Podcast · episode 3
Do numbers, sigils and talismans do anything? 1089, a lucky golf ball, and a tone at 1089 hertz
About thirty minutes on the objects: the trick behind 1089, the study everyone quotes and the one nobody does, and the difference between a cue and a cause.
Listen with saved progress · Download the MP3 · RSS feed · chapters and the full transcript are below.
Every study mentioned is listed in the show notes and resolved against Crossref before publication. Any scenario described as an example is an example, not a report of a real event.
The question
Do talismans, sigils, rituals, numbers, or sacred objects influence outcomes?
Chapters
- Welcome
- Cold open
- Why the trick works
- The golf ball, act one
- Act two
- A cue is not a cause
- The experiment that would tell
- Sigils, and what a ritual actually does
- Crystals, and the question of what a thing is for
- Master numbers, briefly
- Sacred geometry, and the two things that are true about it
- When the object is the problem
- Frequencies
- A test anyone can run
- What we know, what we don't, what would settle it
Show notes
The lucky-charm study and its replication, the planning meta-analysis the cue model rests on, and the three binaural-beat papers, in the order they come up.
Three excerpts
A result that lets both sides feel vindicated travels faster than one that corrects either
The number is a doorbell. What matters is what you do when you answer it.
One in six is a crowd.
Gladys · 11:46
Transcript
Verbatim from the script the recording was made from. Stage directions and delivery cues are omitted. Chapter times are where each section begins in the audio.
Welcome
Andrey Welcome to The Question, Examined. I'm Andrey, this is Gladys—
Gladys Hi.
Andrey —and this is episode three. Numbers, objects, and the things people carry. And I want to start with a trick.
Gladys Of course you do.
Cold open
Andrey Pick a three-digit number. Don't tell me. First and last digit at least two apart.
Gladys This is scripted, for the record. I picked it before we started and Andrey knows what it is.
Andrey It's scripted, and the trick works anyway — that's the point. Reverse it.
Gladys Done.
Andrey Subtract the smaller from the larger.
Gladys ...Done.
Andrey Reverse that, add it to itself.
Gladys One thousand and eighty-nine.
Andrey One thousand and eighty-nine. Every time. Any number you could've picked.
Gladys It's a nice trick. My hypothetical aunt would say the universe just spoke to us through your arithmetic.
Andrey And that's the episode. The trick is real. The universe isn't in it. And the whole business — talismans, sigils, crystals, sacred numbers, frequencies — comes down to telling those two things apart.
Why the trick works
Gladys Explain it. I want people to hear it's not magic before we get to the people who say it is.
Andrey Write the number as hundreds, tens, units. Reverse and subtract — the tens digit cancels completely. You're left with ninety-nine times the difference between the outer digits. So it's always a three-digit multiple of ninety-nine. And every three-digit multiple of ninety-nine, plus its own reverse... one thousand and eighty-nine.
Gladys So it's place value.
Andrey It's base ten doing what base ten does. And then the number's got this whole family. Times nine — nine thousand eight hundred and one. Its own reverse. Double it, two thousand one hundred seventy-eight, times four — eight thousand seven hundred and twelve. Also its own reverse. Those are the only four-digit numbers that do that.
Gladys I'll admit that's lovely.
Andrey It's genuinely lovely. It's thirty-three squared. Its times table climbs on the left and descends on the right. Nobody should be surprised people find it beautiful. Or that beauty gets read as meaning.
Gladys And that's where the frequency comes in.
Andrey That's where a tone at one thousand and eighty-nine hertz gets sold as a wealth frequency. We'll get to that. First — the golf ball.
The golf ball, act one
Andrey Two thousand and ten. A group of researchers run a set of small experiments on superstition. Tell people a golf ball's lucky — they sink more putts. Let people keep their own charm during a memory task — they do better.
Gladys I know this study. Everyone knows this study.
