Your brain wants to believe in magic

Touch wood. Cross your fingers. Don't say it out loud or you'll jinx it. If you have ever done any of these while also holding a physics GCSE, congratulations: you are a normally functioning human being.

Researchers who study magical thinking keep arriving at the same awkward conclusion — the machinery that generates superstition is the same machinery that generates hypotheses, pattern-spotting and science itself. You cannot have one without at least the shadow of the other.

The developmental line is even stranger. Children believe in impossible things not because they are gullible, but because they are running the same test-and-discard loop scientists run — just with a more generous prior on wonder.

Which raises an uncomfortable question for the adults doing the myth-making.