The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking

Most of the world is religious, and millions more are openly superstitious, spiritual, or credulous of the paranormal. But in The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking, Matthew Hutson argues that we all believe in magic - luck, mind over matter, destiny, jinxes, life after death, evil, and heavenly helpers - even when we say we don't.

Magical thinking can be quite banal. We find meaning in the world all around us, every day. Do you own any sentimental; objects - say, a wedding ring, a family heirloom or an autographed baseball? Objects you'd value more than an identical duplicate? That's magical thinking. Do you feel that what goes around comes around, through some universal principle of fairness? Do you yell at your laptop when it erases your files? Do you hope to leave a legacy when you die? Do you believe certain events were meant to happen? Hutson draws on evolution, cognitive science, and neuroscience, to show us that we engage in magical thinking all the time in ways that can be boiled down to these 7 laws, including:

* Any Object Can Be Sacred

*Actions Have Distant Consequences

* What Goes Around Comes Around

Hutson shows readers that this kind of magical thinking has been so useful to our survival that it's hardwired into our brains. It encourages us to think that we actually have free will. It helps make us believe that we have an underlying purpose in the world. It can even protect us from the paralyzing awareness of our own mortality. In other words, magical thinking is a completely irrational way to making our lives make rational sense. For readers of Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide and Joseph Hallinan's Why We Make Mistakes, The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking will expose cognitive misperceptions we didn't even know we had, but which reveal our deepest fears and longings. A relationship we depend on for our very own survival.