May 21, 2015 • 50 mins
What are we to make of coincidence? From the numerological cats cradles we weave around famous events to the curious ways human lives converge through time, coincidence seems to fly in the face of reason and even suggest the supernatural. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the synchronicity, statistics and psychology of coincidence.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Yeah,
you all may remember Joe from Forward Thinking Um, one
of our sister podcasts. I actually appeared on a couple
(00:24):
of episodes talk about monsters with you guys right least
was it last October? So that was what we talked about,
monsters in the future of monsters. That was really fun.
That was that was a fun one. Got into some
of the uh the de sci fi possibilities for the
future in terms of monstrosity. And Joe's joining me this week,
going in for Julie to talk about the science of coincidence.
(00:47):
So I've got one for you. Tell me if you've
heard this one before. Lincoln and Kennedy. Oh, yes, you
know this. I was first exposed to this in middle
school when a teacher of mine get gave us a
list to these like it was some kind of really
important fact we needed to learn. But yeah, how about this.
Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, two American presidents, both
(01:10):
were elected to Congress in the year forty six. Lincoln
in eighteen forty six, Kennedy in nineteen forty six. Both
were elected president in the year sixty, Lincoln in eighteen sixty,
Kennedy in nineteen sixty. Each of their last names both
contains seven letters uh. And then there's this whole list
of coincidences that keeps going. They were both shot in
(01:32):
the head, they were both assassinated by Southerners. They were
both succeeded by Southerners. Their vice presidents were Southerners. Both
vice presidents were named Johnson. What are the odds? Yeah,
I remember this being rolled out, perhaps in a history class,
and uh, you know that the list would start about
(01:52):
these coincidences, and I would kind of tune out after
the first one or two. Um. And I guess that
that kind of boils down to the type of p
in the world, Like there there are people out there
who just tune out after the first coincidence or two,
and then there are those who obsess about it and
see this as as something something really crucial and something
really telling about these two men, about the history of
(02:13):
this nation, et cetera. That might be the difference between
this Robert, because I did not tune out. I was
my mind was blown to uh, to borrow from a
popular phrase. Yeah, I I sat there in my desk like, wow,
what are the odds? You know, must be some kind
of ghost spirit controlling this. It just I was amazed.
(02:38):
There two twin souls are basically the same entity, reincarnated
and and and tracked hunted by the same extra dimensional force. Yeah.
Or there was some sort of like cosmic literature teacher
trying to get me to observe parallels between the meaning
of these two men. Yeah, it's another one of course
(02:58):
that comes to mind is the of Thomas Jefferson and
John Adams, two individuals who, of course a very interconnected
in the history of the United States as well, both
instrumental in drafting the Declaration of Independence, which was signed
to July fourth, seventeen seventy six. Both men died on
the same day, July four, eighteen twenty six, exactly fifty
(03:19):
years to the day after the document was ratified. So
that that you know that that kind of hits you like.
I like that one because that one's nice and succinct.
You know, what were the chances? You don't need a list, Yeah,
it's right there. Yeah, I mean they were they were
good friends. So maybe there was you could imagine some
level of synchronicity about, you know, when you're giving up
and sort of handing it over to the reaper. But
(03:42):
but the dates are are kind of compelling there. It
would be even crazier, though, if I found out now
that you played John Adams in a production of seventeen
seventy six. No, but I was in a production of
seven times. Here you go, I played Thomas Jefferson and
been a production of seventeen seventy six. So we're tied
into it too. There's no escaping the black hole of coincidence. Okay,
(04:03):
I've got an even crazier coincidence. No, it's probably not.
This is kind of dumb, but why do so many
action heroes have the initials JB James Bond, Jason Bourne,
Jack Bauer, Jack Burton my favorite? Well, I mean, what
are the chances? Actually, we have no idea, do we? Yeah?
I haven't read any I mean maybe there's some really
(04:24):
deep statistical study on this out there, but uh yeah,
maybe is it? Is? It? On one hand, is just
possibly pure luck. And we only pick up right on
there there being a j B here, a JB there
because we're also not taking into account all the other
j B initials out there, like like does Jim Bean
factor into this, Probably not, and all of the action
(04:45):
heroes that aren't j B s. Yeah, And then to
what extent is it just completely almost subconscious, you know,
because you have an action hero, and and by extension
of action hero, you think of mythological hero and the
symbolic power of the hero and how it resonates through
through our culture and through through our our the way
we view the world, and and perhaps that ends up
(05:05):
informing it. You know, you have James Bond in your mind,
and then you end up creating Jason Bourne and Jack
Bauer in the same way. And I'm just purely spitballing here.
You could perhaps have the mythic hercules in your mind,
and then when you need to create another, you know,
mythically strong hero, perhaps you go with the Hulk. That's
the same kind of consonants. Yeah. We associate sounds with
(05:27):
with ideas certainly. Yeah. Now another crazy one. And I
love this one, uh, in part because it involves Edgar
Allan Poe. Of course, Edgar Allan Poe only wrote one
novel his entire career. You know, mostly known for his
his excellent short stories, but the novel in question published
an eight thirty eight the narrative of author Gordon Pym
of Nantucket. I've never read it, never mean, I never
(05:49):
read it there, but uh, the fiction of this story
is you have a crew of a ship called Grampus.
They wind up adrift with no food or water, and
so first they catch it toward us. They eat it,
but eventually they have to draw straws to see who
winds up has dinner. And uh, an individual named Richard
Parker draws the short straw, so they stab him and
(06:11):
then they eat him. And then they build a house
on the boat so that they can bury him behind
the wall. Yeah, I mean, you gotta play the greatest hits, right,
Here's where it gets crazy. Years later, in four a
yacht named the minion Net leaves England, is headed towards Sydney, Australia,
and it sinks in a storm. Four men wind up
(06:32):
adrift in a lifeboat. They catch a turtle. They eat
it all right, But again you're probably thinking at this point, Okay,
you know turtles, how hard are they to catch? There
are lots of turtles in the world, they're all tasty. Yeah,
and if you're four men in a boat in the
middle of nowhere and you're hungry, you're gonna eat it.
No good deal. But then it turns to cannibalism, and
this too you might think, well, what a four guys
in the middle in the middle of the ocean in
(06:53):
a little boat. They're hungry, They've only had one turtle
to eat. It's kind of inevitable, right, Well, this is
this is crazy. But aboard this vessel, you have a
seventeen year old named Richard Parker, the same name as
the individual they ate in pose novel. This guy falls overboard,
drinks a bunch of seawater to quench his thirst. Uh,
(07:13):
and so he starts going. He starts deteriorating really quickly
here and they side, well, he's he's about to die.
We're gonna have to eat him, and they eat him.
So you have these this fictional account of cannibalism seeming
to inform this real life act of cannibalism years later
and in almost identical circumstances. Yeah, and it's so gruesome
(07:35):
you can really doubt that they staged it to happen
on purpose. Because of the novel. Yeah, Like I can't
imagine them being on the boat and someone saying, look,
I read this book, and uh, there was a guy
in the book named Richard Parker and they ate him in.
Your name's Richard Parker. So I'm not saying we have
to eat you, but come on. Yeah, it's like the
(07:58):
worst school play every exactly Alright. So, uh, in this
we're talking about coincidence, and in this episode we're talking
about coincidence and the science of coincidence, how we perceive
a coincidence. Uh, but let's let's get down to brass tacks.
What exactly is a coincidence? Yeah, and specifically, I think
we should think about what's the difference between a coincidence
(08:21):
and just an improbable event? Um so of standard Oxford Dictionaries,
definition is a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without
apparent causal connection. Okay, So that's sort of playing up
on the like the two different things coinciding, like like
the pim right, like the Gordon Pim example, or like
(08:41):
Jefferson and Adams, you know, dying on the same day.
Another way of putting it is that it's a concurrence
of events that is quote perceived as meaningfully related with
no apparent causal connection, um and and that quotes from
a paper that we're gonna end up talking about later
in this episode. But I think that's something we should highlight,
(09:03):
is that a coincidence has a perceptual element. It's something
that seems to be important to us, like it has
a psychic weight. But you know it, it kind of
comes back to what we're talking about earlier about the
two students in the classroom. One of them is just
enthralled by the Kennedy Lincoln coincidence list and the other is, uh,
(09:23):
it's just tunes out on it. Because that that kind
of comes down to how we can look at coincidence
in the life. You can either say it's just pure dumblock,
is just a matter of statistics, And then there's the
the the view that there's something else going on here,
that there is some sort of connected, connective tissue that
we were just not privy to. And we have seen
(09:44):
some very you know, thoughtful and informed study on both
sides of the issue. Right there have been brilliant people
throughout the years who paid way more attention to coincidences
than we might today. I mean, we all experience coincidences.
I would be shocked if was someone who would say, no,
I've never experienced anything like a really weird concurrence. It
(10:04):
happens every single day. It happened to us we were
talking about while we were researching these podcasts, so like
just strange topics coming up and seemingly unrelated episodes. Yeah,
I mean, of course that kind of gets down to that,
like the power of coincidence. Coincidence can can kill you,
Coincidence can can make you rich. Coincidence can just be
this seemingly meaningless, little connective tissue between two things. Um,
(10:28):
and it's a trapped It's so easy to fall into,
especially given how important causation and determination are in human culture. Right,
And we'll get more into that later, but I mean,
you you almost can't fault an individual for for thinking
about these coincidences in terms of some sort of connection. Now,
and you see it at every level. I mean, what
is the meat cute and every romantic comedy, it's always
(10:51):
some kind of coincidence that brings people together. And on
the opposite end, you've got famous scientists who have tried
to investigate, you know, what's the meaning of coincidences. I
think one great example is the Austrian biologists Paul Camera.
Uh you know, if if you ever have that feeling like, wow,
I think everything's connected, he did too. So Paul Camera
(11:14):
lived from eighteen eighty to nineteen twenty six and he
was a proponent of Lamarckian evolution. Have you ever I'm
sure you're familiar with this, the one to just give
everyone a quick reminder, the idea that say giraffes, their
next grow long because they're reaching for those top those
top leaves, and so it's like one generation informing the next. Yeah.
So normally, now what we believe is min Dalian genetics.
