May 31, 2016 • 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 (00:02):
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. And
Robert and I are going to be unavailable to record
a regular podcast this week because we're both going to
(00:24):
be recovering from some rather strange cranial surgery that involves
the expansion of the mind. Uh, new sences, new vistas.
So we're gonna be going to a happy place. But
in the meantime, we thought we'd take you back to
an old favorite. Yeah, this is our episode on the
science of coincidence. It's it's one that we really enjoyed
(00:45):
putting together. I think it's definitely an evergreen episode that
tests us, you know, it stands the test of time.
I think I recorded this one before I was actually
a host on the show. I was doing a guest episode.
This is one of the first ones I ever Did's right,
that's right. Yeah, So it's it's a strong one and
if you've heard it before, then I think it's a
perfect one to re experience. And if you are a
(01:05):
newer listener to the show, then hey, listen to it
for the first time. So without further ado, let's jump
into the repeat. So I've got one for you. Tell
me if you've heard this one before. Lincoln and Kennedy. Yes,
you know this. I was first exposed to this in
(01:26):
middle school when a teacher of mine get gave us
a list of 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 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
(01:49):
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 the head, they were both assassinated by Southerners.
They were both succeeded by Southerners. Their vice presidents were Southerners.
(02:10):
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
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 people
in the world, like they're there are people out there
(02:31):
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
this nation, et cetera. That might be the difference between us, Robert,
because I did not tune out. I was my mind
was blown to uh, to borrow from a popular phrase. Yeah,
(02:54):
I I sat there in my desk like, wow, what
are the odds? You know, must to be some kind
of ghost spirit controlling this. It just I was amazed
that there are two twin souls are basically the same
entity reincarnated and and and tracked hunted by the same
(03:15):
extra dimensional force. Yeah. Or there 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 that comes to mind is
the death of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, two individuals who,
of course very interconnected in the history of the United
(03:35):
States as well. Sure, both instrumental drafting the Declaration of Independence,
which was signed to July four, seventy six. Both men
died on the same day, July four, eight twenty six,
exactly fifty 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
(03:56):
and succinct. You know, what were the chances? You don't
need a list, 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 but the dates are kind of compelling there.
It would be even crazier, though, if I found out
(04:16):
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
in a been a production of seventeen seventy six. So
we're tied into it too. There's no escaping the black
hole of coincidence. Okay, I've got an even crazier coincidence. No,
it's probably not. This is kind of dumb, but why
(04:37):
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
deep statistical study on this out there, but uh yeah,
(04:59):
maybe it is it that, on one hand, is just
possibly pure luck. And we only pick up right on
there there being a JB here, JB there, because we're
also not taking into account all the other j B
initials out there, like like does Jim being factor into this?
Probably not, and all of the action heroes that aren't
j B s. Yeah, And then to what extent is
it just completely almost subconscious? You know, because you have
(05:21):
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 uh, through our
culture and through through our our the way we view
the world, and and perhaps that ends up informing it.
You 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
(05:43):
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. The same
kind of consonants. Yeah, we associate sounds with with ideas, certainly. Yeah,
now another crazy one. And I love this one in
part because it involves Edgar Allan Poe. Of course, Edgar
(06:05):
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 eighteen thirty eight the narrative
of author Gordon Pym of Nantucket. I've never read it,
never mean, I never read any there. But the fiction
of this story is you have a crew of a
ship called Grampus. They wind up adrift with no food
(06:26):
or water, and so first they catch a towrartoise. They
eat it, but eventually they have to draw straws to
see who winds up as a dinner and uh an
individual named Richard Parker draws the short straw, so they
stab him and 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
(06:47):
play the greatest hits, right, here's where he gets crazy.
Years later, in eighteen eighty four, a yacht named the
minion Net leaves England, is headed towards Sydney, Australia, and
it sinks in a storm. Four men wind up adrift
in a lifeboat. They catch a turtle. They eat it
all right, But again you're probably thinking at this point, Okay,
(07:08):
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
a little boat. They're hungry, They've only had one turtle
to eat. It's kind of inevitable, right, Well, this is
(07:29):
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.
