Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio, Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff. Lauren Vogel bam here. One day in in Rochester,
Speaker 1: New York, a woman named Sandra rode her bike into
Speaker 1: town to do some shopping. She locked up her steed, shopped,
Speaker 1: and came back to find it gone devastated. She reported
Speaker 1: the loss to the cops, who warned her that the
Speaker 1: chances of recovery were slim. Later that day, at a
Speaker 1: coffee shop, she spotted another policeman and decided to tell
Speaker 1: her sad tale again. Promising to have a look. The
Speaker 1: cop hopped on his bike and went off on patrol,
Speaker 1: but not before Sandra had given him a four leaf
Speaker 1: clover to boost his chances. Within minutes, the officer had
Speaker 1: found her wheels. Never he reported, had he ever recovered
Speaker 1: a missing item so quickly. The clover had apparently done
Speaker 1: its work. Nearly as interesting as the happy outcome of
Speaker 1: this story is the fact that Sandra had a spare
Speaker 1: four leaf clover on hand. It was no accident she
Speaker 1: collected them. In fact, she had so many that she
Speaker 1: made a habit of giving them away. In this she's
Speaker 1: not as unusual as you might think. The Guinness World
Speaker 1: record for the largest collection of four leaf clovers goes
Speaker 1: to one Edward Martin of Cooper Landing, Alaska, who has
Speaker 1: amassed more than a hundred thousand of them. And that's
Speaker 1: truly astounding when you consider the fact that your chances
Speaker 1: of finding a four leaf clover are only one in
Speaker 1: ten thousand. So four leaf clovers are supposed to bring
Speaker 1: good luck, and clearly some people really want to pile
Speaker 1: it on. But just what is it that makes them
Speaker 1: so lucky? The legend goes all the way back to
Speaker 1: Adam and Eve. One tale tells that as they were
Speaker 1: being hustled out of the garden of Eden, Eve plucked
Speaker 1: a four leaf clover to carry with her as a
Speaker 1: souvenir of paradise. The druids of the ancient Celtic world
Speaker 1: were also big fans of four leaf clovers and carried
Speaker 1: them around to ward off malevolent spirits. This practice evolved
Speaker 1: into a medieval theory that a four leaf clover would
Speaker 1: give you the ability to spot fairies and take vase
Speaker 1: of action if necessary. As a result, back in the
Speaker 1: Middle Ages, kids entertained themselves by ferreting out the necessary
Speaker 1: stems and heading out on fairy hunts. With the little
Speaker 1: green plants enjoying such popularity, it's no wonder that Saint
Speaker 1: Patrick decided to use them as a teaching tool when
Speaker 1: he set about converting Ireland to Christianity. The four leaf
Speaker 1: variety being in short supply, he settled on the ubiquitous
Speaker 1: three leaf clovers to explain the three and one nature
Speaker 1: of the Holy Trinity. One leaf stood for the Father,
Speaker 1: one for the Son, and the third for the Holy Spirit,
Speaker 1: all united on the single stem of the Godhead. Similarly,
Speaker 1: a poem in the popular tradition holds that the four
Speaker 1: leaves on the lucky clover signify fame, wealth, health, and
Speaker 1: faithful love. Along these lines, there's an English belief that
Speaker 1: if you dream of clover, you're guaranteed a happy and
Speaker 1: prosperous marriage. West of England, in Cornwall, some people alleged
Speaker 1: that if pixies stole your child and left a changeling
Speaker 1: in its place, the only way to get your own
Speaker 1: offspring back was to lay a four leaf clover on
Speaker 1: the impostor So, we've established that four leaf clovers have
Speaker 1: been considered powerfully lucky for a long time. But why
Speaker 1: clover is a type of pa and It's valued by
Speaker 1: farmers for a couple of reasons. Cows love to eat it,
Speaker 1: bees like to fill up on its nectar, and the
Speaker 1: plant itself likes to fill its boots with nitrogen. That's
Speaker 1: to say, clover is very good at pulling nitrogen from
Speaker 1: the air and rooting it in the ground for itself
Speaker 1: and other plants to eat. There are over three species
Speaker 1: of clover, but the best one for the soil is
Speaker 1: known as white clover or Trifolium repens. Trifolium repens also
Speaker 1: happens to be the kind of clover that produces the
Speaker 1: lucky four leaf aberration. That fourth leaf, as it turns out,
Speaker 1: is the result of a suppressed gene that sometimes fails
Speaker 1: to be suppressed. Like many plants, white clover normally grows
Speaker 1: leaves in groups of three because for reasons no one
Speaker 1: is entirely sure of Lots of plants, from sunflowers to pineapples,
Speaker 1: grows segments and number is in the Fibonacci sequence, you know,
Speaker 1: it goes up one, one, two, three, five, eighty one,
Speaker 1: et cetera, with each new number being the sum of
Speaker 1: the two previous numbers. It's also what the golden spiral
Speaker 1: is constructed from so the genetic anomaly that creates four
Speaker 1: leaf clovers only happens in one in ten thousand clovers.
Speaker 1: It's that rarity that accounts for the luck associated with
Speaker 1: four leaf clovers. In other words, you're lucky just to
Speaker 1: find one, So it stands to reason, a certain kind
Speaker 1: of reason, that more luck will follow in that spirit,
Speaker 1: here's a bit of clover trivia. In two thousand nine,
Speaker 1: after studying ways to cross breed this lucky plant, a
Speaker 1: farmer in Japan grew a clover with fifty six leaves
Speaker 1: on it, again off from the Fibonacci sequences norm of
Speaker 1: fifty five by one. Logically, that makes it fourteen times
Speaker 1: luckier than a mere four leaf clover. Or or, rather illogically,
Speaker 1: this is what scholars like to call magical think. Because
Speaker 1: of the way our brains operate, we're constantly looking for
Speaker 1: connections in order to explain the happenstance of the world
Speaker 1: around us. Magical thinking kicks in when we refuse to
Speaker 1: revise our conclusions despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Speaker 1: Take the story of Sandra and her stole and bicycle.
Speaker 1: Both she and the officer who found it attribute the
Speaker 1: happy outcome to the four leaf clover she gave him
Speaker 1: from her collection. But a skeptic might ask how someone
Speaker 1: toting a quiver of the lucky clover's would have had
Speaker 1: the misfortune of being robbed of her bike in the
Speaker 1: first place. Magical thinking skirts around awkward questions like this
Speaker 1: and sticks to the convenient details while ignoring the inconvenient ones.
Speaker 1: That said, in this case, at least, magical thinking is
Speaker 1: a lot more fun than skepticism. Today's episode was written
Speaker 1: by Ocean Kuran and produced by Tyler Klang. For more
Speaker 1: on this and lots of other magical topics is at
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is production of
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