(11:37):
You know, you inherit, you inherit your genetic traits from
your parents germ cells, and you pass those same genetic
traits onto your kids. And unless you have a certain mutation,
that can be basically random. But the Lamarchian ideas where
that you could you know, maybe if you work out
a lot or something, your kids will be born with
bigger muscles or something will strain your neck trying to
(11:57):
reach something in this life, and in the next life,
your kids will have longer necks by virtue of your
your straining. Yeah, and so in one famous experiment, Camera
claimed to have caused male specimens of a of an
animal called the midwife toad to grow these black forearm
paths that some species of male toads have, and that
(12:17):
they used them to hold onto females during mating. Unfortunately,
some other scientists in the field examined Camera specimens and
found that the black pads on his toads had been
injected with artificial inc and so Camera denied responsibility for that.
And I guess nobody really knows whose fault that was.
But the accusation here would be that he cheated, right,
(12:40):
which is important because we'll come back to cheating. Right.
But Camera wasn't only interested in toads and inheritance. He
was also interested in coincidences, like he kept a diary
of daily coincidences. And just one example against it in
a in a paper that we're going to bring up
in a bit, his brother in law tells him that
he attended to concert and held both the ticket for
(13:02):
seat number nine and the coach check ticket numbered nine. WHOA, yeah, yeah,
But anyway, that itself doesn't seem all that interesting until
you start making lists which Camera did, and he added
them up over time. And I have to admit, when
you add it's it's kind of like the Lincoln Kennedy thing.
(13:25):
The first one isn't all that interesting until you start
adding them together, and then it really gets your attention.
There's this cumulative effect of this, like snowballing kind of attention,
getting significance of coincidences that pile up on each other.
So Camera organized these thoughts into a hypothesis he called
the law of seriality, uh. And he posited basically this
(13:47):
underlying force in reality that was a quote world mosaic
or cosmic kaleidoscope that brings like objects and events together.
So almost a kind of of emergent order, uh in
the chaos yet show which I could buy into it.
And we see in emergences as a major topic in
(14:08):
understanding and intelligence, evolution, etcetera. So why not coincidence? Sure?
But of course Camera wasn't the only scientist who has
been interested in coincidences and who has attributed some significant
role in the universe to them. Carl Young. Carl Young
loved coincidences. Carl So. Carl Young was a Swiss psychiatrist.
(14:32):
You've probably heard of him. As sort of like a
he's one of the big names in psychology and psychiatry,
following Freud. You know, it's like the Mantle, I think
union and the big big tents. But Young was was
very much into sort of interesting borderline magical esoteric ideas.
So he loved the paranormal. He was interested in meaningful
(14:56):
connections and mystical truths, eesp astrology, psychokinesis, all kinds of
stuff like that, and so naturally he was really interested
in coincidences. And so he wrote a book called Synchronicity
and a Causal Connecting Principle. And this book was actually,
(15:17):
uh it was I think extracted from a larger volume
of his work and eventually published on its own. But
I read this book when I was in college, and
I remember thinking, at the time, yet again playing up
on my I guess I'm susceptible to this kind of thing.
I was like, I wonder if he's onto something here.
It seemed really interesting. So what kind of coincidences did
(15:38):
Young notice? Well, he gives one example. This is the
one that's always cited. It's it's it's his favorite example.
It's the Golden Scaub. So in a nineteen fifty one.
I believe it was essay on synchronicity. Young told the
story that he had been seeing a female patient for psychoanalysis,
and Young believed basically that she was languishing because she
(16:01):
was in sort of a prison of rationality. She was
just too rational. She she wouldn't quote open up to
the human side of life. For Young, I think this
had a decidedly sort of supernatural tinge to it. And um,
he wanted to uh and this is from a particular
translation quote sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding.
(16:24):
So one day she was in psychoanalysis telling him about
a dream she'd had where someone gave her a golden
scar rub. And Young claims at that very moment, an
insect started knocking against the window of the office where
they were, and he opened the window and he caught
the insect and it was a beatle. It was a
(16:45):
scarub type of beetle. And he said it was like
a green color, but in the right light it reflected
the light and looked gold. And then he presented it
to her in this moment of you know, one of
those there are more things in heaven and Earth than
dreamt of in your fullosophy kind of moments, and and
he hoped that this helped shatter her rationalism. And so
(17:07):
I don't know if that happened to me. If I
had just been talking about a beetle and then a
beatle started knocking against the window, I'd probably think that
was interesting. But I don't know if I designed any
meaning to it. Yeah, it doesn't really smack of just
Heaven sent beetle sent to you know, open up my
mind and make me more you know, in love with life,
(17:30):
because they're probably just a lot of beetles flying around
out of there. Sure, but Young commented that when coincidences
like these accumulate, it's what we were talking about earlier.
The more of them happened, the more we take note
of them, uh, and with good reason, because it's harder
to explain them away by random chance. The more they accumulate,
you fill up that entire diary with them, right. Yeah,
(17:51):
it has weight to it exactly. So Young came up
with this term synchronicity to describe the a causal connecting
principle that links meaningfully significant events that couldn't be connected
by physical causes. So he's not saying that there's like
a there's like a you know, a ghost that put
the beetle there, because that would be in some way causal. Instead,
(18:14):
he's saying there's another force in the universe other than causality.
It sort of runs parallel to causality that connects events
and and creates links of significance. But it's not physics, Okay,
Like I kind of in making sense of it in
my own head, I thought of it in terms of
this room or recording in in which case we have
(18:35):
wires that are running outside of the walls, then running
across the floor and under the table, and then there
are the wires within the wall that we cannot see.
And so the wires that are running outside of the
walls are are kind of like causality. We can we
can see them. We're in causality. We've our brain spends
a lot of time making sense of cause and effect.
But then there's this idea that there might be some
(18:56):
other force at work within the walls. We can't see it,
we're not we're not privy to it. It's exact in
an ins and outs, but it's it's making things interconnected.
It's it's these connections are popping up throughout our life,
throughout the times game. Yeah, causality connects events in the
physical realm, and according to Young, synchronicity would connect events
(19:17):
in sort of like the psychic meaningfulness realcom that it
was this force it makes things have meaning and shows
us meaning by bringing unlikely events together. Okay, so this
would be kind of like in um, you seen Interstellar? Yes, okay,
so there's the whole bit in there about love. Is
this uh, this connecting force like that seems to line
(19:39):
up rather closely with this idea of synchronicity. Yeah, I
think that makes sense. So coincidences obviously have this power
over us. They captivate us, they seem significance. They make
us wonder if there is some kind of magical or
super psychic force at work. And sometimes it can be
hard to tell because we don't know how to analyze coincidences.
(20:02):
You know, like there when something happens, like you get
a number nine from the coach check and then you're
in seat number nine. There's really no reason to ask
why something like that happened, but you can perhaps ask,
wait a minute, did anything significant actually happen? Indeed, now
(20:23):
we've talked about the the sort of supernatural end of
the pool, the idea that there is some sort of
of intrinsic synchronicity connecting these these events. And now we're
gonna we're gonna look at a more critical and more
skeptical side of the pool. Right, So, several times so
far in this podcast we've referred ahead to a paper,
and this is sort of a classic paper in statistics
(20:45):
and mathematical analysis of coincidences, and it's called Methods for
Studying Coincidences. It was published by the Journal of the
American Statistical Association in December nineteen nine. I think it
had been given at a been given as a presentation
in a couple of years before. But it's by Percy
Diaconis and Frederick Moss Stellar, and they were I believe,
(21:08):
Harvard mathematicians, and Diaconis and moss Stellar offer four main
categories of explanation for seeming examples of synchronicity. You know,
they refer to camera, they refer to young and they say,
what what do we make of these events? And and
how can we tell if something is actually going on
that's worth noting. So the first of the options is
(21:30):
that there is an actual causal link. It's not a coincidence,
because there's a cause that to seemingly disparate events happen together. Uh.
The second one is psychology. It's something about the way
our brains work, the fact that we're noticing what seemed
to be coincidences, and will definitely have more on that later.
Another point is what they call the multiplicity of end points,
(21:54):
and this is going to be about how how we
count something as a hit. And then the last one
that they site is called the law of truly large numbers,
and that's going to be about statistical context. So I
think we should go back and look at causes first.
So when something happens that's seemingly just a huge coincidence,
(22:16):
you should always consider the fact that there might be
a cause that's more obvious than you realize. Yeah, this
would of course be the birthday problem, right, which is
a problem that that people will encounter just everywhere, right
and in your workplace, at school, et cetera. I mean
we can encounter it right here in the podcast Chamber
Joe Win your Birthday July six, Minds October six, whoa synchronicity?
(22:39):
Are you serious? I'm serious? Were sixteen sixteen. Okay, what
happened when you were sixteen? What city were you in? Oh, Paris, Tennessee.
I was in Tennessee too when I was sorry, I
was in fatal Tennessee. But still Tennessee, Tennessee. Man, something
weird is going on. Yeah, or but but worth noting
here is notice how we're we're singling in on the hits.
(22:59):
We totally missed the same day birthday by by many months,
but we're counting as a hit because we both had sixteen. Yeah,
so here's the birthday problem. Let's say you're in a
subway car and you're riding around with some random strangers,
and because you are extremely rude, you start getting people's attention,
getting them to take their headphones off, and you you
(23:20):
ask the strangers in the car all of their birthdays.
That's not rude, that's just good manners. I mean, it's
a it's a nice breaker. Okay, Yeah, you might want
to know if today's their birthday, and you should offer
them this cake that you found on the ground. Exactly. Yeah,
So how many people would you have to ask before
It's more likely than not that you'd find two people
(23:41):
with the same exact birthday. Well, let's see three sixty
five days in a year. Uh, so you'd think, well,
maybe I need a talk to three d sixty five people, right,
or maybe twice that. Yeah, I mean I'm not good
at doing math like that immediately, but that's where I
would have gone the first place in my head. Okay,
it's got to be like one in three sixty five
(24:01):
times two or something like that. But no, the answer
is twenty three. Okay, But we're not going to take
the time to explain all the math. You can go
look that up online. It is well documented. Uh, this
is a classic problem. If you ask twenty three people
in a room, in a train car, whatever, you have
reached the fifty fifty odds that two of them will
(24:22):
have the same birthday. And one of the key points
here is that you're not starting with the specified birthday.
You're not saying how many people do I have to
ask before I find somebody with my birthday? You're just
trying to find one match, right, Yeah, in this group
of if you ask twenty three people, odds are two
of them will have the same birthday. What if you
(24:43):
want to find three people with the same birthday, that's
got to be astronomical, right I would think so. I
mean you think that would just multiply it. Yeah. No, Actually,
if your train car can hold people, chances are in
your favor you reach odds again if you ask a
D eight. So that just shows that the statistical probability
(25:03):
of in this case, this is a birthday match occurring,
he's actually uh, far greater than we we we may
get a credit at the surface. Yeah, I think the
point is that we are often surprised by events that
are not statistically unlikely at all, Like they just don't
match our intuitions. Basically, we we have exaggerated intuitions for
(25:28):
how unlikely some things are, especially it turns out particular
types of things, for example, things that happened to us.