And so he starts going, he starts deteriorating really quickly
here and they side, well, he's he's about to die.
(07:50):
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
you can really doubt that they staged it to happen
on purpose because of the novel. Yeah, Like I can't
(08:11):
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 is Richard Parker. So I'm not saying
we have to eat you, but come on. Yeah, it's
like the worst school play ever exactly. Alright. So in
(08:33):
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 and just an improbable event um So of
(08:54):
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 Jefferson and Adams, you know, dying on the
same day. Another way of putting it is that it's
(09:17):
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, is that a coincidence has a perceptual element.
It's something that seems to be important to us, like
(09:40):
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, it's just tunes out on it.
Because that that kind of comes down to how we
can look at coincidence in life. You can either say
(10:00):
was just pure dumblock. It 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 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
(10:23):
attention to coincidences than we might today. I mean, we
all experience coincidences. I would be shocked if there was
someone who would say, no, I've never experienced anything like
a really weird concurrence. It happens every single day. It
happened to us we were talking about while we were
researching these podcasts, like just strange topics coming up and
seemingly unrelated episodes. Yeah, I mean, of course, that kind
(10:46):
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, and it's 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
(11:06):
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 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,
(11:28):
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 lived from
eighteen eighty to nineteen twenty six and he was a
proponent of Lamarckian evolution. Have you ever, I'm sure you're
(11:50):
familiar with this. This is the the one that, just
to give everyone a quick reminder, the idea that say, giraffes,
their next grow long because they're reaching for those top
those top leads, and so it's like one generation informing
the next. Yeah. So normally, now what we believe is
min Dalian genetics. You know, you inherit, you inherit your
genetic traits from your parents germ cells, and you pass
(12:12):
those same genetic traits onto your kids. And unless you
have a certain mutation, that can be basically random. But yeah,
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. You strain your
neck trying to reach something in this life, and in
the next life, your kids will have longer necks by
virtue of your straining. Yeah. And so in one famous experiment,
(12:35):
Camera claimed to have caused male specimens of a of
an animal called the midwife toad to grow these black
forearm pads that some species of male toads have, and
that 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
(12:57):
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, 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
(13:20):
daily coincidences. And just one example against id 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 a concert and held both the ticket for
seat number nine and the coach check ticket numbered nine. WHOA, yeah, yeah.
But anyway, that itself doesn't seem all that interesting until
(13:43):
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.
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,
(14:05):
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
underlying force in reality that was a quote world mosaic
or cosmic kaleidoscope that brings like objects and events together.
(14:28):
So almost a kind of emergent order, uh in the
Chaos show, which I can buy into. And we see
in emergence as as a major topic in 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
(14:49):
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. You probably heard of him as
sort of like a he's one of the big names
in psychology and psychiatry following Freud. It's like the Mantle.
(15:13):
But Young was was very much into sort of interesting
borderline magical esoteric ideas. So he loved the paranormal. He
was interested in meaningful connections and mystical truths, esp astrology, psychokinesis,
all kinds of stuff like that. And so naturally he
(15:34):
was really interested in coincidences. And so he wrote a
book called Synchronicity and a Causal Connecting Principle. And this
book was actually 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
(15:56):
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 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 Scarub. So in a
(16:17):
ninety 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 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
(16:39):
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. So one day she was in psychoanalysis
telling him about a dream she had had where one
(17:00):
gave her a golden scarrub. And Young claims at that
very moment an insects 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 scarub type of beatle. And he said
it was like a green color, but in the right
light it reflected the light and looked gold. And then
(17:22):
he presented it to her in this moment of you know,
one of those there are more things in Heaven and
Earth than I dreamt of in your philosophy kind of moments,
and and he hoped that this helped shatter her rationalism.
