We Like the Thought of Threes

In the final analysis, though, it’s the idea of a pattern that makes threes such a popular mechanism. Even though patterns can vary, appearing as sequences, chronologies, lists, definitions, classifications or series, for instance, they create frameworks that become memorable and contain transitions that tie three words, phrases or ideas together. Even our brains are wired for threes. “Stunning new visuals of the brain reveal a deceptively simple pattern of organization in the wiring of this complex organ. Instead of nerve fibers travelling willy-nilly through the brain like spaghetti, as some imaging has suggested, the new portraits reveal two-dimensional sheets of parallel fibers crisscrossing other sheets at right angles in a gridlike structure that folds and contorts with the convolutions of the brain. This same pattern appeared in the brains of humans, rhesus monkeys, owl monkeys, marmosets and galagos, researchers report Thursday in the journal Science. ‘The upshot is the fibers of the brain form a 3-D grid and are organized in this exceptionally simple way,’ study leader Van Wedeen, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, told LiveScience. ‘This motif of crossing in three axes is the basic motif of brain tissue,’" reports Stephanie Pappas at LiveScience. Perhaps we are hard wired for threes, making them natural, abundant and recurring. Beyond the science, though, threes have a rhythm and flow that are comfortable to the mind, the eye and the ear. Threes are social and timeless and inescapable. We embrace ideas given to us in threes.  Lewis Carroll said, “What I tell you in threes is true.” We like the thought of it. 

From Threes, Chapter Eleven, “Threes Forever”