This is a funny thing. We're we're way more surprised
about coincidences that happened to us than coincidences that happened
to other people. Oh yeah, because we're all the center
of our own stories, right, we're going to be We're
more interesting, We're more invested in this one. Um. I
(25:50):
mean just to come back to back to the statistical possibilities,
I mean, just thinking back to how we both were
like whoa sixteen whoa Tennessee. But when you really break
it down, like the chances of us scoring the same day,
I mean the same date within a month, that's what
one and thirty one chance for the most part, and
Tennessee what we could say, Well, we're both living and
(26:10):
working in Atlanta, so there's probably a reasonable chance that
we would come from a southern state, of which there
are I mean, but not that many. There's very many
literature majors from Tennessee end up in Atlanta. That's not unusual, yea. Um,
but so hey, there could be another cause though. So
(26:30):
that's just the apparent cause. The cause that's um readily available,
you just haven't looked at the math. There could also
be a hidden cause. When something appears to be a coincidence,
it's not actually a coincidence because there's an actual causal
link that you don't know about. Um. The classic example
of this would be cheating and gambling. Yes, this is
(26:53):
where a person rolls a dice, right, Yeah, So so
you roll a pair of dice, you know, a hundred
times in a row. And let's say you you roll
a seven nineties six out of those hundred times. Yeah,
like the more the more every time you roll when
you get the same number he gets, that gets even
more astronomical. That have happened? How could that possibly have happened? Well,
(27:15):
obviously if there's a hidden cause, which is the dice
are loaded so that they will turn up a seven
pretty much every time. So there you go. You don't
have to be a god to do it. You just
have to be a cheater with with a pair of
loaded diet exactly. And another example comes to mind. This
was going back to Carl Young. Carl Young was associated
with the physicist of Wolfgang Polly, and Paully was famous
(27:38):
for coming up with the Poully exclusion principle, which is
important in quantum mechanics. I don't remember exactly what it
does right now, but it's something that's right. But yeah,
he um. So he was a known physicist and it
did really important work. But Paul, I think, was also
sort of interested in the you know, strange synchronicity type ideas,
(28:00):
and Polly, in addition to the Polly principle, which is
an actual principle of science, was known for the Polly effect,
which is a more anecdotal effect. But the story goes
like this everywhere Wolfgang Polly went, machines broke. Ah. This
is the classic watch stopper scenario. Yeah, so he would
show up in a lab somewhere to test out some
(28:22):
equipment and what do you know, the equipment and working today.
Can't figure it out, And then he'd leave the lab
and suddenly it'd start working again. Uh. We don't know
how many of these stories are actually true, but this
is a popular anecdotal legend, and we'll just accept that
it's true for the purpose of the conversation that everywhere
he went it seemed like stuff wouldn't work. In fact,
there was even one anecdote I read about where some
(28:46):
people were working in a lab and their equipment stopped working,
and they joked, is you know Wolf going here? Is
as he'd come down the hall. Uh. And then later
they found out that he just happened to have been
changing trains in that city on that day at the
time that their equipment malfunction. He has some long reaching effects.
(29:07):
So whether or not that's true, right, let's go ahead
and settle now on. But but if it were true,
you could perhaps look for actual hidden causes. It might
not be a synchronistic coincidence that you know that the universe,
the the Unice, the Unice Mundi is trying to tell
(29:27):
Wolfgung Polly something about his relationship with machines or something.
It could be perhaps that Polly had a habit of
scuffing around his office carpet before heading into the lab,
and that led him to discharge a lot of static
electricity which could break some really delicate instruments. Or Polly
is just really clumsy. Yeah, And of course it's also
not taken to account all the machines that are not
(29:48):
breaking in Polly's life, right, it's literally everything he touches.
Does it just fall apart and rust, you know, before
his very eyes? Or is it just oh this thing broke?
How could that happen? How get a machine and this
little device made by human? How could this possibly stop working?
You know? So you end up that you end up
honing in on those instances where it doesn't work, right.
(30:11):
And it's also i think probably not communicating the reality
about lab equipment, which is that it probably breaks all
the time, and there's a lot of it. Any lab
is going to have a lot of equipment, and all
of it has a half life, and and and a
death point. Yeah. Um so, so yeah, that's the idea
of the hidden cause. And then, of course those are
just some hypothetical examples we're offering. The true hidden cause
(30:34):
would be the one we haven't even thought of, you know,
the cause that's an actual physical causal link that's causing
things to malfunction in police presence, but we can't even
guess what it is it might be there. Yeah, so
I think we should move on to another one of
the points that Diaconis and Mostell are making their paper,
which is the quote multiplicity of end points or the
(30:57):
sort of like the cost of close point. Yeah, because
if we have already illustrated close counts and coincidence, Like
when we're talking about birthdays, we were looking for the
same day in the same month, but we settled for sixteen.
You know, we were looking for the same Tennessee town
and oh my god, we accidentally went to the same
high school and didn't realize it. But we'll settle for
just the same state. And that's what we're doing. We're
(31:20):
we're constantly looking for these these little coins as to
line up, and we'll settle for something that's close. And
if you settle for close the statistical possibilities just blow up,
such as with the birthday situation. Um, if you want
to uh to, uh to, if you want to hit
a near birthday match with a group of people, so
make sure you're back on the back in the train
(31:41):
car and you're willing to to settle for all right,
let's see who on this train car has a birthday
within a day of each other. You know, we'll settle
for a close match. Then you only seven people are
needed for that chance. So yeah, so so coming down
from from a perfect match to a near match just
opens it up tremendously. And then, of course, when you
(32:04):
think about the accumulation effect that we were talking about earlier,
it makes it much easier if you are accumulating close matches.
You keep building up close matches, and over time they
start to look significant because they just turned into hits
in your memory. You know, you don't remember, well, that
was kind of close. You remember there's a hit, and
(32:26):
then another hit, and then another hit, and some of
these might be actual hits, some of these might be
close hits, but they all kind of blend together. Yeah,
this brings to mind like cold readings and uh, you know,
and the whole psychic game right where you throw out,
oh i'm i'm I think there's somebody named Joe in
your life, and you know I have an uncle Joseph.
There you go, close becomes a perfect match and then
(32:48):
in the blink of an eye, and then that is
how you reckon your memory. Okay. Then, also when studying coincidences,
that this is another category of of Diaconis and Mustellar.
There's the law of truly large numbers. And this is
a point about context. So let's say somebody encounters of
an event that is truly incredibly unlikely for a person
(33:08):
to experience. So it's not one of those things with
a hidden cause. It's not one of those things where
the odds are actually, you know, much more probable than
you realize. It's truly unlikely. You still have to consider context.
You have to consider this event against the vast number
of uncounted dice rolls of human experience that it is
(33:29):
nestled in. So here's an analogy. Let's say you're talking
to a professional poker player and she tells you one
time she was playing five card poker and she was
dealt a royal flush on the opening bet. Of a
hand then to trade any cards. She just got a
royal flush. Now, the odds of being dealta royal flush
are about one in six fifty thousand. I think it's
(33:50):
like sixty nine thousand or something like that, about one
and six. But you wouldn't say to this poker player, oh,
you must be lying or like you know, or you
must have been cheating in this game, because you understand
that the anecdote is in context. If she's a professional
poker player, depending on how long she's playing, she might
have been dealt hundreds of thousands of hands in her life.
(34:13):
And on top of that, she's one player out of many,
and maybe not everybody has had that experience. So when
considered in context, really improbable events start looking like, oh, okay, well, yeah,
this is the one chance in however many. Yeah, this
is kind of the you know, it's bound to happen
eventually clause Right, Like ive enough people are trying a
given thing, it's gonna line up. The monkeys are going
(34:35):
to compose the complete works of Shakespeare with thin enough time. Yeah.
So there are improbable events, but there are just a
lot of chances to achieve them. There are seven point
three billion people on Earth today and according to the
Population Reference Bureau, there is an estimated a hundred and
eight billion people who have ever lived. So considering that
if there's an event that has a one in a
(34:57):
million chance per year of occurring in somebody's life, let's
say it's I don't know what the actual chance of
this is, but having a baseball bat thrown over a
wall and it hits you on the head or something, Uh,
it should still happen to seventy three hundred people every year,
just given the population of the Earth, that that is
the probability. If there's a one in ten billion chance
(35:21):
of something ever occurring in a human's life, it should
still have happened to at least ten people in human history.
And it it kind of comes back around to the
idea of synchronicity, the union idea, because even though we're
we're talking about about real numbers and uh, and just
our sort of our inability to really make statistical sense
of the actual odds of things, uh, those actual odds
(35:45):
of the computation of those odds, they kind of exist
within the wall. They kind of exist outside of our
perception and our understanding of life in the small sense
in the individual sense. So in a way, uh, the
synchronoy city lines up well with with it with the
statistical likelihood of things happening. We're just we're just not
(36:07):
privy to it. Yeah. I think that connects back to
the fact that there is a personal significance for us,
even if there is not a statistical significance. Again, it's
not surprising that somebody won the lottery. It would be
really surprising if you won the lottery. That's not actually
objectively surprising, it's just surprising to you, which of course
brings us to psychology. Yeah, and we save this for
(36:29):
last because I think this might be the most significant
of all of these factors. And this is the fact
that sometimes it's not even the numbers. Sometimes it's not
even the data. It's just that we are wired to
bow at the altar of coincidence. It's how our brains work. Indeed,
I mean, that's just how we survive. That's how we
(36:50):
make sense of the stimuli in our environment, that's how
we form our memories, and that's how we plan for
the future. Yeah, So let's look at some psychological phenomenon
that that are sort of related to our tendency to
take note of coincidences and maybe a tribute to them
more magical significance than they might actually have. Uh, how
about you even heard of the batter main Hoff phenomenon. Yeah,
(37:13):
this is the frequency illusions. This is I guess the
famous example of this would be you just learn a
new word, you know, you either encounter in a book
and he's like, WHOA, I don't know that when you
look it up and your rather taken with it, and
then it seems to pop up everywhere you just learned
about it, and it's all around you. So it's like
discovering a flower exists for the first time you've never
(37:35):
seen before, and then suddenly it seems to be growing
in every pot across town. Yeah. Yeah, And so the
weird name actually comes from a West German terrorist organization,
doesn't have anything to do with them. Really. I read
that the origin of this was that the phenomenon supposedly
got its name because a message board user somewhere online
told the story of encountering information about the bad or
(37:58):
mine Hoff gang and then just suddenly seeing that again
within like twenty four hours. Um, and I'm sure this
has happened to you. It's happened to me all the time.