Andrey Everyone knows it because it flattered everyone. Believers heard "science confirmed the charm." Sceptics heard "the mechanism's confidence, not magic" — which is what they'd said all along.
Gladys A result that lets both sides feel vindicated...
Andrey ...travels faster than one that corrects either. So it racked up citations in proportion to how pleasant it was.
Gladys What was the mechanism supposed to be?
Andrey Self-efficacy. Believing luck's on your side raises confidence, confidence raises persistence, persistence raises performance. Which — notice — is all inside the person. Nothing in that paper touches the outside world. The claim that a charm changes your luck was never tested by it.
Act two
Gladys And then.
Andrey And then. Four years later. A preregistered replication, much bigger sample, runs the golf study again as close to the original as they can manage.
Gladys And.
Andrey And nothing. People told the ball was lucky did not putt better than people who weren't.
Gladys So the effect isn't there.
Andrey The effect's fragile, at best. An effect that shows up small and vanishes big is — most of the time — an effect that was never as big as it looked. That's not an accusation against the original authors. That's just what the last ten years of the field have been about.
Gladys How many articles cite the replication?
Andrey Almost none. It was less pleasant. It went nowhere. Which is why the site has a page whose entire job is putting act two under act one.
Gladys So when someone says "science proved lucky charms work"...
Andrey They're citing act one and don't know there's an act two. And the fair summary of both is: a real question, asked well, answered small, answered again bigger with a different result. "Fragile" is the word to carry.
A cue is not a cause
Gladys Let me ask the actual question. Is there any version of a talisman that does something?
Andrey Yes. And it's the boring version. An object can be a cue. It sits on the desk and reminds you of the goal. You touch it in your pocket and it interrupts the drift into the phone. You pick it up and it starts a short rehearsal of the next step, and the thing in the way, and then... the step.
Gladys That's a sticky note.
Andrey It's a sticky note you chose. That means something. That you'll actually look at. The evidence for cues is the evidence for what they trigger. If the object starts a plan — the plan has a meta-analysis behind it. Mental contrasting plus if-then. Small-to-medium effect on reaching the goal, across a lot of trials.
Gladys With the publication-bias caveat.
Andrey Always. But the chain's real. Cue, rehearsal, plan, action. And it needs no claim about radiation, vibration, or a field. The object does something because you do something when you see it.
Gladys The number is a doorbell.
Andrey The number's a doorbell. What matters is what you do when you answer it. If the answer's eighteen minutes of process and action — the number's earned its place on the wall. If the answer is feeling abundant and closing the laptop... the number's done what the lucky ball did in act two.
Gladys There's a protocol on the site that spells the number as a plan.
Andrey One-oh-eight-nine: one priority, zero assumption that thought alone delivers it, eight minutes of process rehearsal, nine minutes of action. And two-one-seven-eight: two obstacles, one lever, a seven-day if-then, eight check-ins. It's a mnemonic. I designed it. Nobody's tested it. And the page says both of those things in the first paragraph.
Gladys I appreciate that it says "designed, not validated."
Andrey It'd be a strange site that graded everyone else's claims and then slipped its own past the gate.
The experiment that would tell
Gladys Suppose someone insists the number itself does something. Beyond the plan it triggers. How would you know?
Andrey Four conditions. The number with its mathematical story explained. The number with no explanation. A visually matched arbitrary number with an equally good invented story. And no symbol at all. Same protocol in every arm, objective outcomes, preregistered.
Gladys And the readings.
Andrey If effects show up only when the meaning's explained — it's meaning and expectancy. If the talisman improves adherence but not outcomes once you control for adherence — it's a cue. And if a number-specific effect survives blinding, shows on objective outcomes, and replicates in another lab... then you've found a genuine anomaly and the world should hear about it.
Gladys Has anyone run it?
Andrey Not that we could find. Which is itself information. A tradition that's had a century and a big market has not run the one experiment that would vindicate it.
Gladys Or falsify it.
Andrey Or falsify it. A believer should want that experiment more than I do.
