Everything is random. Deal with it.

Let’s say you’re a columnist who writes about books, movies, tennis, and music. You are constantly listening to music. One day you hear Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ wafting out of a music store and get the urge to listen to Michael Jackson’s album, “Thriller.” This is not unusual as you are a person with sudden moods. You have given up trying to explain them, and you know better than to resist. There are days when you listen to the same song over and over again, all day, thank you, iPod “Repeat One” setting. This may seem nuts to other people, but in your observation it’s the people who claim to be “normal” who tend to be stark raving mad.

A month later, at a product launch, you get a media kit that includes a CD. Your colleagues get Mark Ronson or Pink; you pick up a kit at random and it contains “Thriller, The 25th Anniversary Edition.” It includes a DVD of the music videos, including the one for Thriller, in which the singer appears as a dancing corpse. On Tuesday you sit down and write a column about Michael Jackson and the cruelty of celebrity. On Friday the paper hits the stands. Hours later, while you are still sleeping, the world gets the news: Michael Jackson has died. Your friends sit down to breakfast, open the paper to your column, and cereal comes out of their noses.

Based on the one incontestable fact — the timing of your column — people generate conclusions that are way more interesting than the column itself. Among them, a) You knew that Michael Jackson would die; b) You killed Michael Jackson by writing about him.

True, the column reads like an obituary, but anything written about Jackson in this century will read like an obituary. Professionally he had been dead for over a decade. As for killing him, it would seem that his handlers took care of that. He was, as Michael Kinsley wrote in 1984, a prisoner of commerce.

What we have here is an illustration of how randomness is misinterpreted to fit the narrative in our minds. We like to look for patterns and find connections in unrelated events. This way we can explain them to ourselves. Life seems neater, or at least less messy.

We need to feel that we are in control: it is integral to our self-esteem. We also know, though we deny it, that we are not in control. So we settle for the illusion of control.

What if we stopped fooling ourselves?

In his mind-opening book The Drunkard’s Walk (a mathematical term describing random motion), Leonard Mlodinow points out that in uncertain situations, we use our intuitive processes to make assessments and decisions. “Those processes no doubt carried an evolutionary advantage when we had to decide whether a saber-toothed tiger was smiling because it was fat and happy or because it was famished and saw us as its next meal,” Mlodinow says in the wry, breezy style that makes The Drunkard’s Walk such a pleasure to read — and it’s a math book. “But the modern world has a different balance, and today those intuitive processes come with drawbacks.”

These drawbacks include seeing false patterns, the availability bias (giving greater importance to memories that are more vivid and therefore most available for retrieval), and assigning meaning to meaningless measurements (If the unemployment rate “drops” by one-tenth of a percentage point, the change is so small, there is no way to tell whether there really is a change. Ooh, that explains so much).

Faced with uncertainty, humans take shortcuts in assessing patterns and making judgments. It doesn’t help that the human mind insists on identifying a definite cause for every effect, and has difficulty accepting the influence of random factors. Our response to chance and uncertainty is amazingly complex: different structures within our brains reach different conclusions, and then fight it out to determine which conclusion we will believe.

Simply put, we cannot recognize randomness when it’s staring us in the face. There is a difference between a process being random, and the product of that process appearing to be random.

Consider the Random Shuffle feature on the iPod. When this feature was introduced, users complained that they would hear two consecutive songs by the same artist, ergo the shuffling was not random. But true randomness sometimes produces repetitions. To placate users, the manufacturer made the Shuffle less random to make it seem more random.

We explain away randomness by attributing, say, a blockbuster movie or a profitable investment to the genius of Hollywood executives or stockbrokers. “We all understand that genius doesn’t guarantee success, but it’s seductive to assume that success must come from genius,” the author notes. Luck plays a much more important role than success or failure that we’d like to admit.

Mlodinow, a physicist who teaches randomness at Caltech, spent time in Hollywood in the ’80s writing for Star Trek: The Next Generation and MacGyver. He provides vivid examples of how Hollywood misinterprets a string of hits or a series of flops as trends. In fact random events come in groups and clusters.

As for the geniuses of the financial industry, I’m afraid I have some bad news. Oh, and about your wine collection. . .

The Drunkard’s Walk offers a crash course on the mathematical laws of randomness and pays tribute to the thinkers who figured them out: characters like the Renaissance man Girolamo Cardano, Blaise Pascal, and the Bernoullis. Mlodinow argues that there is a fundamental clash between our need for control and our ability to recognize randomness.

Basically he’s saying that all our assumptions are false and we need to change the way we look at the world.

Control freaks, it’s time for your nervous breakdowns.

You’re probably thinking: Is this a depressing book? Does it mean that we are all helpless victims of circumstance? If human life is entirely subject to randomness, should we all just give up trying? No. Your talent or ability increases your chance of success. So does not giving up. The more chances you take, the greater the probability that you will succeed. That factor is entirely under your control.

The Drunkard’s Walk is available at National Bookstores (P629).

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