This actually happened to me while I was researching these
podcasts were recording today. So in the other podcast we're
recording today, Uh, there's a mention of Prince Cheep, a
island off of the west coast of Africa, and I
(38:20):
had when I when I got to them in the research,
I realized I had just been reading about that island
for the first time, like less than twenty four hours before,
for completely unrelated reason, not related to astronomy or anything. No,
but see, Yeah, you see those kind of weird littal
coincidences pop up, yeah all the time, And uh, I've
often found that to be the case too, seemingly unrelated episodes,
(38:43):
but there'll be some little thread that connects them. Um.
You know. Another example the frequency illusion that I often
see is I'll I'll come across like a new concept
or a concept I wasn't that familiar with, and I'll
do a deep dive in in it for a podcast
podcast such as h super Normal Stimuli was a big one,
and after I researched it, I was just I was
just seeing it everywhere like it it kind of a
(39:05):
topic like that of you know sufficient depth. It kind
of changes the way you look at the world and
then you see reflections of it just all around you. Yeah,
and uh and and so it can be something as
simple as a as a word. It can be something
that's you know, a particular place, a particular you know,
a particular band, a particular work of a literature, or
(39:26):
it can be uh, you know, a philosophical mindset suddenly
because you're aware of it, you're hyper aware of it,
you're excited about it, You're going to see it in
the rest of the world. Yeah, um, yeah, And there
there could be lots of reasons. One could be that
hidden causal connection. You know, there are actually reasons that
you're investigating similar stories around the same time or reading
(39:48):
similar material that might use a new and unfamiliar word
around the same time, because you have interests and drives
that are sort of unified by time. Uh. Also, the
authors of the paper we were talking about earlier, have
they have their own sort of mathematical analysis of this,
don't they? And they sort of explain how it's not
that unusual that you should, you know, at a certain point,
(40:09):
after acquiring a word for the first time, see it again. Yeah,
that's just sort of expected to happen. Yeah, they're just there.
There's a finite number of words, so you're going to
see them again. Um. And of course this plays into apophenia. Uh.
This is uh. This is a term comes to us
from German scientists Claus Konrad, who coined apophenia from the
(40:31):
Greek appo away and uh uh and Finian to show
in n He was studying acute schizophrenia, during which connections
and meanings seem to web together around unrelated details. So
this is the basic idea here is we're always looking
for patterns and signals from our environment. I mean, that's
how we think, that's how we live, that's how we survive,
(40:52):
particularly when it comes to assessing threats. Okay, um, And
so we have we often have this tendency to perceive
patterns and connections in random or meaningless data. Um. For instance. Uh.
One example that comes to mind here is you have
some sort of silly police drama. On right, they're looking
at a map of the city and they have little
pins showing where the crimes are at. And then what
(41:15):
do they see. They see like a pentagram rights some
sort of order. And of course in the show. It
always makes sense, right, Like the the Satanic Killer actually
is trying to kill people so that his crimes look
like a pentagram in a map. But you can see
that pentagram without any planning at all or some other symbol. Yeah,
if you want to see that pentagram in the planning,
you can see that pentagram in the planning of just
about anything. Um. But what this basically breaks down to
(41:38):
is a false positive in statistics, a type one error
in cognition. And this is something that plays into religion, gambling,
conspiracy theory, and just are and also our need to
see faces everywhere. Right, it's the reason we see uh,
figures in the constellations in the sky, right. I mean
i'd say very few people these days actually think that
(41:59):
the stars were arranged to look like a figure from
Greek myth. Yeah, because you think whoever was doing it
would do a better job. I mean, yeah, it's it's
not very good. It's kind of a crappy portrait, but
you know people saw it. Yeah, yeah, they saw the
pattern and we just can't help but see. Patterns were
pattern recognition engines, as we've mentioned before here. And there's
(42:21):
the thing is there's an evolutionary advantage for us pattern
recognition apes in making that type one air because essentially
you have you have you have a type one air
and you have a type two right false positive, false negative.
And the classic example is that of you know, rustling
in the bushes on the on the prehistoric savannah, right,
because there's a possibility that a big cat is about
(42:44):
to spring out of those rustling bush bushes and kill us.
Or it could be the statistical noise of wind. Exactly.
A false positive just gets you hot and bothered over
nothing and maybe a good laugh. I thought it was
a tiger and it was just wind. But a false
negative that gets you killed. Yeah, so obvious. There's obviously
a selection pressure to favor false positives. Yeah, exactly. So,
(43:07):
I mean, so that just plays into how we think
and how we behave as humans and are overwhelming tendency
to see the pattern when there isn't one, to see
the connective tissue between events, in this case, when there
isn't any right. So yeah, and so in that way
a coincidence can represent a pattern to us, we start
thinking what does it mean? Yeah, I mean, and there's
(43:27):
likely a connection between apophenia and creativity This is a
theory that was put put forth by Swiss neurologist Peter
Bruger Uh in a two thousand one book, Hauntings and
Poulter Guy's Multi Disiplinary Perspectives. And he was studying apophenian
patients suffering from psychotic episodes that were beginning to find
spontaneous meaning and random aspects of their life. And his
(43:47):
research revealed that high levels of dopamine disposes his patients
to find meetings, patterns, significance where there was there was none.
So creativity apophenia, Uh, you know, it's what is creativity.
But ultimately, you know, finding new patterns, new connections, new
ways to arrange existing ideas and motifs uh into something new,
(44:09):
right of course, Yeah, I mean we often see that
as sort of the core of the creative principle. It's
you know, understanding like, oh, this is connected to this
other thing. Very often the connections you see between events
or objects or ideas and say a literature class or
something like that, are they are still psychic phenomenon. It's
(44:31):
something that we are putting together out of our need
defined meaning, that's right, and a lot of times that
meaning that we need to find. You know, we we
already have our our minds made up about what that
meaning is. This brings us to confirmation bias, which of
course is always a big one. This, of course is
the idea that we have a tendency to search for
or interpret information in a way that confirms your preconceptions
(44:55):
about life, about about basically anything, which leads to statistical
errors that cloud your decision and problem decision making a
problem solving ability. Yeah, so this would come into play
if say you are already looking for a pattern of coincidences,
say you've had to like to sort of synchronous strange
events happen in one day, you're looking for a third
(45:18):
and that's going to bias the way that you sample data.
It's probably going to make you look for things that
are sort of a close hit is something you might
have ignored otherwise to confirm your pattern hypothesis that there's
gonna be something in line with this second thing. You know,
it's the same like people dye in threes ideas just
thinking of that. Yeah, like you, if you're lucky, you'll
(45:40):
get like to a list celebrities dying at the same time.
But then often like that third one has to be
like a radio star for the days. You know, it's
something that doesn't really match up, but you'll take it.
It's totally fleets the prophecy exactly right. It's confirmation bias.
You're you're bringing it in because you've got to make
it fit the pattern. Yeah, it's kind of like when
you listen to an episode of This American Life and
(46:02):
like the they have the theme for the show, and
like the intro hits the theme, the second segment really
hits the theme. The third segment and the second third segment,
you know they mostly hit this theme, and that last
one you're kind of like, I don't know close enough,
close enough to close out the show, but you're really
kind of strayed from the overall theme. Um. But then
that's pretty much how we approach life in general, whether
(46:24):
you're talking about belief in UFOs, ancient Egyptians and alien tech, Bigfoot,
or or you know, office conspiracies or whatever it happens
to be. If you're looking for something to be true, uh,
you can find it. That So it plays into scientific analysis.
You have a you know, a theory you want and
you want to see it proven out, and you subconsciously
(46:45):
scow your the results of the experimentation in your favor. Uh,
you want to love that new movie that just hit
the theaters, so you wind up looking for reasons to
love it and focusing more on that and being perhaps
a little less critical than you normally will. And then,
of course there's a racial aspect too, right you You
if you happen to distrust members of another racial group,
you wind up focusing on the evidence that supports your
(47:07):
existing distrust rather than evidence that challenges it. Oh. Yeah,
people are definitely likely to oversample stuff that confirms their
bigotry or biases. So yeah, if if you have a
preconceived stereotype, you're looking to make things fit evidence that
doesn't fit it, you just kind of like, yeah, that's noise,
it doesn't matter. Yeah, I mean, for the most part,
you're kind of maintaining the castle of you know, fortress
(47:30):
sanity and fortress worldview and uh and and so you
want to to focus as much on the stuff that
keeps the walls up as possible. Yeah. Of course this
all works perfectly because post addiction is largely a result
of the brain's task of continually integrating sensory stimuli and
reconciling conflicting information into a unified vision of reality, a
(47:52):
unified story again in which we are the central character. Yeah.
I mean that's just simply how our memory. Yeah, I
mean you always see the the pattern of clue is
left by the mystery writer once you've had the ending revealed.
You might not notice it while you're going through the
novel to the first time. So there you have it. Coincidence. Um.
We we've kind of hit some of the the more
(48:15):
you know, fringey ideas of what could be happening with
this perceived synchronicity in life and what is actually going
on when it comes to the statistics of the world
around us and the way we perceive our world. Yeah.
So one of the authors of that paper we talked
about earlier, Percy Diaconis, he had this quote that I
saw in an interview or said, probability isn't a fact
(48:37):
about the world, it's a fact about the observers and knowledge.
And I think that's number one that seems very true,
but also it's um, it's a good way of informing
this discussion we've had about what coincidence means when you
actually examine probability and statistics. Very often, the real magic
is happening inside our heads, in our in our quest
(48:58):
to construct meaning in sort of are are actually the
great links that we go through mentally to weave events
together and produce tapestries of significance in our lives. So
think about that the next time you know, some of
these little coincidences pop up in your life and you
start drawing those imaginary lines in the in the world
(49:18):
of synchronicity. Hey. In the meantime, if you want more
episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, if you want
to read blog posts, you want to see videos, you
want links out of social media accounts, you should head
on over to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's the mothership, and on the landing page for this
episode will make sure to include links to related content
as well as outside content of note, And if you
(49:41):
want to send us an example of some crazy coincidence
in your own life, you can send it to blow
the mind at how stuff works dot com. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff
Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Yeah,
you all may remember Joe from Forward Thinking Um, one
of our sister podcasts. I actually appeared on a couple
(00:24):
of episodes talk about monsters with you guys right least
was it last October? So that was what we talked about,
monsters in the future of monsters. That was really fun.