Sigils, and what a ritual actually does
Gladys We've done numbers and charms. Do sigils. That's the one my feed is full of and it's the one you've said least about.
Andrey A sigil — for anyone who hasn't met the word — you write a wish, strike out the repeated letters, squash what's left into a glyph. Then you "charge" it, which usually means staring at it in some heightened state. And then you forget it. The theory being the wish sinks below awareness and works from there.
Gladys That's the twentieth-century version.
Andrey That's a version from a British artist about a hundred years ago that the internet rediscovered. And I want to be fair to it, because as psychology it's more interesting than a lucky ball.
Gladys Go on.
Andrey Look at what the person actually does. They write the wish — which makes it specific. They work on it with their hands — ten minutes of attention. They do it in a heightened state — arousal attached to a goal. And then they're told to forget it. Which is the one instruction in the whole tradition that runs against outcome fantasy. You don't sit and feel the wish every morning. You make it once, you put it away.
Gladys So the ritual accidentally avoids the fantasy cost.
Andrey Accidentally avoids the fantasy cost, and accidentally does something like a written commitment to the goal. Whether it does anything beyond that — same question as the number. Is the glyph a cue or a cause?
Gladys And your answer.
Andrey Same answer. No evidence a glyph does anything outside the person who drew it. Decent evidence that specifying a wish and attaching attention to it does something inside the person. So a sigil's a fairly good goal-setting exercise... wearing a robe. And I'd rather people did it than nothing.
Gladys You keep landing on "wearing a robe."
Andrey Because it's the pattern. A useful psychological act, dressed as a supernatural one — and the dressing is what gets sold. Strip it, the act still works. Sell it, and the person ends up believing the robe did it.
Gladys Then here's my question. If the robe's what makes people do the act... isn't the robe earning its keep?
Andrey That's the best defence of this whole subject, and I don't have a clean answer. If the only way someone will write a specific goal and spend ten minutes on it is to call it magic — the magic did something. The cost comes later. When the wish doesn't arrive, and the robe explains why: you didn't charge it properly. That's the blame again. The act helps, and the theology bills you for it.
Gladys So keep the act, drop the theology.
Andrey Keep the act, drop the theology. And if you like the glyph — keep the glyph. It's a nice thing to have made.
Crystals, and the question of what a thing is for
Gladys Crystals. Quickly.
Andrey Quickly, because there's nothing to test. A crystal on a desk is an object with a story. The stories are specific — rose quartz for love, citrine for money — and none of them's ever been tested, because there's no mechanism to test. A mineral does not emit love.
Gladys But people say they feel different around them.
Andrey People feel different around a beautiful object they've been told means something. And that's the whole of it. And it's real. It's tier one. The placebo episode's about how far that reaches — it reaches the person. Not the bank.
Gladys So a crystal's a cue as well.
Andrey A cue with a story attached. And the story's the thing to be careful of. The danger isn't the stone. It's the shop that sells the stone as a treatment. If a crystal makes you pause and think about what you want — small good thing. If it replaces an appointment — large bad one.
Gladys We keep ending up at the same sentence.
Andrey Because it's the same sentence. Real structure, unshown causation, and the line at the skin. Everything in this episode is that sentence with a different noun.
Master numbers, briefly
Gladys You've got a numerology thread I want to pull, because it's the same lesson from another angle. Master numbers.
Andrey Eleven, twenty-two, thirty-three. The books hold them apart as rare and heavy. And the rarity's the entire emotional payload.
Gladys And you counted.
Andrey The site enumerated every calendar date from nineteen hundred to twenty twenty-five — forty-six thousand and twenty-one of them — under the standard method. Sixteen percent of birthdays produce a master number. One in six.
Gladys That's not rare.
Andrey About as common as being left-handed. And which master number you get — or whether you get one at all — changes with the arithmetic. Thirty-three lands on four percent of birthdays under one standard method and under one percent under the other. A property of a person cannot depend on the order you add up a date.