And so I don't know if that happened to me.
If I had just been talking about a beatle and
then a beatle started knocking against the window, I'd probably
(17:44):
think that was interesting. But I don't know if I
had designed any meaning to it. Yeah, it doesn't really
smack of just Heaven sent beetle sent to you, open
up my mind and make me more, you know, in
love with life because of just a lot of beetles
flying around out there. Sure, but Young commented that when
coincidences like these accumulate, it's what we were talking about earlier.
(18:08):
The more of them happen, 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,
it has way 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
(18:32):
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,
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.
(18:57):
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
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
(19:18):
can see them. We're in causality. We our brain spends
a lot of time making sense of cause and effect.
But then there's this idea that there might be some
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,
(19:38):
throughout the Times game. Yeah, causality connects events in the
physical realm, and according to Young, synchronicity would connect events
in sort of like the psychic meaningfulness realm. That it
was this force it makes things have meaning and shows
us meaning by bringing unlikely events together. Okay, so this
(19:59):
would be kind of like an um. Have 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
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
(20:19):
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,
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
(20:41):
why something like that happened, but you can perhaps ask,
wait a minute, did anything significant actually happen. Indeed, now
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
(21:02):
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
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 eighty nine. I think
(21:26):
it had been given at a been given as a
presentation in eighty seven a couple of years before. But
it's by Percy Diaconis and Frederick Moss Stellar, and they
were I believe, Harvard mathematicians, and Diaconis and Moss Stellar
offer four main categories of explanation for seeming examples of synchronicity.
(21:48):
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 that there is an actual causal link. It's
not a coincidence, because there's a cause that to seemingly
disparate events happen together. The second one is psychology. It's
(22:12):
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, and this is going
to be about how how we count something as a hit.
And then the last one that they cite is called
the law of truly large numbers, and that's going to
(22:34):
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, you should always consider
the fact that there might be a cause that's more
obvious than you realize. This would, of course be the
birthday problem, right, which is a problem that that people
(22:57):
will encounter just everywhere, right and in your workplace that's Google, etcetera.
I mean we can encounter it right here in the
podcast Chamber Joe Win your birthday July six, mind Sectober six?
Whoa synchronicity? 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
(23:19):
was in faith fal Tennessee. But still Tennessee, Tennessee. Man,
some weirds going on? Yeah or but but worth noting
here is notice how we're we're singling in on the hits.
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
(23:40):
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
asked 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 for
them this cake that you found on the ground. Yeah,
(24:03):
So how many people would you have to ask before
it's more likely than not that you'd find two people
with the same exact birthday. Well, let's see, three sixty
five days in a year. Uh so you think, well,
maybe I need a talk to three sixty five people, right,
or maybe twice that. Yeah, I mean, I'm I'm not
good at doing math like that immediately, but that's where
(24:25):
I would have gone the first place in my head. Okay,
it's got to be like one in three sixty five
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
(24:46):
in a room, in a train car, whatever, you have
reached the fifty fifty odds that two of them will
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 ask
before I find somebody with my birthday? You're trying to
find one match, right, Yeah, in this group of if
(25:07):
you ask twenty three people, odds are two of them
will have the same birthday. What if you 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.
(25:29):
So that just shows that the statistical probability of in
this case this is a birthday match occurring, he's actually,
uh far greater than we we we may get a credit. Yeah.
I think the point is that we are often surprised
by events that are not statistically unlikely at all, Like
(25:51):
they just don't match our intuitions. Basically, what we we
have exaggerated intuitions for 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
(26:13):
we're all the center of our own stories, right, We're
gonna be We're more interesting, We're more invested in this one. Um.
I 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 and thirty one chance
(26:35):
for the most part. And Tennessee, what we could say, Well,
we're both living and 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. Yeah, um, but so hey, there could
(26:58):
be another cause though. So 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
(27:20):
be cheating and gambling. Yes, this is 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 and you get the same
number he gets. That gets even more astronomical that have happened.