That was that was a fun one. Got into some
of the uh the de sci fi possibilities for the
future in terms of monstrosity. And Joe's joining me this week,
going in for Julie to talk about the science of coincidence.
(00:47):
So I've got one for you. Tell me if you've
heard this one before. Lincoln and Kennedy. Oh, yes, you
know this. I was first exposed to this in middle
school when a teacher of mine get gave us a
list to these like it was some kind of really
important fact we needed to learn. But yeah, how about this.
Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, two American presidents, both
(01:10):
were elected to Congress in the year forty six. Lincoln
in eighteen forty six, Kennedy in nineteen forty six. Both
were elected president in the year sixty, Lincoln in eighteen sixty,
Kennedy in nineteen sixty. Each of their last names both
contains seven letters uh. And then there's this whole list
of coincidences that keeps going. They were both shot in
(01:32):
the head, they were both assassinated by Southerners. They were
both succeeded by Southerners. Their vice presidents were Southerners. Both
vice presidents were named Johnson. What are the odds? Yeah,
I remember this being rolled out, perhaps in a history class,
and uh, you know that the list would start about
(01:52):
these coincidences, and I would kind of tune out after
the first one or two. Um. And I guess that
that kind of boils down to the type of p
in the world, Like there there are people out there
who just tune out after the first coincidence or two,
and then there are those who obsess about it and
see this as as something something really crucial and something
really telling about these two men, about the history of
(02:13):
this nation, et cetera. That might be the difference between
this Robert, because I did not tune out. I was
my mind was blown to uh, to borrow from a
popular phrase. Yeah, I I sat there in my desk like, wow,
what are the odds? You know, must be some kind
of ghost spirit controlling this. It just I was amazed.
(02:38):
There two twin souls are basically the same entity, reincarnated
and and and tracked hunted by the same extra dimensional force. Yeah.
Or there was some sort of like cosmic literature teacher
trying to get me to observe parallels between the meaning
of these two men. Yeah, it's another one of course
(02:58):
that comes to mind is the of Thomas Jefferson and
John Adams, two individuals who, of course a very interconnected
in the history of the United States as well, both
instrumental in drafting the Declaration of Independence, which was signed
to July fourth, seventeen seventy six. Both men died on
the same day, July four, eighteen twenty six, exactly fifty
(03:19):
years to the day after the document was ratified. So
that that you know that that kind of hits you like.
I like that one because that one's nice and succinct.
You know, what were the chances? You don't need a list, Yeah,
it's right there. Yeah, I mean they were they were
good friends. So maybe there was you could imagine some
level of synchronicity about, you know, when you're giving up
and sort of handing it over to the reaper. But
(03:42):
but the dates are are kind of compelling there. It
would be even crazier, though, if I found out now
that you played John Adams in a production of seventeen
seventy six. No, but I was in a production of
seven times. Here you go, I played Thomas Jefferson and
been a production of seventeen seventy six. So we're tied
into it too. There's no escaping the black hole of coincidence. Okay,
(04:03):
I've got an even crazier coincidence. No, it's probably not.
This is kind of dumb, but why do so many
action heroes have the initials JB James Bond, Jason Bourne,
Jack Bauer, Jack Burton my favorite? Well, I mean, what
are the chances? Actually, we have no idea, do we? Yeah?
I haven't read any I mean maybe there's some really
(04:24):
deep statistical study on this out there, but uh yeah,
maybe is it? Is? It? On one hand, is just
possibly pure luck. And we only pick up right on
there there being a j B here, a JB there
because we're also not taking into account all the other
j B initials out there, like like does Jim Bean
factor into this, Probably not, and all of the action
(04:45):
heroes that aren't j B s. Yeah, And then to
what extent is it just completely almost subconscious, you know,
because you have an action hero, and and by extension
of action hero, you think of mythological hero and the
symbolic power of the hero and how it resonates through
through our culture and through through our our the way
we view the world, and and perhaps that ends up
(05:05):
informing it. You know, you have James Bond in your mind,
and then you end up creating Jason Bourne and Jack
Bauer in the same way. And I'm just purely spitballing here.
You could perhaps have the mythic hercules in your mind,
and then when you need to create another, you know,
mythically strong hero, perhaps you go with the Hulk. That's
the same kind of consonants. Yeah. We associate sounds with
(05:27):
with ideas certainly. Yeah. Now another crazy one. And I
love this one, uh, in part because it involves Edgar
Allan Poe. Of course, Edgar Allan Poe only wrote one
novel his entire career. You know, mostly known for his
his excellent short stories, but the novel in question published
an eight thirty eight the narrative of author Gordon Pym
of Nantucket. I've never read it, never mean, I never
(05:49):
read it there, but uh, the fiction of this story
is you have a crew of a ship called Grampus.
They wind up adrift with no food or water, and
so first they catch it toward us. They eat it,
but eventually they have to draw straws to see who
winds up has dinner. And uh, an individual named Richard
Parker draws the short straw, so they stab him and
(06:11):
then they eat him. And then they build a house
on the boat so that they can bury him behind
the wall. Yeah, I mean, you gotta play the greatest hits, right,
Here's where it gets crazy. Years later, in four a
yacht named the minion Net leaves England, is headed towards Sydney, Australia,
and it sinks in a storm. Four men wind up
(06:32):
adrift in a lifeboat. They catch a turtle. They eat
it all right, But again you're probably thinking at this point, Okay,
you know turtles, how hard are they to catch? There
are lots of turtles in the world, they're all tasty. Yeah,
and if you're four men in a boat in the
middle of nowhere and you're hungry, you're gonna eat it.
No good deal. But then it turns to cannibalism, and
this too you might think, well, what a four guys
in the middle in the middle of the ocean in
(06:53):
a little boat. They're hungry, They've only had one turtle
to eat. It's kind of inevitable, right, Well, this is
this is crazy. But aboard this vessel, you have a
seventeen year old named Richard Parker, the same name as
the individual they ate in pose novel. This guy falls overboard,
drinks a bunch of seawater to quench his thirst. Uh,
(07:13):
and so he starts going. He starts deteriorating really quickly
here and they side, well, he's he's about to die.
We're gonna have to eat him, and they eat him.
So you have these this fictional account of cannibalism seeming
to inform this real life act of cannibalism years later
and in almost identical circumstances. Yeah, and it's so gruesome
(07:35):
you can really doubt that they staged it to happen
on purpose. Because of the novel. Yeah, Like I can't
imagine them being on the boat and someone saying, look,
I read this book, and uh, there was a guy
in the book named Richard Parker and they ate him in.
Your name's Richard Parker. So I'm not saying we have
to eat you, but come on. Yeah, it's like the
(07:58):
worst school play every exactly Alright. So, uh, in this
we're talking about coincidence, and in this episode we're talking
about coincidence and the science of coincidence, how we perceive
a coincidence. Uh, but let's let's get down to brass tacks.
What exactly is a coincidence? Yeah, and specifically, I think
we should think about what's the difference between a coincidence
(08:21):
and just an improbable event? Um so of standard Oxford Dictionaries,
definition is a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without
apparent causal connection. Okay, So that's sort of playing up
on the like the two different things coinciding, like like
the pim right, like the Gordon Pim example, or like
(08:41):
Jefferson and Adams, you know, dying on the same day.
Another way of putting it is that it's a concurrence
of events that is quote perceived as meaningfully related with
no apparent causal connection, um and and that quotes from
a paper that we're gonna end up talking about later
in this episode. But I think that's something we should highlight,
(09:03):
is that a coincidence has a perceptual element. It's something
that seems to be important to us, like it has
a psychic weight. But you know it, it kind of
comes back to what we're talking about earlier about the
two students in the classroom. One of them is just
enthralled by the Kennedy Lincoln coincidence list and the other is, uh,
(09:23):
it's just tunes out on it. Because that that kind
of comes down to how we can look at coincidence
in the life. You can either say it's just pure dumblock,
is just a matter of statistics, And then there's the
the the view that there's something else going on here,
that there is some sort of connected, connective tissue that
we were just not privy to. And we have seen
(09:44):
some very you know, thoughtful and informed study on both
sides of the issue. Right there have been brilliant people
throughout the years who paid way more attention to coincidences
than we might today. I mean, we all experience coincidences.
I would be shocked if was someone who would say, no,
I've never experienced anything like a really weird concurrence. It
(10:04):
happens every single day. It happened to us we were
talking about while we were researching these podcasts, so like
just strange topics coming up and seemingly unrelated episodes. Yeah,
I mean, of course that kind of gets down to that,
like the power of coincidence. Coincidence can can kill you,
Coincidence can can make you rich. Coincidence can just be
this seemingly meaningless, little connective tissue between two things. Um,
(10:28):
and it's a trapped It's so easy to fall into,
especially given how important causation and determination are in human culture. Right,
And we'll get more into that later, but I mean,
you you almost can't fault an individual for for thinking
about these coincidences in terms of some sort of connection. Now,
and you see it at every level. I mean, what
is the meat cute and every romantic comedy, it's always
(10:51):
some kind of coincidence that brings people together. And on
the opposite end, you've got famous scientists who have tried
to investigate, you know, what's the meaning of coincidences. I
think one great example is the Austrian biologists Paul Camera.
Uh you know, if if you ever have that feeling like, wow,
I think everything's connected, he did too. So Paul Camera
(11:14):
lived from eighteen eighty to nineteen twenty six and he
was a proponent of Lamarckian evolution. Have you ever I'm
sure you're familiar with this, the one to just give
everyone a quick reminder, the idea that say giraffes, their
next grow long because they're reaching for those top those
top leaves, and so it's like one generation informing the next. Yeah.
So normally, now what we believe is min Dalian genetics.
(11:37):
You know, you inherit, you inherit your genetic traits from
your parents germ cells, and you pass those same genetic
traits onto your kids. And unless you have a certain mutation,
that can be basically random. But the Lamarchian ideas where
that you could you know, maybe if you work out
a lot or something, your kids will be born with
bigger muscles or something will strain your neck trying to
(11:57):
reach something in this life, and in the next life,
your kids will have longer necks by virtue of your
your straining. Yeah, and so in one famous experiment, Camera
claimed to have caused male specimens of a of an
animal called the midwife toad to grow these black forearm
paths that some species of male toads have, and that
(12:17):
they used them to hold onto females during mating. Unfortunately,
some other scientists in the field examined Camera specimens and
found that the black pads on his toads had been
injected with artificial inc and so Camera denied responsibility for that.
