Hello, it's Richard McLean Smith here, not the imposter you've been listening to on the podcasts, the real one.

Join me for Unexplained TV, beginning Tuesday, December 3rd at YouTube.com forward slash unexplained Pod For almost as long as the written word has been around at least,

humanity's predilection for inflicting curses on others has been well documented.

From ancient Egyptian inscriptions, written on the entrances to tombs,

with the intention of protecting sacred property, to the well-known mark of Cain,

placed upon the eponymous biblical figure from the book of Genesis, curses have played a vital

role in setting moral boundaries for millennia. It should come as no surprise that given our

inherently superstitious nature, curses as well as blessings have become a fundamental aspect

of our most cherished belief systems. Curses have

filtered into everyday speech in the form of taboo words and phrases. They are still invoked as powerful

psychological tropes to be deployed in movies and popular stories associated with the horror genre.

Despite the archaic nature of curses, in other words,

the idea of another person wishing us ill still has the power to generate fear.

We see omens in magpies and avoid breaking mirrors.

We cross the street to avoid walking under ladders.

We change our path when we encounter black cats and carry religious medals, crucifixes and

sage to ward off evil.

Perhaps because of our need to give narrative to our existence, we are predisposed to find

connections between seemingly unrelated events.

In his 1958 publication, the onset of schizophrenia, an attempt to form an analysis of delusion,

German psychiatrist Klaus Conrad coined the term apophenia to describe this exact

phenomena.

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