Down on your luck? How behavioural neuroscience could help

The latest research suggests there’s far more to good fortune than mere accident When the founder of Panasonic, Kōnosuke Matsushita, was asked what quality he valued most in job candidates, his answer baffled everyone: whether they were lucky. Not their credentials, not their intelligence, not their experience. Luck. For years, this anecdote struck me as charmingly eccentric – the kind of thing a titan of industry gets away with saying because nobody around them dares to laugh. Then I began studying the neuroscience of fortunate people, and I stopped laughing, too. What my research has revealed is that luck, far from being a roll of the cosmic dice, operates through identifiable patterns of brain chemistry and behaviour. The consistently lucky are not blessed by fate. They are running different neurological software – and the remarkable thing is that this software can be installed. Consider what happens when someone simply declares: “I am a lucky person.” It sounds like wishful thinking. But brain imaging tells a different story. That declaration activates the prefrontal cortex in a way that shifts perception from threat-detection mode toward opportunity-recognition mode. The perso