And I guess nobody really knows whose fault that was.
But the accusation here would be that he cheated, right,
(12:40):
which is important because we'll come back to cheating. Right.
But Camera wasn't only interested in toads and inheritance. He
was also interested in coincidences, like he kept a diary
of daily coincidences. And just one example against it in
a in a paper that we're going to bring up
in a bit, his brother in law tells him that
he attended to concert and held both the ticket for
(13:02):
seat number nine and the coach check ticket numbered nine. WHOA, yeah, yeah,
But anyway, that itself doesn't seem all that interesting until
you start making lists which Camera did, and he added
them up over time. And I have to admit, when
you add it's it's kind of like the Lincoln Kennedy thing.
(13:25):
The first one isn't all that interesting until you start
adding them together, and then it really gets your attention.
There's this cumulative effect of this, like snowballing kind of attention,
getting significance of coincidences that pile up on each other.
So Camera organized these thoughts into a hypothesis he called
the law of seriality, uh. And he posited basically this
(13:47):
underlying force in reality that was a quote world mosaic
or cosmic kaleidoscope that brings like objects and events together.
So almost a kind of of emergent order, uh in
the chaos yet show which I could buy into it.
And we see in emergences as a major topic in
(14:08):
understanding and intelligence, evolution, etcetera. So why not coincidence? Sure?
But of course Camera wasn't the only scientist who has
been interested in coincidences and who has attributed some significant
role in the universe to them. Carl Young. Carl Young
loved coincidences. Carl So. Carl Young was a Swiss psychiatrist.
(14:32):
You've probably heard of him. As sort of like a
he's one of the big names in psychology and psychiatry,
following Freud. You know, it's like the Mantle, I think
union and the big big tents. But Young was was
very much into sort of interesting borderline magical esoteric ideas.
So he loved the paranormal. He was interested in meaningful
(14:56):
connections and mystical truths, eesp astrology, psychokinesis, all kinds of
stuff like that, and so naturally he was really interested
in coincidences. And so he wrote a book called Synchronicity
and a Causal Connecting Principle. And this book was actually,
(15:17):
uh it was I think extracted from a larger volume
of his work and eventually published on its own. But
I read this book when I was in college, and
I remember thinking, at the time, yet again playing up
on my I guess I'm susceptible to this kind of thing.
I was like, I wonder if he's onto something here.
It seemed really interesting. So what kind of coincidences did
(15:38):
Young notice? Well, he gives one example. This is the
one that's always cited. It's it's it's his favorite example.
It's the Golden Scaub. So in a nineteen fifty one.
I believe it was essay on synchronicity. Young told the
story that he had been seeing a female patient for psychoanalysis,
and Young believed basically that she was languishing because she
(16:01):
was in sort of a prison of rationality. She was
just too rational. She she wouldn't quote open up to
the human side of life. For Young, I think this
had a decidedly sort of supernatural tinge to it. And um,
he wanted to uh and this is from a particular
translation quote sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding.
(16:24):
So one day she was in psychoanalysis telling him about
a dream she'd had where someone gave her a golden
scar rub. And Young claims at that very moment, an
insect started knocking against the window of the office where
they were, and he opened the window and he caught
the insect and it was a beatle. It was a
(16:45):
scarub type of beetle. And he said it was like
a green color, but in the right light it reflected
the light and looked gold. And then he presented it
to her in this moment of you know, one of
those there are more things in heaven and Earth than
dreamt of in your fullosophy kind of moments, and and
he hoped that this helped shatter her rationalism. And so
(17:07):
I don't know if that happened to me. If I
had just been talking about a beetle and then a
beatle started knocking against the window, I'd probably think that
was interesting. But I don't know if I designed any
meaning to it. Yeah, it doesn't really smack of just
Heaven sent beetle sent to you know, open up my
mind and make me more you know, in love with life,
(17:30):
because they're probably just a lot of beetles flying around
out of there. Sure, but Young commented that when coincidences
like these accumulate, it's what we were talking about earlier.
The more of them happened, the more we take note
of them, uh, and with good reason, because it's harder
to explain them away by random chance. The more they accumulate,
you fill up that entire diary with them, right. Yeah,
(17:51):
it has weight to it exactly. So Young came up
with this term synchronicity to describe the a causal connecting
principle that links meaningfully significant events that couldn't be connected
by physical causes. So he's not saying that there's like
a there's like a you know, a ghost that put
the beetle there, because that would be in some way causal. Instead,
(18:14):
he's saying there's another force in the universe other than causality.
It sort of runs parallel to causality that connects events
and and creates links of significance. But it's not physics, Okay,
Like I kind of in making sense of it in
my own head, I thought of it in terms of
this room or recording in in which case we have
(18:35):
wires that are running outside of the walls, then running
across the floor and under the table, and then there
are the wires within the wall that we cannot see.
And so the wires that are running outside of the
walls are are kind of like causality. We can we
can see them. We're in causality. We've our brain spends
a lot of time making sense of cause and effect.
But then there's this idea that there might be some
(18:56):
other force at work within the walls. We can't see it,
we're not we're not privy to it. It's exact in
an ins and outs, but it's it's making things interconnected.
It's it's these connections are popping up throughout our life,
throughout the times game. Yeah, causality connects events in the
physical realm, and according to Young, synchronicity would connect events
(19:17):
in sort of like the psychic meaningfulness realcom that it
was this force it makes things have meaning and shows
us meaning by bringing unlikely events together. Okay, so this
would be kind of like in um, you seen Interstellar? Yes, okay,
so there's the whole bit in there about love. Is
this uh, this connecting force like that seems to line
(19:39):
up rather closely with this idea of synchronicity. Yeah, I
think that makes sense. So coincidences obviously have this power
over us. They captivate us, they seem significance. They make
us wonder if there is some kind of magical or
super psychic force at work. And sometimes it can be
hard to tell because we don't know how to analyze coincidences.
(20:02):
You know, like there when something happens, like you get
a number nine from the coach check and then you're
in seat number nine. There's really no reason to ask
why something like that happened, but you can perhaps ask,
wait a minute, did anything significant actually happen? Indeed, now
(20:23):
we've talked about the the sort of supernatural end of
the pool, the idea that there is some sort of
of intrinsic synchronicity connecting these these events. And now we're
gonna we're gonna look at a more critical and more
skeptical side of the pool. Right, So, several times so
far in this podcast we've referred ahead to a paper,
and this is sort of a classic paper in statistics
(20:45):
and mathematical analysis of coincidences, and it's called Methods for
Studying Coincidences. It was published by the Journal of the
American Statistical Association in December nineteen nine. I think it
had been given at a been given as a presentation
in a couple of years before. But it's by Percy
Diaconis and Frederick Moss Stellar, and they were I believe,
(21:08):
Harvard mathematicians, and Diaconis and moss Stellar offer four main
categories of explanation for seeming examples of synchronicity. You know,
they refer to camera, they refer to young and they say,
what what do we make of these events? And and
how can we tell if something is actually going on
that's worth noting. So the first of the options is
(21:30):
that there is an actual causal link. It's not a coincidence,
because there's a cause that to seemingly disparate events happen together. Uh.
The second one is psychology. It's something about the way
our brains work, the fact that we're noticing what seemed
to be coincidences, and will definitely have more on that later.
Another point is what they call the multiplicity of end points,
(21:54):
and this is going to be about how how we
count something as a hit. And then the last one
that they site is called the law of truly large numbers,
and that's going to be about statistical context. So I
think we should go back and look at causes first.
So when something happens that's seemingly just a huge coincidence,
(22:16):
you should always consider the fact that there might be
a cause that's more obvious than you realize. Yeah, this
would of course be the birthday problem, right, which is
a problem that that people will encounter just everywhere, right
and in your workplace, at school, et cetera. I mean
we can encounter it right here in the podcast Chamber
Joe Win your Birthday July six, Minds October six, whoa synchronicity?
(22:39):
Are you serious? I'm serious? Were sixteen sixteen. Okay, what
happened when you were sixteen? What city were you in? Oh, Paris, Tennessee.
I was in Tennessee too when I was sorry, I
was in fatal Tennessee. But still Tennessee, Tennessee. Man, something
weird is going on. Yeah, or but but worth noting
here is notice how we're we're singling in on the hits.
(22:59):
We totally missed the same day birthday by by many months,
but we're counting as a hit because we both had sixteen. Yeah,
so here's the birthday problem. Let's say you're in a
subway car and you're riding around with some random strangers,
and because you are extremely rude, you start getting people's attention,
getting them to take their headphones off, and you you
(23:20):
ask the strangers in the car all of their birthdays.
That's not rude, that's just good manners. I mean, it's
a it's a nice breaker. Okay, Yeah, you might want
to know if today's their birthday, and you should offer
them this cake that you found on the ground. Exactly. Yeah,
So how many people would you have to ask before
It's more likely than not that you'd find two people
(23:41):
with the same exact birthday. Well, let's see three sixty
five days in a year. Uh, so you'd think, well,
maybe I need a talk to three d sixty five people, right,
or maybe twice that. Yeah, I mean I'm not good
at doing math like that immediately, but that's where I
would have gone the first place in my head. Okay,
it's got to be like one in three sixty five
(24:01):
times two or something like that. But no, the answer
is twenty three. Okay, But we're not going to take
the time to explain all the math. You can go
look that up online. It is well documented. Uh, this
is a classic problem. If you ask twenty three people
in a room, in a train car, whatever, you have
reached the fifty fifty odds that two of them will
(24:22):
have the same birthday. And one of the key points
here is that you're not starting with the specified birthday.
You're not saying how many people do I have to
ask before I find somebody with my birthday? You're just
trying to find one match, right, Yeah, in this group
of if you ask twenty three people, odds are two
of them will have the same birthday. What if you
(24:43):
want to find three people with the same birthday, that's
got to be astronomical, right I would think so. I
mean you think that would just multiply it. Yeah. No, Actually,
if your train car can hold people, chances are in
your favor you reach odds again if you ask a
D eight. So that just shows that the statistical probability
(25:03):
of in this case, this is a birthday match occurring,
he's actually uh, far greater than we we we may
get a credit at the surface. Yeah, I think the
point is that we are often surprised by events that
are not statistically unlikely at all, Like they just don't
match our intuitions. Basically, we we have exaggerated intuitions for
(25:28):
how unlikely some things are, especially it turns out particular
types of things, for example, things that happened to us.
