3 is a magic number

When it comes to presentation, visual display and narrative why do we prefer to see things in threes?  A question that’s arisen a few times recently and prompted some thought.

Simple

We live in an age of complexity, with more information at our fingertips than ever before and it’s increasing, rapidly.  To effectively convey or absorb an idea, a concept or a story, the overview, the summary, the synopsis, must be simple.  It has to entice you to delve deeper.

This is perhaps best illustrated in web presentation, where design-conscious organisations consistently and purposely put their strongest messages in 3 panels, be it static images, product prompts, carousel or movie clips.

The result is the same, the messages they want to convey most are the focus point of the home page and are usually in 3s.

The same is true of media companies and many other organisations:

Perhaps the most successful, simple and minimal web presence of them all does it too:

Metaphysical

As a species the number 2 has a huge significance to us. We have 2 arms, 2 legs, 2 eyes, 2 ears, etc. A symmetry runs down our bodies, so physically ‘two’ matters a lot. The world around us is similar with lots of duality; night and day, light and dark, sea and land, earth and sky and possibly the biggest; life and death.  So, the number 2, the polarisation between extremes, is really pronounced in the physical world but it’s when we consider things beyond the physical; in the metaphysical, that the number 3 occurs so often.

Consider the biggest thing to us; life and death.  At a physical level it’s a duality, an opposite, you’re alive or dead, until Schr?dinger posed a question.  Religion changed that with the promise of life after death and the number 3 plays out in many religions.  The Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit is the most obvious but even with the extremes of hell and heaven we were presented with the third option of purgatory long before Dante.

The number 3 appears in many religions.  In Zoroastrianism there are three ethical principles: Humata (to think good); Hukhta (to speak good), Huveshta (to act good).  Under Muslim law a man can divorce his wife by repeating the phrase “I divorce thee” three times and Islam has its own Trinity in the Father, the Son and Maryam, or Mary, as the only religion to include a feminine aspect in the deity.  In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the ‘Three Bodies of Buddhahood’ present triadic levels of existence.

In ancient Egypt the iris flower was a symbol of power and placed on sceptres of rulers and kings. The three large petals of the iris flower symbolise: Faith – Wisdom – Courage.

Aside from religion, mysticism and superstition also favour the number 3.  We regularly use the phrase ‘third time lucky’.  In fairy tales three is often a magical number.  Chinese tradition considers three to be THE lucky number, possibly because the pronunciation is similar to the word for 'alive’.  Bad luck is said to come in threes and in the 6th Century BC, the Greeks founded a system based on numerology.  For them, 1 meant unity, and 2 meant disorder but 3 was special to them; it equalled harmony and was bound up in the origin of Pythagoras’ theorem.

Maybe it all came from the triangle and other things are coincidental but whichever way you look at it when we as human beings look for a higher purpose; a meaning beyond physical existence, the number 3 features consistently and perhaps that's why 3 is used so much to present, to emphasise a higher purpose.

Our physiology, beyond the usual duality, has influence too.  We have two eyes which the brain stereoscopically converts into one vision.  We have two cerebral hemispheres to the brain. Strangely, the left side of the brain is responsible for controlling the right side of the body.  It also performs tasks requiring logic, such as science and mathematics. The right hemisphere coordinates the left side of the body and performs tasks that have do with creativity, but in the 1950s Neuroscientist Paul MacLean proposed the 'Triune Brain' model, referring to the limbic system of the thalmus, within the brain stem. It’s the limbic system, our third part of the brain, that makes judgements of whether we like something or someone, and it does it almost instantaneously, what we often refer to as gut instinct.

Stories

We gather knowledge in myriad ways now, but we’ve only been writing them down for a few thousand years; a comparatively short time in our evolution.  In that time we’ve developed a knack for relaying information with maximum impact through stories, making the listener or reader ‘feel’ an experience through language and description, making them relate.

Many stories have the same structure; a beginning, a middle and an end. Referred to regularly as ‘three act play’, the story opens with a dilemma or a problem to be solved.  The second act describes the struggle to resolve the problem and then gives closure in the third act by denouement or aftermath.

It was present in the poetry of Aristotle, the plays of Shakespeare, Aesop’s fables, the novels of Dickins and Conan Doyle.  It’s present in Hitchcock movies and stories right up to present day Hollywood and gaming culture.  It may date from Aristotle, but he may just have been the first person to write it down. Rise, fall, redemption is a classic formula – see Homer’s Odyssey up to George Lucas’ Star Wars Revenge of the Sith, itself the third part of a trilogy within three series trilogies.

Perhaps all of this makes us prefer ‘3’ when we look at any presentation, visual display and narrative.  Our brains allow us to remember three aspects with clarity and meaning but maybe it’s because we simply prefer a story to be told this way.