Gladys One in six is a crowd.
Andrey One in six is a crowd. And the point for this episode: the appeal of a sacred number is its rarity, and the rarity's bookkeeping. Every ordinary digit lands on exactly a ninth of birthdays. The masters look scarce only because they intercept the twos, fours and sixes one step early.
Gladys So — sacred geometry.
Andrey Same shape. The patterns are real. Golden ratio's real, the flower of life tiles, the numbers have structure. Nobody disputes the patterns. What's never been shown is that carrying a pattern, or wearing it, or staring at it, changes anything outside the person staring. Real structure. Unshown causation. Every time.
Sacred geometry, and the two things that are true about it
Gladys You waved at sacred geometry. I want more, because it's the one that sounds most like it should have something in it.
Andrey It's the one I'm most sympathetic to. So let me say the two true things first, then the untrue one.
Gladys Go.
Andrey True thing one: the patterns are real and they're not arbitrary. The golden ratio shows up in sunflower heads and pine cones for a reason — it's the most efficient way to pack seeds around a centre. Hexagons show up in honeycomb because they tile a plane with the least wax. The flower of life's a nice drawing of overlapping circles. None of that's mystical. All of it's genuinely beautiful. And it's beautiful because it's efficient, which is a better story than the mystical one.
Gladys True thing two.
Andrey True thing two: looking at ordered patterns does something to people. Symmetry's easier to process, and things that are easier to process feel better — and get judged as more true. That's a robust finding, and it explains a lot of why a geometric symbol on a wall feels calming and significant at the same time.
Gladys So the feeling's real and it has a mechanism.
Andrey The feeling's real and the mechanism is processing fluency. Which is the least sacred phrase in psychology.
Gladys And the untrue thing.
Andrey The untrue thing is the step from "this pattern's in nature and it feels good to look at" to "carrying this pattern draws things to me." Nobody's shown that. Nobody's proposed how it would work. Same gap as the number and the charm. Same drawer: real structure, real feeling, unshown causation.
Gladys I'll take the two true things.
Andrey Take them. Put the drawing on the wall because it's beautiful and it makes you pause. Just don't let anyone sell it to you as an antenna.
When the object is the problem
Gladys There's a harder version of this I want to raise, because we've been kind to the objects. What about when the object becomes the thing that's wrong?
Andrey The dependency.
Gladys The person who can't do the interview without the stone in their pocket. Who cancels because the number didn't show up. Who's spent — at this point — a lot of money on crystals and courses.
Andrey This is where the cue model has a warning built in, and I want to say it as clearly as the compliment. A cue that starts an action is a tool. A cue that's become a condition for the action is a leash. The moment you can't perform without the object, the object's stopped helping and started charging rent.
Gladys How do you tell the difference from the inside?
Andrey Ask what happens when you forget it. If the answer's "I do the thing anyway and feel a bit less settled" — tool. If the answer's "I can't" — leash. And the practice has become the thing the practice was supposed to fix.
Gladys And the money.
Andrey The money's the survey from episode one. Belief in the cosmic version travels with attraction to risk, and with being sold to. A shop that sells a stone for calm is selling a nice stone. A shop that sells a stone for a cure — or a course that sells a number for wealth — is selling the removal of a brake. The stone's fine. The pitch is the thing to watch.
Gladys We keep arriving at the pitch.
Andrey Because the objects are innocent. Nobody was ever harmed by a pebble. People are harmed by the sentence attached to the pebble, and it's always the same sentence: this will do it for you. Nothing does it for you. Some things help you do it. That's the whole distinction, and it's worth a podcast.
Frequencies
Gladys The tone. One thousand and eighty-nine hertz attracts wealth.
Andrey No study. Not one. We looked. What a tone can do to a listener is a different question, and there's real work on it — the site's got four free tapes built on it.
Gladys The binaural ones.