This is a funny thing. We're we're way more surprised
about coincidences that happened to us than coincidences that happened
to other people. Oh yeah, because we're all the center
of our own stories, right, we're going to be We're
more interesting, We're more invested in this one. Um. I
(25:50):
mean just to come back to back to the statistical possibilities,
I mean, just thinking back to how we both were
like whoa sixteen whoa Tennessee. But when you really break
it down, like the chances of us scoring the same day,
I mean the same date within a month, that's what
one and thirty one chance for the most part, and
Tennessee what we could say, Well, we're both living and
(26:10):
working in Atlanta, so there's probably a reasonable chance that
we would come from a southern state, of which there
are I mean, but not that many. There's very many
literature majors from Tennessee end up in Atlanta. That's not unusual, yea. Um,
but so hey, there could be another cause though. So
(26:30):
that's just the apparent cause. The cause that's um readily available,
you just haven't looked at the math. There could also
be a hidden cause. When something appears to be a coincidence,
it's not actually a coincidence because there's an actual causal
link that you don't know about. Um. The classic example
of this would be cheating and gambling. Yes, this is
(26:53):
where a person rolls a dice, right, Yeah, So so
you roll a pair of dice, you know, a hundred
times in a row. And let's say you you roll
a seven nineties six out of those hundred times. Yeah,
like the more the more every time you roll when
you get the same number he gets, that gets even
more astronomical. That have happened? How could that possibly have happened? Well,
(27:15):
obviously if there's a hidden cause, which is the dice
are loaded so that they will turn up a seven
pretty much every time. So there you go. You don't
have to be a god to do it. You just
have to be a cheater with with a pair of
loaded diet exactly. And another example comes to mind. This
was going back to Carl Young. Carl Young was associated
with the physicist of Wolfgang Polly, and Paully was famous
(27:38):
for coming up with the Poully exclusion principle, which is
important in quantum mechanics. I don't remember exactly what it
does right now, but it's something that's right. But yeah,
he um. So he was a known physicist and it
did really important work. But Paul, I think, was also
sort of interested in the you know, strange synchronicity type ideas,
(28:00):
and Polly, in addition to the Polly principle, which is
an actual principle of science, was known for the Polly effect,
which is a more anecdotal effect. But the story goes
like this everywhere Wolfgang Polly went, machines broke. Ah. This
is the classic watch stopper scenario. Yeah, so he would
show up in a lab somewhere to test out some
(28:22):
equipment and what do you know, the equipment and working today.
Can't figure it out, And then he'd leave the lab
and suddenly it'd start working again. Uh. We don't know
how many of these stories are actually true, but this
is a popular anecdotal legend, and we'll just accept that
it's true for the purpose of the conversation that everywhere
he went it seemed like stuff wouldn't work. In fact,
there was even one anecdote I read about where some
(28:46):
people were working in a lab and their equipment stopped working,
and they joked, is you know Wolf going here? Is
as he'd come down the hall. Uh. And then later
they found out that he just happened to have been
changing trains in that city on that day at the
time that their equipment malfunction. He has some long reaching effects.
(29:07):
So whether or not that's true, right, let's go ahead
and settle now on. But but if it were true,
you could perhaps look for actual hidden causes. It might
not be a synchronistic coincidence that you know that the universe,
the the Unice, the Unice Mundi is trying to tell
(29:27):
Wolfgung Polly something about his relationship with machines or something.
It could be perhaps that Polly had a habit of
scuffing around his office carpet before heading into the lab,
and that led him to discharge a lot of static
electricity which could break some really delicate instruments. Or Polly
is just really clumsy. Yeah, And of course it's also
not taken to account all the machines that are not
(29:48):
breaking in Polly's life, right, it's literally everything he touches.
Does it just fall apart and rust, you know, before
his very eyes? Or is it just oh this thing broke?
How could that happen? How get a machine and this
little device made by human? How could this possibly stop working?
You know? So you end up that you end up
honing in on those instances where it doesn't work, right.
(30:11):
And it's also i think probably not communicating the reality
about lab equipment, which is that it probably breaks all
the time, and there's a lot of it. Any lab
is going to have a lot of equipment, and all
of it has a half life, and and and a
death point. Yeah. Um so, so yeah, that's the idea
of the hidden cause. And then, of course those are
just some hypothetical examples we're offering. The true hidden cause
(30:34):
would be the one we haven't even thought of, you know,
the cause that's an actual physical causal link that's causing
things to malfunction in police presence, but we can't even
guess what it is it might be there. Yeah, so
I think we should move on to another one of
the points that Diaconis and Mostell are making their paper,
which is the quote multiplicity of end points or the
(30:57):
sort of like the cost of close point. Yeah, because
if we have already illustrated close counts and coincidence, Like
when we're talking about birthdays, we were looking for the
same day in the same month, but we settled for sixteen.
You know, we were looking for the same Tennessee town
and oh my god, we accidentally went to the same
high school and didn't realize it. But we'll settle for
just the same state. And that's what we're doing. We're
(31:20):
we're constantly looking for these these little coins as to
line up, and we'll settle for something that's close. And
if you settle for close the statistical possibilities just blow up,
such as with the birthday situation. Um, if you want
to uh to, uh to, if you want to hit
a near birthday match with a group of people, so
make sure you're back on the back in the train
(31:41):
car and you're willing to to settle for all right,
let's see who on this train car has a birthday
within a day of each other. You know, we'll settle
for a close match. Then you only seven people are
needed for that chance. So yeah, so so coming down
from from a perfect match to a near match just
opens it up tremendously. And then, of course, when you
(32:04):
think about the accumulation effect that we were talking about earlier,
it makes it much easier if you are accumulating close matches.
You keep building up close matches, and over time they
start to look significant because they just turned into hits
in your memory. You know, you don't remember, well, that
was kind of close. You remember there's a hit, and
(32:26):
then another hit, and then another hit, and some of
these might be actual hits, some of these might be
close hits, but they all kind of blend together. Yeah,
this brings to mind like cold readings and uh, you know,
and the whole psychic game right where you throw out,
oh i'm i'm I think there's somebody named Joe in
your life, and you know I have an uncle Joseph.
There you go, close becomes a perfect match and then
(32:48):
in the blink of an eye, and then that is
how you reckon your memory. Okay. Then, also when studying coincidences,
that this is another category of of Diaconis and Mustellar.
There's the law of truly large numbers. And this is
a point about context. So let's say somebody encounters of
an event that is truly incredibly unlikely for a person
(33:08):
to experience. So it's not one of those things with
a hidden cause. It's not one of those things where
the odds are actually, you know, much more probable than
you realize. It's truly unlikely. You still have to consider context.
You have to consider this event against the vast number
of uncounted dice rolls of human experience that it is
(33:29):
nestled in. So here's an analogy. Let's say you're talking
to a professional poker player and she tells you one
time she was playing five card poker and she was
dealt a royal flush on the opening bet. Of a
hand then to trade any cards. She just got a
royal flush. Now, the odds of being dealta royal flush
are about one in six fifty thousand. I think it's
(33:50):
like sixty nine thousand or something like that, about one
and six. But you wouldn't say to this poker player, oh,
you must be lying or like you know, or you
must have been cheating in this game, because you understand
that the anecdote is in context. If she's a professional
poker player, depending on how long she's playing, she might
have been dealt hundreds of thousands of hands in her life.
(34:13):
And on top of that, she's one player out of many,
and maybe not everybody has had that experience. So when
considered in context, really improbable events start looking like, oh, okay, well, yeah,
this is the one chance in however many. Yeah, this
is kind of the you know, it's bound to happen
eventually clause Right, Like ive enough people are trying a
given thing, it's gonna line up. The monkeys are going
(34:35):
to compose the complete works of Shakespeare with thin enough time. Yeah.
So there are improbable events, but there are just a
lot of chances to achieve them. There are seven point
three billion people on Earth today and according to the
Population Reference Bureau, there is an estimated a hundred and
eight billion people who have ever lived. So considering that
if there's an event that has a one in a
(34:57):
million chance per year of occurring in somebody's life, let's
say it's I don't know what the actual chance of
this is, but having a baseball bat thrown over a
wall and it hits you on the head or something, Uh,
it should still happen to seventy three hundred people every year,
just given the population of the Earth, that that is
the probability. If there's a one in ten billion chance
(35:21):
of something ever occurring in a human's life, it should
still have happened to at least ten people in human history.
And it it kind of comes back around to the
idea of synchronicity, the union idea, because even though we're
we're talking about about real numbers and uh, and just
our sort of our inability to really make statistical sense
of the actual odds of things, uh, those actual odds
(35:45):
of the computation of those odds, they kind of exist
within the wall. They kind of exist outside of our
perception and our understanding of life in the small sense
in the individual sense. So in a way, uh, the
synchronoy city lines up well with with it with the
statistical likelihood of things happening. We're just we're just not
(36:07):
privy to it. Yeah. I think that connects back to
the fact that there is a personal significance for us,
even if there is not a statistical significance. Again, it's
not surprising that somebody won the lottery. It would be
really surprising if you won the lottery. That's not actually
objectively surprising, it's just surprising to you, which of course
brings us to psychology. Yeah, and we save this for
(36:29):
last because I think this might be the most significant
of all of these factors. And this is the fact
that sometimes it's not even the numbers. Sometimes it's not
even the data. It's just that we are wired to
bow at the altar of coincidence. It's how our brains work. Indeed,
I mean, that's just how we survive. That's how we
(36:50):
make sense of the stimuli in our environment, that's how
we form our memories, and that's how we plan for
the future. Yeah, So let's look at some psychological phenomenon
that that are sort of related to our tendency to
take note of coincidences and maybe a tribute to them
more magical significance than they might actually have. Uh, how
about you even heard of the batter main Hoff phenomenon. Yeah,
(37:13):
this is the frequency illusions. This is I guess the
famous example of this would be you just learn a
new word, you know, you either encounter in a book
and he's like, WHOA, I don't know that when you
look it up and your rather taken with it, and
then it seems to pop up everywhere you just learned
about it, and it's all around you. So it's like
discovering a flower exists for the first time you've never
(37:35):
seen before, and then suddenly it seems to be growing
in every pot across town. Yeah. Yeah, And so the
weird name actually comes from a West German terrorist organization,
doesn't have anything to do with them. Really. I read
that the origin of this was that the phenomenon supposedly
got its name because a message board user somewhere online
told the story of encountering information about the bad or
(37:58):
mine Hoff gang and then just suddenly seeing that again
within like twenty four hours. Um, and I'm sure this
has happened to you. It's happened to me all the time.
