The Super Bowl is this Sunday, which means millions of fans and gamblers alike will spend the next 48 hours looking for signs from the universe about who’s going to win. If Seattle’s Richard Sherman gets his dreadlocks tangled into the shape of a “W” during pregame warm-ups, Seahawks fans will like their chances. If a Denver flight makes an emergency stopover in Omaha–the city that quarterback Peyton Manning famously barks out at the line of scrimmage–Broncos fans will like theirs (except perhaps any fans on that flight).

Our brains infer greater meaning from random events in an instinctual way.

Sports fans may showcase their superstitions more openly than most people, but we all harbor them. In fact, cognitive scientists have started to see superstitious, supernatural, paranormal, and even some religious beliefs as a default state of mind. One recent study found that physicists, of all people, will endorse unscientific ideas that might make an astrologer smile when rushed to judge a statement’s veracity in mere seconds. Our brains evidently infer greater meaning from random events in an instinctual way.

Image: Richard Sherman via Wikipedia

Major sporting events and time pressures aside, the logical question is why some people remain believers of superstitious ideas while many others turn skeptical. A group of brain scientists proposes an answer in a recent issue of Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (via BPS Research Digest). The research team, led by Marjaana Lindeman of the University of Helsinki, in Finland, suggests that skeptics possess greater powers of cognitive inhibition–in other words, the ability to reject a superstitious impulse.

“Cognitive inhibition, that is, suppressing or overriding spontaneously occurring mental processes, may thus be the mechanism that, when working efficiently, controls our natural intuitions and explains why supernatural interpretations seem so natural for some people and yet others find them quite strange,” Lindeman and her collaborators conclude.

Image via Matt Hayward / Shutterstock

The researchers recruited 12 supernatural believers and 11 doubters (both groups verified through a questionnaire) for the study. The test itself took place in a brain imaging machine. While inside, test participants viewed written life scenarios followed by a picture. They were instructed to imagine that they were walking down the street with that scenario in mind when the picture suddenly appeared on, say, a billboard or a poster.