(27:42):
How could that possibly have happened? Well, 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 you you don't have to be a
god to do it. You just have to be a
cheater with a pair of loaded dice exactly. And another
example comes to mind. This was a going back to
Carl Young. Carl Young was associated with the physicist Wolfgang Polly,
(28:06):
and Polly was famous for coming up with the Polly
exclusion principle, which is important in quantum mechanics. I don't
remember exactly what it does right now, but that's right,
but yeah, he um, so he was a known physicist
and it did really important work. But Polly, I think,
was also sort of interested in the you know, strange
(28:27):
synchronicity type ideas, and Polly, in addition to the Polly principle,
which is an actual principle of science, wasn't 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
(28:49):
would show up in a lab somewhere to test out
some 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. 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,
(29:11):
there was even one anecdote I read about where some
people were working in a lab and their equipment stopped
working and they joked, is you know Wolfgang here is
as he 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.
(29:36):
So whether or not that's true, right, let's go ahead
and settle now. 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 Eunice Mundi is trying to tell Wolfgang
(29:57):
Polly something about his relationship with miche Jeans 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 he's also
not taken to account all of the machines that are
(30:18):
not 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 could 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.
(30:40):
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 were offering. The true hidden cause
(31:03):
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 Poulic's 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
(31:27):
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
(31:49):
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 of 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
you're back on the train car, back on the train car,
(32:11):
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. 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 think about
(32:34):
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
(32:55):
then another hit and then another hit. And some of
these might be actual hits, 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 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're like, well, I have an uncle Joseph. There
you go, close becomes a perfect match and then in
(33:17):
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
to experience. So it's not one of those things with
(33:40):
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
nestled in. So here's an analogy. Let's say you're talking
(34:02):
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 not to trade any cards, she just got a
royal flush. Now, the odds of being dealt a royal
flush or about one in six fifty thousand. I think
it's like sixty nine thousand or something like that, about
(34:23):
one and six d fifty. But you wouldn't say to
this poker player he 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. And on top of that, she's one
(34:44):
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 it'll it's bound to happen eventually, right, Like enough
people are trying a given thing, it's gonna line up.
The monkeys are going to compose the complete works of
(35:06):
Shakespeare than 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's an estimated
a hundred and eight billion people who have ever lived.
So considering that, if there's an event that has a
(35:26):
one in a 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
(35:48):
one in ten billion chance of something ever occurring in
a human's life, it should still have happened to at
least ten people in human history. And it kind of
comes back around to the idea of think nicity 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
(36:12):
of things. Uh, those actual odds, 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 synchronicity lines up well with with
(36:32):
it with the statistical likelihood of things happening. We just
we're just not 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
(36:55):
course brings us to psychology. Yeah, and we save this
for 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
(37:16):
brains work, indeed, I mean, that's just how we survive.
That's how we make sense of the stimuli and 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 attribute to
them more magical significance than they might actually have. Uh,
(37:39):
how about even heard of the batter main Hoff phenomenon. Yeah,
this is the frequency illusion. 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 you're 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 it,
(38:00):
and it's all around you. So it's like discovering a
flower exists for the first time you've never 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 I read that
the origin of this was that the phenomenon supposedly got
(38:21):
its name because a message board user somewhere online told
the story of encountering information about the batter 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,
(38:44):
there's a mention of Prince Chipi island off of the
west coast of Africa, and I 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 read.
