Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio, Hey brain Stuff. Lauren Vogel bam here. One day in in Rochester, New York, a woman named Sandra rode her bike into town to do some shopping. She locked up her steed, shopped, and came back to find it gone devastated. She reported the loss to the cops, who warned her that the chances of recovery were slim. Later that day, at a coffee shop, she spotted another policeman and decided to tell
her sad tale again. Promising to have a look. The cop hopped on his bike and went off on patrol, but not before Sandra had given him a four leaf clover to boost his chances. Within minutes, the officer had found her wheels. Never he reported, had he ever recovered a missing item so quickly. The clover had apparently done its work. Nearly as interesting as the happy outcome of this story is the fact that Sandra had a spare four leaf clover on hand. It was no accident she
collected them. In fact, she had so many that she made a habit of giving them away. In this she's not as unusual as you might think. The Guinness World record for the largest collection of four leaf clovers goes to one Edward Martin of Cooper Landing, Alaska, who has amassed more than a hundred thousand of them. And that's truly astounding when you consider the fact that your chances of finding a four leaf clover are only one in
ten thousand. So four leaf clovers are supposed to bring good luck, and clearly some people really want to pile it on. But just what is it that makes them so lucky? The legend goes all the way back to Adam and Eve. One tale tells that as they were being hustled out of the garden of Eden, Eve plucked a four leaf clover to carry with her as a souvenir of paradise. The druids of the ancient Celtic world were also big fans of four leaf clovers and carried
them around to ward off malevolent spirits. This practice evolved into a medieval theory that a four leaf clover would give you the ability to spot fairies and take vase of action if necessary. As a result, back in the Middle Ages, kids entertained themselves by ferreting out the necessary stems and heading out on fairy hunts. With the little green plants enjoying such popularity, it's no wonder that Saint Patrick decided to use them as a teaching tool when
he set about converting Ireland to Christianity. The four leaf variety being in short supply, he settled on the ubiquitous three leaf clovers to explain the three and one nature of the Holy Trinity. One leaf stood for the Father, one for the Son, and the third for the Holy Spirit, all united on the single stem of the Godhead. Similarly, a poem in the popular tradition holds that the four leaves on the lucky clover signify fame, wealth, health, and
faithful love. Along these lines, there's an English belief that if you dream of clover, you're guaranteed a happy and prosperous marriage. West of England, in Cornwall, some people alleged that if pixies stole your child and left a changeling in its place, the only way to get your own offspring back was to lay a four leaf clover on the impostor So, we've established that four leaf clovers have been considered powerfully lucky for a long time. But why clover is a type of pa and It's valued by
farmers for a couple of reasons. Cows love to eat it, bees like to fill up on its nectar, and the plant itself likes to fill its boots with nitrogen. That's to say, clover is very good at pulling nitrogen from the air and rooting it in the ground for itself and other plants to eat. There are over three species of clover, but the best one for the soil is known as white clover or Trifolium repens. Trifolium repens also happens to be the kind of clover that produces the
lucky four leaf aberration. That fourth leaf, as it turns out, is the result of a suppressed gene that sometimes fails to be suppressed. Like many plants, white clover normally grows leaves in groups of three because for reasons no one is entirely sure of Lots of plants, from sunflowers to pineapples, grows segments and number is in the Fibonacci sequence, you know, it goes up one, one, two, three, five, eighty one, et cetera, with each new number being the sum of
the two previous numbers. It's also what the golden spiral is constructed from so the genetic anomaly that creates four leaf clovers only happens in one in ten thousand clovers. It's that rarity that accounts for the luck associated with four leaf clovers. In other words, you're lucky just to find one, So it stands to reason, a certain kind of reason, that more luck will follow in that spirit,
here's a bit of clover trivia. In two thousand nine, after studying ways to cross breed this lucky plant, a farmer in Japan grew a clover with fifty six leaves on it, again off from the Fibonacci sequences norm of fifty five by one. Logically, that makes it fourteen times luckier than a mere four leaf clover. Or or, rather illogically,
this is what scholars like to call magical think. Because of the way our brains operate, we're constantly looking for connections in order to explain the happenstance of the world around us. Magical thinking kicks in when we refuse to revise our conclusions despite all the evidence to the contrary. Take the story of Sandra and her stole and bicycle. Both she and the officer who found it attribute the happy outcome to the four leaf clover she gave him
from her collection. But a skeptic might ask how someone toting a quiver of the lucky clover's would have had the misfortune of being robbed of her bike in the first place. Magical thinking skirts around awkward questions like this and sticks to the convenient details while ignoring the inconvenient ones. That said, in this case, at least, magical thinking is a lot more fun than skepticism. Today's episode was written
by Ocean Kuran and produced by Tyler Klang. For more on this and lots of other magical topics is at how stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio as the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.