This article was taken from the June 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Would WD-40 have been as successful had it been called WD-39?
Would readers of Nineteen Eighty-Four have found Room 101 as chilling a location if George Orwell had instead named it Room 100? And would it have been so droll if Douglas Adams had decided that the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything was actually 43, instead of 42?
Numbers were invented as inert, objective symbols to express exact quantities. Yet as humans we understand them subjectively, and we cannot help but project meaning on to them. In each of the cases above, the numbers tell a story.
We attribute "personalities" to numbersbased on their arithmetical properties, and our emotional responses to numbers can influence how we make decisions. Take the number ten: it's the total of digits we have on our hands -- it's also the total of digits in our number system. Ten is non-controversial, easy to understand, a friend. Everything's OK with ten. No surprise there's a spot cream called Oxy 10.
Four also feels robust: it's the number of sides of a square.
Four multiplied by ten strikes the right notes for a product like WD-40 -- regular, helpful and tough.
Consider the research of Dan King of the National University of Singapore and Chris A Janiszewski of the University of Florida.
They showed that the same cleaning product is more attractive to customersif its brand name contains an even number than if it contains an odd one. King and Janiszewski argue that our brains process even numbers more easily than odd numbers, and that this increased fluency translates as liking for the product. Even numbers are more easily processed, they say, because they appear more frequently in the times tables.
Odd numbers, when they are prime, do not appear in times tables.
In fact, Terence Hines of Pace University, New York, discovered that our brains take longer to process odd numbers than even ones.
Odd numbers stick in our brain more, are harder to digest -- and as a result gain extra meanings. In western culture the numbers that attract the most superstition, three, seven and 13, are all odd.
Room 101 is a much scarier place than Room 100 because 101 is arithmetically more challenging than 100. We understand how 100 fits in to the structure of numbers -- it is ten times ten, or two times fifty, or four times twenty-five. But 101 is harder to toy around with. The asymmetry is cruel to our pattern-making minds.
And by being just one over the hundred it suggests that no matter how bad things get, they can always get worse.
Like Orwell, Adams understood the importance of a good number.
You don't need to have read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to realise that the blandness of 42 makes it the perfect comedy answer to his existential question. Adams said 42 was "the sort of number that you could without any fear introduce to your parents." We understand instinctively that he is right -- some numbers are more boring than others. If he had chosen 41 or 43, the gag falls flat.
They are both odd and prime numbers, and they feel elusive. It's not funny to say that the meaning of life is mysterious. It's funny to say that it is dull.
We are taught to take numbers at face value, as markers signifyingamount and position. Yet we respond to them emotionallyand psychologically based on arithmetical characteristics. Our brains are always subconsciously doing maths, and our responses influence how we see the world and the decisions we make in it.
Alex Bellos wrote Alex Through The Looking-Glass: How Life Reflects Numbers and Numbers Reflect Life
(Bloomsbury)
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