I'm not related to astronomy or anything, but see. Yeah,
you see those kind of weird littal coincidences pop up
(39:07):
all the time, and uh, I've often found that to
be the case to seemingly unrelated episodes, 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
super Normal Stimuli. It was a big one, and after
(39:30):
I researched it, I was just I was just seeing
it everywhere like it. It kind of a 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. And uh
and and so it can be something as simple as
a as a word. It can be something that's you know,
(39:50):
a particular place, a particular you know, a particular band,
a particular work of a literature, or 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
(40:12):
are actually reasons that you're investigating similar stories around the
same time, are reading 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 that they have their own sort of mathematical analysis
(40:33):
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, 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 that
you're going to see them again. Um. And of course
this plays into apothenia. Uh. This is uh, this is
(40:55):
a term comes to us from German science. Is Claus
Konrad who coined api finia from the Greek appo away
and uh uh and finea to show in nine and
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
(41:17):
and signals from our environment. I mean, that's how we think,
that's how we live, that's how we survive, 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
(41:37):
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
do they see. They see like a pentagram, Right, there's
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
(41:59):
other or 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 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
(42:21):
the reason we see uh, figures in the constellations in
the sky, right. I mean it's a very few people
these days actually think that 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, right,
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,
(42:44):
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 the thing is there's an evolutionary advantage for
us pattern recognition apes in making that type one error
because essentially you have you have a you have a
type one air or any other type two right, false positive,
false negative. And the classic example is that of you know,
(43:06):
rustling in the bushes on the on the prehistoric savannah, right,
because there's a possibility that a big cat is about
to spring out of those rustling 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
(43:28):
negative that gets you killed. Yeah, so obvious, there's obviously
a selection pressure to favor false positives. Yeah, exactly. So
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
(43:50):
a coincidence can represent a pattern to us, we start
thinking what does it mean? I mean, and there's 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 Multidisiplinary Perspectives. And he was studying Apophanian patients suffering
(44:11):
from psychotic episodes UH that were beginning to find spontaneous
meaning and random aspects of their life. And his research
revealed that high levels of dopamine H 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
(44:34):
ways to arrange existing ideas and motifs uh into something new, 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.
And very often the connections you see between events or
objects or ideas and say a literature class or something
(44:56):
like that, are they are still psychic phenomenon. It's 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
(45:18):
that we have a tendency to search for or interpret
information in a way that confirms your preconceptions 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
(45:41):
to like to sort of synchronous strange events happen in
one day, You're looking for a third 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 something you might have ignored otherwise
to confirm your pattern. Hypoth assists that there's gonna be
(46:02):
something in line with this second thing. You know, it's
the same like people dye in threes. I was just
thinking of that. Yeah, like you, if you're lucky, you'll
get like to a list celebrities dying at the same time.
But then often like the third one has to be
like a radio star for the whole 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 by us.
(46:23):
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
like that they have the theme for the show, and
like the intro hits the theme, the second segment really
hits the theme, the third segment, 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,
(46:43):
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
you're talking about belief in UFOs, ancient Egyptians and alien tech, bigfoot,
or or office conspiracies, well, whatever it happens to be.
If you're looking for something to be true, uh, you
(47:06):
can find it. So if 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
scow your the results of the experimentation in your favor.
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 and being
(47:26):
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
existing distrust rather than evidence that challenges it. Oh yeah,
people are definitely likely to oversample stuff that confirms their
bigotry or biases. So if yeah, if if you have
(47:48):
a preconceived stereotype, you're looking to make things fit evidence
that doesn't fit it, you just kind of like 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
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
(48:09):
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
unified story again in which we are the central character. Yeah,
I mean, that's just simply how our memory. Yeah, I mean,
you you always see the pattern of clue is left
(48:31):
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. All right, So there you
have it, the science of coincidence. Hope you enjoyed the
rerun or the first run if you had not heard
the previous one. Yeah, So I hope you will take
something away from this that you can apply to your
(48:52):
everyday life when you think about all those strange coincidences
you encounter day in and day out, and do they
really mean something. Indeed, now, in the meantime, if you
want to explore more episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind,
head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
After you will find all the podcast episodes. You'll find videos,
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(49:13):
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any others, you can always email us at blow the
Mind at how stuff works dot com. Well more on
(49:34):
this and batands of other topics. Is that how stuff
Works dot com. It
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. And
Robert and I are going to be unavailable to record
a regular podcast this week because we're both going to
(00:24):
be recovering from some rather strange cranial surgery that involves
the expansion of the mind. Uh, new sences, new vistas.
