Magical thinking is the belief that thought, intention or symbol can influence the physical world bypassing ordinary causal links. Anthropologists have studied it since the 1890s; psychologists, for about the same time. The short cultural verdict: "archaism", "human childhood", "superstition". The longer scientific verdict is more complicated.
Let me break it down honestly, in three parts.
Part one: where magical thinking works
The placebo effect is a real physiological process. A meta-analysis by Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche (NEJM, 2001) originally found a small effect — but that was for objective outcomes. For subjective experiences (pain, nausea, anxiety) the effect is measurably large. Candace Pert and later Ted Kaptchuk (Harvard) traced the mechanism: expectation activates specific neurotransmitter systems, including endogenous opioids and dopamine.
The meaning is simple: if you "believe it will help", your brain produces a chemical change that does help. Biochemistry triggered by a signal from the higher cognitive layers. Magical thinking, here, works as the interface routing the user to a real mechanism. The mechanism stays mechanistic.
Same with prayer, meditation, ritual. Neuro-imaging (Newberg et al., 2001 and later) shows measurable changes in prefrontal cortex and parietal regions during intense prayer. A neural network running in a specific mode, with specific physiological consequences — reduced anxiety, altered pain threshold, sometimes long-term structural change. No external party required.
Part two: where magical thinking misleads
Confirmation bias. We remember the hits and forget the misses. You wished for it and it happened — remembered; you wished and it didn't — forgotten. Daniel Kahneman described this in detail (Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011), but it was known earlier.
Clustering of random events. The brain finds patterns where there are none and assigns them meaning. Evolutionarily useful (better to mistake a bush for a tiger than the other way round), but in modern environments it regularly produces false "synchronicities".
Magical thinking about other people. More dangerous here. "I thought something bad and it happened to him, so I'm to blame." Or: "I sent him a blessing, he recovered, so I'm a miracle worker." Both formulas are ego traps dressed as spirituality. No link exists between your thoughts and what happens to another person, apart from ones that pass through physical channels (you called, you said something, you did something).
Part three: where the boundary is blurry
Quantum mechanics handed magical thinking an unexpected gift — the word "observer". The same mistake has been replicated by popularisers for twenty years: "if the observer affects quantum measurement, then my consciousness creates reality."
Short physics answer: no. The "observer" in quantum mechanics is a measuring apparatus, not consciousness. Decoherence occurs because of interaction between the quantum system and its environment; consciousness has nothing to do with it. Wojciech Zurek showed this in detail across work in the 1990s and 2000s.
The longer answer is more interesting. Penrose and Hameroff claim that quantum coherence inside the brain may play a role in the moment of conscious choice. A hypothesis. It has fresh arguments in its favour (Frisch and Farrow, 2022), it is not accepted by the mainstream, and at the same time it is not refuted. In the narrow form — "quantum processes in microtubules may be relevant to consciousness" — it is a testable claim. In the wide form "consciousness creates reality" — a slogan that physically means nothing.
What I think
Magical thinking is the predecessor of scientific thinking, rather than its opposite. It says "there is a hidden link between intention and world". Science answers: "part of those links is real, via neuroendocrine and social mechanisms; part is illusion, via cognitive biases; part is unknown, and that is an open question."
The right stance is to separate. What exactly you observe. What mechanism might stand behind it. How it could be tested. Neither to dismiss as superstition, nor to accept as proof of "another reality".
Less exciting than "the universe is listening". Works.