Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff, I'm Lauren Vogelbaum. And even if you don't believe in the power of superstition, you may sometimes find yourself knocking on wood, crossing your fingers, or wearing your lucky baseball cap during the World Series. Although we know scientifically that these things don't actually affect the outcome of anything, we
still find them comforting. Study by behavioral scientists at the University of Chicago suggested that when people perform a physical action to avoid bad luck or harm, the ritual calms their mind. Superstitions span cultures, countries, and centuries. Every culture has its own unique set of superstitions. However, this raises an interesting question, are any superstitions common across cultures. Superstitions revolving around numbers are abundant worldwide. The specific numbers may vary.
For example, the number thirteen is widely regarded to bring bad luck in Western cultures. There's even a name for is fear triski decaphobia. Other cultures have superstitions about different numbers. In China and Japan, it's the number four because the pronunciation is similar to words for death. The number nine in Japan is feared because its pronunciation sounds like a
word for torture. Some Italians consider Friday the seventeenth to be bad luck because the Roman numeral for seventeen x v I I can be rearranged to v i x I VIXI, translated from Latin means my life is over. In many parts of the world, the appearance of a black cat is considered bad luck. Although this isn't true across all cultures, black cats still hold a place in global superstitions. In ancient Egypt, cats were worshiped as gods and kept in homes to bring prosperity. In Italy, if
your cat's sneezes, good luck is on the way. In some parts of Europe, black cat crossing your path is good luck. However, in the New World, Puritans believed black cats were related to witches and therefore were considered a bad omen. The action of knocking on wood or tie chingwood for good luck goes back millennia and exists across
the world. Some people's believed fairies or spirits lived inside trees, and they would knock on or touch the tree wants to request a wish, and one more time to express thanks, or they believed that the knocking would distract any evil spirits living there. Similar expressions to knock on wood exist today in Arabic, Brazilian, Finnish, German, Czechoslovakian, English, Greek, and Finnish.
Other superstitions that cross cultures include crossing your fingers for good luck, four leaf clovers as lucky charms, and sneeze is causing some change in luck, be it good or bad. As human beings in an often chaotic world, we all try to control our destinies one knock, number or bless you at a time. Today's episode was written by Deborah Rnka and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other lucky topics, visit our home planet, pastaff works dot com