So we're gonna be going to a happy place. But
in the meantime, we thought we'd take you back to
an old favorite. Yeah, this is our episode on the
science of coincidence. It's it's one that we really enjoyed
(00:45):
putting together. I think it's definitely an evergreen episode that
tests us, you know, it stands the test of time.
I think I recorded this one before I was actually
a host on the show. I was doing a guest episode.
This is one of the first ones I ever Did's right,
that's right. Yeah, So it's it's a strong one and
if you've heard it before, then I think it's a
perfect one to re experience. And if you are a
(01:05):
newer listener to the show, then hey, listen to it
for the first time. So without further ado, let's jump
into the repeat. So I've got one for you. Tell
me if you've heard this one before. Lincoln and Kennedy. Yes,
you know this. I was first exposed to this in
(01:26):
middle school when a teacher of mine get gave us
a list of 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 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
(01:49):
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 the head, they were both assassinated by Southerners.
They were both succeeded by Southerners. Their vice presidents were Southerners.
(02:10):
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
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 people
in the world, like they're there are people out there
(02:31):
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
this nation, et cetera. That might be the difference between us, Robert,
because I did not tune out. I was my mind
was blown to uh, to borrow from a popular phrase. Yeah,
(02:54):
I I sat there in my desk like, wow, what
are the odds? You know, must to be some kind
of ghost spirit controlling this. It just I was amazed
that there are two twin souls are basically the same
entity reincarnated and and and tracked hunted by the same
(03:15):
extra dimensional force. Yeah. Or there 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 that comes to mind is
the death of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, two individuals who,
of course very interconnected in the history of the United
(03:35):
States as well. Sure, both instrumental drafting the Declaration of Independence,
which was signed to July four, seventy six. Both men
died on the same day, July four, eight twenty six,
exactly fifty 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
(03:56):
and succinct. You know, what were the chances? You don't
need a list, 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 but the dates are kind of compelling there.
It would be even crazier, though, if I found out
(04:16):
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
in a been a production of seventeen seventy six. So
we're tied into it too. There's no escaping the black
hole of coincidence. Okay, I've got an even crazier coincidence. No,
it's probably not. This is kind of dumb, but why
(04:37):
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
deep statistical study on this out there, but uh yeah,
(04:59):
maybe it is it that, on one hand, is just
possibly pure luck. And we only pick up right on
there there being a JB here, JB there, because we're
also not taking into account all the other j B
initials out there, like like does Jim being factor into this?
Probably not, and all of the action heroes that aren't
j B s. Yeah, And then to what extent is
it just completely almost subconscious? You know, because you have
(05:21):
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 uh, through our
culture and through through our our the way we view
the world, and and perhaps that ends up informing it.
You 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
(05:43):
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. The same
kind of consonants. Yeah, we associate sounds with with ideas, certainly. Yeah,
now another crazy one. And I love this one in
part because it involves Edgar Allan Poe. Of course, Edgar
(06:05):
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 eighteen thirty eight the narrative
of author Gordon Pym of Nantucket. I've never read it,
never mean, I never read any there. But the fiction
of this story is you have a crew of a
ship called Grampus. They wind up adrift with no food
(06:26):
or water, and so first they catch a towrartoise. They
eat it, but eventually they have to draw straws to
see who winds up as a dinner and uh an
individual named Richard Parker draws the short straw, so they
stab him and 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
(06:47):
play the greatest hits, right, here's where he gets crazy.
Years later, in eighteen eighty four, a yacht named the
minion Net leaves England, is headed towards Sydney, Australia, and
it sinks in a storm. Four men wind up adrift
in a lifeboat. They catch a turtle. They eat it
all right, But again you're probably thinking at this point, Okay,
(07:08):
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
a little boat. They're hungry, They've only had one turtle
to eat. It's kind of inevitable, right, Well, this is
(07:29):
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.
