In researcher Richard Wiseman's newspaper study, people who rated themselves as luckier found hidden text offering £100 and an instruction to stop counting photos far more often than self-described unlucky people.
Where this was said
At 7:26 · chapter starts 5:10
Mark formally opens Solved, introduces Drew Birnie as co-host, producer, and lead researcher, and frames today's topic. The discussion briefly turns personal as both hosts reflect on whether they consider themselves lucky — Drew answers yes immediately, which becomes a small irony the episode will develop. Mark explains that Napoleon's question to his generals ('are you lucky?') was really a proxy for opportunity-sensing and adaptive thinking, not superstition. The first sponsor read follows: Simple, a virtual health coaching app, pitched through the story of a couple who together lost over 117 pounds.
Dan Gilbert's research found that the psychological immune system — the brain's ability to justify and find satisfaction in choices — activates most powerfully when a decision is perceived as irreversible.
Barry Schwartz's research found that maximizers — people who try to optimize every decision — tend to achieve objectively better outcomes but report lower happiness than satisficers who choose 'good enough.'
Research consistently shows that while people may initially regret poor decisions, in the long run they regret the decisions they didn't make — inaction — far more than the ones they took.
A study showed that men in committed relationships who briefly viewed 10 attractive women's faces reported a measurable decrease in relationship satisfaction immediately afterward, illustrating evolutionary mismatch with modern media.
Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert, who previously didn't believe in marriage, immediately proposed to his long-term girlfriend after his own research showed that constraints increase satisfaction with choices.
Animals first sensed light 540 million years ago, triggering an evolutionary acceleration known as the Cambrian explosion within 10 million years.
It is estimated that half of all cortical activity in the human brain is involved in visual function, underscoring vision's central role in intelligence.
Cognitive neuroscience literature shows that by age 6, humans can recognize tens of thousands of different object categories — far more data than early AI systems were trained on.
Only about 3% of FDA-approved drugs have genuinely unclear mechanisms of action, making an unknown mechanism a meaningful early red flag for any compound.
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