It's possible that I'm at least partly human after all

First, let me recount something I wrote in August, the day my worst-ever losing streak finally got snapped (with the bits most important to the point of this post rendered in bold):

Like I said, this sort of streak does crazy things to the mind. I've even
found myself entertaining thoughts that maybe this new PokerStars sweatshirt
I've been wearing is what's bringing me bad luck, because it was right around
the time it arrived in the mail that I started losing. It's the sort of silly,
superstitious thought that I would normally laugh off the instant it occurred to
me. But desperation sometimes trumps rationality, and I can't easily shrug off
even the most far-out ideas that offer to make understandable what is otherwise
beyond comprehension.

Something peculiar happened when I got to the Venetian. The parking spot I
found was between two Honda Fits. Just about as soon as Honda released the Fit
to the U.S. market a couple of years ago, I decided that that's probably what my
next car will be, when my current one finally collapses into a pile of shards,
like Oliver Wendall Holmes's Wonderful One-Hoss
Shay. They're great little cars, just right for my needs. But demand for
them has vastly exceeded Honda's initial projections, so they haven't been
making enough of them, and it's still quite uncommon to see them on the
streets.

With the way my thinking has been warped and distorted and made vulnerable
to all manner of loopy ideas by this losing streak, something in my head clicked
about this fortuitous parking spot. It's a sign of some sort--an affirmation
that, yes, things will turn around and I'll be able to afford a new car when I
need one. No, I don't seriously believe deep down that the universe caused these
two cars to be where they were just as a personal manifestation to me, but my
ability to banish such absurdities has been mightily compromised.

Now go read this news story from yesterday. In short, research published in today's issue of Science shows that when people are feeling that they are not in control of their lives, they are more prone to superstitions, to conspiracy theories, to seeing patterns that do not objectively exist in collections of random data.

I was absolutely feeling that my destiny was slipping beyond my control during that losing streak, and it really did make me a lot more susceptible to irrational thoughts about what was causing things to go so badly, as I tried to describe in that post. And now I learn that such connections between a sense of loss of control and the development of superstitions or other illogical explanations for what one sees happening are, well, human. Normal, even. Normal is not a word that people who know me well would tend to label me with. But at least in this one respect, maybe I am.