And so he starts going, he starts deteriorating really quickly
here and they side, well, he's he's about to die.
(07:50):
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
you can really doubt that they staged it to happen
on purpose because of the novel. Yeah, Like I can't
(08:11):
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 is Richard Parker. So I'm not saying
we have to eat you, but come on. Yeah, it's
like the worst school play ever exactly. Alright. So in
(08:33):
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 and just an improbable event um So of
(08:54):
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 Jefferson and Adams, you know, dying on the
same day. Another way of putting it is that it's
(09:17):
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, is that a coincidence has a perceptual element.
It's something that seems to be important to us, like
(09:40):
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, it's just tunes out on it.
Because that that kind of comes down to how we
can look at coincidence in life. You can either say
(10:00):
was just pure dumblock. It 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 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
(10:23):
attention to coincidences than we might today. I mean, we
all experience coincidences. I would be shocked if there was
someone who would say, no, I've never experienced anything like
a really weird concurrence. It happens every single day. It
happened to us we were talking about while we were
researching these podcasts, like just strange topics coming up and
seemingly unrelated episodes. Yeah, I mean, of course, that kind
(10:46):
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, and it's 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
(11:06):
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 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,
(11:28):
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 lived from
eighteen eighty to nineteen twenty six and he was a
proponent of Lamarckian evolution. Have you ever, I'm sure you're
(11:50):
familiar with this. This is the the one that, just
to give everyone a quick reminder, the idea that say, giraffes,
their next grow long because they're reaching for those top
those top leads, and so it's like one generation informing
the next. Yeah. So normally, now what we believe is
min Dalian genetics. You know, you inherit, you inherit your
genetic traits from your parents germ cells, and you pass
(12:12):
those same genetic traits onto your kids. And unless you
have a certain mutation, that can be basically random. But yeah,
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. You strain your
neck trying to reach something in this life, and in
the next life, your kids will have longer necks by
virtue of your straining. Yeah. And so in one famous experiment,
(12:35):
Camera claimed to have caused male specimens of a of
an animal called the midwife toad to grow these black
forearm pads that some species of male toads have, and
that 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
(12:57):
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, 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
(13:20):
daily coincidences. And just one example against id 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 a concert and held both the ticket for
seat number nine and the coach check ticket numbered nine. WHOA, yeah, yeah.
But anyway, that itself doesn't seem all that interesting until
(13:43):
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.
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,
(14:05):
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
underlying force in reality that was a quote world mosaic
or cosmic kaleidoscope that brings like objects and events together.
(14:28):
So almost a kind of emergent order, uh in the
Chaos show, which I can buy into. And we see
in emergence as as a major topic in 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
(14:49):
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. You probably heard of him as
sort of like a he's one of the big names
in psychology and psychiatry following Freud. It's like the Mantle.
(15:13):
But Young was was very much into sort of interesting
borderline magical esoteric ideas. So he loved the paranormal. He
was interested in meaningful connections and mystical truths, esp astrology, psychokinesis,
all kinds of stuff like that. And so naturally he
(15:34):
was really interested in coincidences. And so he wrote a
book called Synchronicity and a Causal Connecting Principle. And this
book was actually 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
(15:56):
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 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 Scarub. So in a
(16:17):
ninety 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 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
(16:39):
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. So one day she was in psychoanalysis
telling him about a dream she had had where one
(17:00):
gave her a golden scarrub. And Young claims at that
very moment an insects 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 scarub type of beatle. And he said
it was like a green color, but in the right
light it reflected the light and looked gold. And then
(17:22):
he presented it to her in this moment of you know,
one of those there are more things in Heaven and
Earth than I dreamt of in your philosophy kind of moments,
and and he hoped that this helped shatter her rationalism.
And so I don't know if that happened to me.