Andrey Two tones, one per ear, a few hertz apart, and the brain hears a pulse at the difference. That much is settled. It was described for a wide audience in the seventies, and you can hear it yourself in ten seconds with headphones.
Gladys And the claims on top of it.
Andrey Two sizes. The small claim — an alpha beat relaxes you, a beta beat sharpens you — has been pooled across the trials that exist. Modest average effect on anxiety and some cognitive measures. Varying widely between studies.
Gladys Modest.
Andrey Modest, and small studies. Then there's the mechanism on every label — entrainment. The brain's own rhythms follow the beat. That's a claim about the EEG, you can check it with electrodes, and the systematic review that checked it found the evidence inconsistent. Some studies found changes, others none, and the changes didn't line up with the beat in any consistent direction.
Gladys So the frequency does roughly what sitting still with a steady sound does.
Andrey Twenty minutes with your eyes closed does most of it. A steady, featureless sound to rest attention on does some. And expectation does some — which is last episode's whole subject. What none of it does is cross the skin. A tone can relax the person listening. It cannot reach their bank account, because there's nothing out there listening on that band.
Gladys And the Monroe stuff, the out-of-body claims.
Andrey Tier four. There's an essay on the one government assessment of it that people actually cite, and the finding is — its bibliography is the story. The tapes on the site are labelled calm, settle, sleep, focus. Which is how they feel to listen to. And the page says plainly the labels are descriptions, not prescriptions.
A test anyone can run
Gladys Give the listener something to do. You've spent half an hour telling them what doesn't work.
Andrey Something cheap, then. If you've got an object — a number, a glyph, a stone, whatever — run it for a month as a cue and count what it triggers. Every time you notice it, tick a box: did I do the eight minutes and the nine minutes, or did I feel good and move on? End of the month, you'll know whether your talisman's a doorbell or a decoration.
Gladys And if it's a decoration?
Andrey Then it's a decoration. Nothing wrong with decorations. You can stop expecting it to pay rent. If it's a doorbell — keep it on the wall, and be grateful to whoever made the trick that put it there.
Gladys The magician.
Andrey The magician. Whose whole craft was knowing the answer before you picked the number. Which is — if you think about it — exactly what every book on this subject claims to do, and only the magician can actually do.
Gladys That's a good line and you've clearly been saving it.
Andrey Since the cold open.
What we know, what we don't, what would settle it
Andrey Ending. Known.
Gladys Known: the number tricks are real arithmetic. The lucky-charm effect showed up small and didn't replicate big. A cue can start a plan, and plans work. Master numbers land on one in six birthdays. Binaural beats are a real perceptual effect with a modest, variable effect on anxiety and no reliable entrainment.
Andrey Uncertain.
Gladys Whether any confidence effect from a charm survives a properly powered study — the replication says probably not, but it's one replication. Whether a personally chosen cue beats a sticky note for adherence — which is testable, and cheap. And whether "meaning explained" versus "not explained" makes a difference. Nobody's run it.
Andrey And what would settle it.
Gladys The four-arm number experiment. Explained, unexplained, matched arbitrary, none. Objective outcomes, preregistered, replicated. I'd put money on "meaning and adherence." But I'd rather see it run than be right.
Andrey That's the most a sceptic's ever offered a talisman.
Gladys I'm feeling generous. It's the parking space.
Andrey Your hypothetical aunt's parking space.
Gladys Which — for the record — she found by driving round the block three times. Twelve attempts.
Andrey Twelve attempts at, say, one in eight. About eighty percent chance of a space. She was always going to find it.
Gladys She's going to hate this episode.
Andrey She's hypothetical. Next time — synchronicity. Why it feels personal. And I have a story about a clock that I am going to label as a story.
Gladys Label it twice.
Andrey Twice. This has been The Question, Examined. See you next time.
Put an idea into practice
Choose a concrete action in the free Practice Studio, or keep observations in the Experience notebook. A personal record can guide reflection; it does not by itself establish a cause.