This actually happened to me while I was researching these
podcasts were recording today. So in the other podcast we're
recording today, Uh, there's a mention of Prince Cheep, a
island off of the west coast of Africa, and I
(38:20):
had when I when I got to them in the research,
I realized I had just been reading about that island
for the first time, like less than twenty four hours before,
for completely unrelated reason, not related to astronomy or anything. No,
but see, Yeah, you see those kind of weird littal
coincidences pop up, yeah all the time, And uh, I've
often found that to be the case too, seemingly unrelated episodes,
(38:43):
but there'll be some little thread that connects them. Um.
You know. Another example the frequency illusion that I often
see is I'll I'll come across like a new concept
or a concept I wasn't that familiar with, and I'll
do a deep dive in in it for a podcast
podcast such as h super Normal Stimuli was a big one,
and after I researched it, I was just I was
just seeing it everywhere like it it kind of a
(39:05):
topic like that of you know sufficient depth. It kind
of changes the way you look at the world and
then you see reflections of it just all around you. Yeah,
and uh and and so it can be something as
simple as a as a word. It can be something
that's you know, a particular place, a particular you know,
a particular band, a particular work of a literature, or
(39:26):
it can be uh, you know, a philosophical mindset suddenly
because you're aware of it, you're hyper aware of it,
you're excited about it, You're going to see it in
the rest of the world. Yeah, um, yeah, And there
there could be lots of reasons. One could be that
hidden causal connection. You know, there are actually reasons that
you're investigating similar stories around the same time or reading
(39:48):
similar material that might use a new and unfamiliar word
around the same time, because you have interests and drives
that are sort of unified by time. Uh. Also, the
authors of the paper we were talking about earlier, have
they have their own sort of mathematical analysis of this,
don't they? And they sort of explain how it's not
that unusual that you should, you know, at a certain point,
(40:09):
after acquiring a word for the first time, see it again. Yeah,
that's just sort of expected to happen. Yeah, they're just there.
There's a finite number of words, so you're going to
see them again. Um. And of course this plays into apophenia. Uh.
This is uh. This is a term comes to us
from German scientists Claus Konrad, who coined apophenia from the
(40:31):
Greek appo away and uh uh and Finian to show
in n He was studying acute schizophrenia, during which connections
and meanings seem to web together around unrelated details. So
this is the basic idea here is we're always looking
for patterns and signals from our environment. I mean, that's
how we think, that's how we live, that's how we survive,
(40:52):
particularly when it comes to assessing threats. Okay, um, And
so we have we often have this tendency to perceive
patterns and connections in random or meaningless data. Um. For instance. Uh.
One example that comes to mind here is you have
some sort of silly police drama. On right, they're looking
at a map of the city and they have little
pins showing where the crimes are at. And then what
(41:15):
do they see. They see like a pentagram rights some
sort of order. And of course in the show. It
always makes sense, right, Like the the Satanic Killer actually
is trying to kill people so that his crimes look
like a pentagram in a map. But you can see
that pentagram without any planning at all or some other symbol. Yeah,
if you want to see that pentagram in the planning,
you can see that pentagram in the planning of just
about anything. Um. But what this basically breaks down to
(41:38):
is a false positive in statistics, a type one error
in cognition. And this is something that plays into religion, gambling,
conspiracy theory, and just are and also our need to
see faces everywhere. Right, it's the reason we see uh,
figures in the constellations in the sky, right. I mean
i'd say very few people these days actually think that
(41:59):
the stars were arranged to look like a figure from
Greek myth. Yeah, because you think whoever was doing it
would do a better job. I mean, yeah, it's it's
not very good. It's kind of a crappy portrait, but
you know people saw it. Yeah, yeah, they saw the
pattern and we just can't help but see. Patterns were
pattern recognition engines, as we've mentioned before here. And there's
(42:21):
the thing is there's an evolutionary advantage for us pattern
recognition apes in making that type one air because essentially
you have you have you have a type one air
and you have a type two right false positive, false negative.
And the classic example is that of you know, rustling
in the bushes on the on the prehistoric savannah, right,
because there's a possibility that a big cat is about
(42:44):
to spring out of those rustling bush bushes and kill us.
Or it could be the statistical noise of wind. Exactly.
A false positive just gets you hot and bothered over
nothing and maybe a good laugh. I thought it was
a tiger and it was just wind. But a false
negative that gets you killed. Yeah, so obvious. There's obviously
a selection pressure to favor false positives. Yeah, exactly. So,
(43:07):
I mean, so that just plays into how we think
and how we behave as humans and are overwhelming tendency
to see the pattern when there isn't one, to see
the connective tissue between events, in this case, when there
isn't any right. So yeah, and so in that way
a coincidence can represent a pattern to us, we start
thinking what does it mean? Yeah, I mean, and there's
(43:27):
likely a connection between apophenia and creativity This is a
theory that was put put forth by Swiss neurologist Peter
Bruger Uh in a two thousand one book, Hauntings and
Poulter Guy's Multi Disiplinary Perspectives. And he was studying apophenian
patients suffering from psychotic episodes that were beginning to find
spontaneous meaning and random aspects of their life. And his
(43:47):
research revealed that high levels of dopamine disposes his patients
to find meetings, patterns, significance where there was there was none.
So creativity apophenia, Uh, you know, it's what is creativity.
But ultimately, you know, finding new patterns, new connections, new
ways to arrange existing ideas and motifs uh into something new,
(44:09):
right of course, Yeah, I mean we often see that
as sort of the core of the creative principle. It's
you know, understanding like, oh, this is connected to this
other thing. Very often the connections you see between events
or objects or ideas and say a literature class or
something like that, are they are still psychic phenomenon. It's
(44:31):
something that we are putting together out of our need
defined meaning, that's right, and a lot of times that
meaning that we need to find. You know, we we
already have our our minds made up about what that
meaning is. This brings us to confirmation bias, which of
course is always a big one. This, of course is
the idea that we have a tendency to search for
or interpret information in a way that confirms your preconceptions
(44:55):
about life, about about basically anything, which leads to statistical
errors that cloud your decision and problem decision making a
problem solving ability. Yeah, so this would come into play
if say you are already looking for a pattern of coincidences,
say you've had to like to sort of synchronous strange
events happen in one day, you're looking for a third
(45:18):
and that's going to bias the way that you sample data.
It's probably going to make you look for things that
are sort of a close hit is something you might
have ignored otherwise to confirm your pattern hypothesis that there's
gonna be something in line with this second thing. You know,
it's the same like people dye in threes ideas just
thinking of that. Yeah, like you, if you're lucky, you'll
(45:40):
get like to a list celebrities dying at the same time.
But then often like that third one has to be
like a radio star for the days. You know, it's
something that doesn't really match up, but you'll take it.
It's totally fleets the prophecy exactly right. It's confirmation bias.
You're you're bringing it in because you've got to make
it fit the pattern. Yeah, it's kind of like when
you listen to an episode of This American Life and
(46:02):
like the they have the theme for the show, and
like the intro hits the theme, the second segment really
hits the theme. The third segment and the second third segment,
you know they mostly hit this theme, and that last
one you're kind of like, I don't know close enough,
close enough to close out the show, but you're really
kind of strayed from the overall theme. Um. But then
that's pretty much how we approach life in general, whether
(46:24):
you're talking about belief in UFOs, ancient Egyptians and alien tech, Bigfoot,
or or you know, office conspiracies or whatever it happens
to be. If you're looking for something to be true, uh,
you can find it. That So it plays into scientific analysis.
You have a you know, a theory you want and
you want to see it proven out, and you subconsciously
(46:45):
scow your the results of the experimentation in your favor. Uh,
you want to love that new movie that just hit
the theaters, so you wind up looking for reasons to
love it and focusing more on that and being perhaps
a little less critical than you normally will. And then,
of course there's a racial aspect too, right you You
if you happen to distrust members of another racial group,
you wind up focusing on the evidence that supports your
(47:07):
existing distrust rather than evidence that challenges it. Oh. Yeah,
people are definitely likely to oversample stuff that confirms their
bigotry or biases. So yeah, if if you have a
preconceived stereotype, you're looking to make things fit evidence that
doesn't fit it, you just kind of like, yeah, that's noise,
it doesn't matter. Yeah, I mean, for the most part,
you're kind of maintaining the castle of you know, fortress
(47:30):
sanity and fortress worldview and uh and and so you
want to to focus as much on the stuff that
keeps the walls up as possible. Yeah. Of course this
all works perfectly because post addiction is largely a result
of the brain's task of continually integrating sensory stimuli and
reconciling conflicting information into a unified vision of reality, a
(47:52):
unified story again in which we are the central character. Yeah.
I mean that's just simply how our memory. Yeah, I
mean you always see the the pattern of clue is
left by the mystery writer once you've had the ending revealed.
You might not notice it while you're going through the
novel to the first time. So there you have it. Coincidence. Um.
We we've kind of hit some of the the more
(48:15):
you know, fringey ideas of what could be happening with
this perceived synchronicity in life and what is actually going
on when it comes to the statistics of the world
around us and the way we perceive our world. Yeah.
So one of the authors of that paper we talked
about earlier, Percy Diaconis, he had this quote that I
saw in an interview or said, probability isn't a fact
(48:37):
about the world, it's a fact about the observers and knowledge.
And I think that's number one that seems very true,
but also it's um, it's a good way of informing
this discussion we've had about what coincidence means when you
actually examine probability and statistics. Very often, the real magic
is happening inside our heads, in our in our quest
(48:58):
to construct meaning in sort of are are actually the
great links that we go through mentally to weave events
together and produce tapestries of significance in our lives. So
think about that the next time you know, some of
these little coincidences pop up in your life and you
start drawing those imaginary lines in the in the world
(49:18):
of synchronicity. Hey. In the meantime, if you want more
episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, if you want
to read blog posts, you want to see videos, you
want links out of social media accounts, you should head
on over to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's the mothership, and on the landing page for this
episode will make sure to include links to related content
as well as outside content of note, And if you
(49:41):
want to send us an example of some crazy coincidence
in your own life, you can send it to blow
the mind at how stuff works dot com. For more
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