“Our brains aren’t wired to understand randomness.” From Does Your iPod Play Favorites?:
Its ad slogan celebrates the serendipity music lovers embrace when their songs are reordered by chance — “Life is random.”But just about everyone who has an iPod has wondered how random the iPod shuffle function really is. From the day I loaded up my first Pod, it was as if the little devil liked to play favorites. It had a particular fondness for Steely Dan, whose songs always seemed to pop up two or three times in the first hour of play. Other songs seemed to be exiled to a forgotten corner of the disk drive. Months after I bought “Wild Thing” from the iTunes store, I’m still waiting for my iPod to cue it up.
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More than once the “random” playlist included three tracks from the same album! Since there are more than 3,000 tunes in my library, this seemed to defy the odds.Or did it? I explained this phenomenon to Temple University prof John Allen Paulos, an expert in applying mathematical theory to everyday life. His conclusion: it’s entirely possible that nothing at all is amiss with the shuffle function. It’s quite common for random processes (like coin tosses) to get unlikely results here and there, like runs of six heads in a row. Over a very long time, it evens out, but it’s hard for us to envision that. “We often interpret and impose patterns on random processes,” he says, adding that this might be expected in the case of music, which evokes strong emotions. Paul Kocher, president of Cryptography Research, puts it another way: “Our brains aren’t wired to understand randomness.”
(Hat tip to GeekPress.)