This is an IHeart podcast.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

My name is Robert Lamb, and today is Saturday once more.

So we have an episode from The Vault.

This is going to be Odds and Evens Part 3, and it originally published 912,

2024. Enjoy.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

And I am Joe McCormick, and we are back for the third and final part in our series on the psychology and cultural significance of number parity.

P-A-R-I-T-Y, parity referring to whether a number is even or odd. And we are ending it with an odd number of episodes. That just felt right. Now, if you haven't heard the other parts in this series, you might want to go back and listen to those first. But in part one, we talked about the mathematical principle of number parity, as well as some evidence that people,

if given the opportunity, will sometimes project associations and emotions onto even and odd numbers. For example, by maybe feeling more positivity toward even numbers on average, or

by having an aesthetic preference for odd numbers in visual art,

as reflected in the conventional rule of thirds and rule of odds in art theory, which we discussed

in some detail in that episode, but then we also brought in some questions and counter-evidence

about the real-world validity and alleged universality of these preferences for odds in art.

In part two of the series, we talked about a research paper on the cognitive psychology of number parity,

which advanced what I thought was a really interesting argument, that despite the fact that all positive integers are mathematically defined as simply odd or even and nothing in between, our brains may in practice treat some numbers as more even or more odd than others, mentally transforming these definitionally discrete categories into a semi-smooth gradient.

And this could be due to multiple factors involving mathematical properties like, definitionally discrete categories into a semi-smooth gradient.

And this could be due to multiple factors involving mathematical properties like the ease of divisibility and also linguistic properties about how easily we process different words and their associated concepts.

We also talked some more about even and odd groupings in visual art,

specifically in religious images,

such as that of the ten-headed Demon King Ravana in Hindu mythology. And we also talked about

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