybe it's the variable reinforcement that ultimately influences our behaviors more.