Why Do We Love Zodiacs? (The) Neuroscience of Predicting.

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So, what is at the heart of why we want to use things like 8-balls, zodiacs, seances, spiritual calendars and everything in-between? There are a few reasons that we are driven to perpetuate the desire to know how things will end.

First things first, let’s workout an exploratory definition of the zodiac:

Astrology is the belief?that the date and time of your birth can determine fundamental aspects of your personality. In the past hundred years, astrology has become increasingly popular, especially among women, as a way to gain insight on their past, present, and future. According to astrology, the year is split into twelve sections.

Each section, or star sign, is ruled by its eponymous constellation, and a celestial body (usually just called a planet) — for example, Cancer (23rd June – 22nd July) is ruled by the constellation of the crab as well as the moon. Astrology dictates that people born under each sign share basic personality traits and values, and that’s only scratching the surface.

Depending on your exact time and place of birth, a full birth chart can be drawn, detailing exactly how the stars have destined your life.

Emotional Breadcrumbing???

One is a concept I refer to as, Environmental Breadcrumbing.?Breadcrumbing?is a phenomenon that occurs when someone gives you just enough attention, so it makes you want more of it.

The argument here is that what draws us in to our eventual attraction to using things like zodiacs is due to the fact that we might read our astrological calendar of choice and because something happens either close or exactly as what is written on the page — we use this as proof that zodiacs must always be right. Its a form of myopic confirmation bias.

We want it to be right — depending upon our life circumstances —we might think we need it to be right, so we do everything we can to look for things in our world where the zodiac would fit into our worldview.

The Grass is Greener???

Our brain rewards us for novelty. We love the new and exciting. In fact, our brain looks for the new and exciting on a regular basis. This is one of the many roles of dopamine in our brains.

Dopamine causes you?to want, desire, seek out, and search. It increases your general level of arousal and your goal-directed behavior. Dopamine makes you curious about ideas and fuels your searching for information.

The intrinsic skill that evolution has bestowed upon us is great for the creation and invention process — it turns our brain into an organ that justifies its ‘always-seeking’ nature by looking for things outside the current scope of our knowledge. Without this, humans would not have moved past the discovery of fire. Dopamine is the birthplace of progress.

However, it is also a neurochemical that does not judge what we believe or how we believe it, it simply reinforces the repetitive nature of our actions.

So, when we get up and look at our future predicting tools, our brain rewards us for the habit. It is the habit that we get rewarded for, not what the habit is.

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