My lucky pen :-)

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Guess most of us, despite all our rationalities, have done this sometime or the other (atleast Ganguly does it, remember him changing his jersey during the world cup match)....that lucky pen for the exam, this lucky shirt for the interview, that lucky seat in the exam hall etc. etc. .....

One approach to this phenomenon would be to dismiss the entire thing as superstitions of poor mortals.
But there's a different way of looking at it which I find more convincing.

There is a limit to the number of "independent" events which the human brain is capable of storing. The easiest way to store 'more and more' info is to link the info up, create causal dependencies and relationships (that's what those 10 day memory techniques teach you). So if the brain can store one link, using the dependencies it can recall the entire chain. In the real world these causal dependencies might not exist it (it's just a ruse which helps the brain store more), yet they exist in the mind (and for good reason too, it's increasing your memory).....so you'll find the portly Mr. Shepherd dancing his unique jig at 111 even though in the real world there might actually be nothing to that number.

Well, I was in and out of that lucky pen thing in school (there's a psychological angle to this thing as well...will deal with that in a later post) but gave it up as a freak irrationality later. Is that the reason I can't seem to remember the names of people :-).