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CrowdScience listener Griffith in Ghana, isn’t JUST a CrowdScience listener. He’s also a listener to our sister-show on the World Service, Unexpected Elements. But he’s noticed something funny.

In the weekly Unexpected Elements multiple-choice quiz, the answer is almost NEVER ‘a’. It’s nearly always ‘b’, or ‘c’. Why is this? When we set the quiz, why are we so reluctant to choose option ‘a’?

His question leads Alex Lathbridge on a journey into the murky depths of our brain, where he discovers the cognitive biases which so often trip us up in games of chance, or probability. Your brain might be a marvellous machine when it comes to figuring out how to understand the world, but sometimes, in the name of efficiency, it takes clever little short-cuts to the answer.

This pragmatic approach to problem solving is called ‘heuristics’, and it helps us manage an incredibly complicated world. But occasionally, especially when it comes to mathematics, chance, and probability, it leads us in the wrong direction.

Alex explores the world of gaming, and gambling. Games of chance in which our intuition sometimes lets us down, and makes us choose unwisely. Can we use maths to beat our brains, and learn how to win more often?