If I had just been talking about a beatle and
then a beatle started knocking against the window, I'd probably
(17:44):
think that was interesting. But I don't know if I
had designed any meaning to it. Yeah, it doesn't really
smack of just Heaven sent beetle sent to you, open
up my mind and make me more, you know, in
love with life because of just a lot of beetles
flying around out there. Sure, but Young commented that when
coincidences like these accumulate, it's what we were talking about earlier.
(18:08):
The more of them happen, 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,
it has way 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
(18:32):
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,
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.
(18:57):
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
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
(19:18):
can see them. We're in causality. We our brain spends
a lot of time making sense of cause and effect.
But then there's this idea that there might be some
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,
(19:38):
throughout the Times game. Yeah, causality connects events in the
physical realm, and according to Young, synchronicity would connect events
in sort of like the psychic meaningfulness realm. That it
was this force it makes things have meaning and shows
us meaning by bringing unlikely events together. Okay, so this
(19:59):
would be kind of like an um. Have 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
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
(20:19):
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,
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
(20:41):
why something like that happened, but you can perhaps ask,
wait a minute, did anything significant actually happen. Indeed, now
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
(21:02):
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
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 eighty nine. I think
(21:26):
it had been given at a been given as a
presentation in eighty seven a couple of years before. But
it's by Percy Diaconis and Frederick Moss Stellar, and they
were I believe, Harvard mathematicians, and Diaconis and Moss Stellar
offer four main categories of explanation for seeming examples of synchronicity.
(21:48):
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 that there is an actual causal link. It's
not a coincidence, because there's a cause that to seemingly
disparate events happen together. The second one is psychology. It's
(22:12):
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, and this is going
to be about how how we count something as a hit.
And then the last one that they cite is called
the law of truly large numbers, and that's going to
(22:34):
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, you should always consider
the fact that there might be a cause that's more
obvious than you realize. This would, of course be the
birthday problem, right, which is a problem that that people
(22:57):
will encounter just everywhere, right and in your workplace that's Google, etcetera.
I mean we can encounter it right here in the
podcast Chamber Joe Win your birthday July six, mind Sectober six?
Whoa synchronicity? 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
(23:19):
was in faith fal Tennessee. But still Tennessee, Tennessee. Man,
some weirds going on? Yeah or but but worth noting
here is notice how we're we're singling in on the hits.
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
(23:40):
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
asked 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 for
them this cake that you found on the ground. Yeah,
(24:03):
So how many people would you have to ask before
it's more likely than not that you'd find two people
with the same exact birthday. Well, let's see, three sixty
five days in a year. Uh so you think, well,
maybe I need a talk to three sixty five people, right,
or maybe twice that. Yeah, I mean, I'm I'm not
good at doing math like that immediately, but that's where
(24:25):
I would have gone the first place in my head. Okay,
it's got to be like one in three sixty five
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
(24:46):
in a room, in a train car, whatever, you have
reached the fifty fifty odds that two of them will
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 ask
before I find somebody with my birthday? You're trying to
find one match, right, Yeah, in this group of if
(25:07):
you ask twenty three people, odds are two of them
will have the same birthday. What if you 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.
(25:29):
So that just shows that the statistical probability of in
this case this is a birthday match occurring, he's actually,
uh far greater than we we we may get a credit. Yeah.
I think the point is that we are often surprised
by events that are not statistically unlikely at all, Like
(25:51):
they just don't match our intuitions. Basically, what we we
have exaggerated intuitions for 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
(26:13):
we're all the center of our own stories, right, We're
gonna be We're more interesting, We're more invested in this one. Um.
I 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 and thirty one chance
(26:35):
for the most part. And Tennessee, what we could say, Well,
we're both living and 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. Yeah, um, but so hey, there could
(26:58):
be another cause though. So 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
(27:20):
be cheating and gambling. Yes, this is 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 and you get the same
number he gets. That gets even more astronomical that have happened.
(27:42):
How could that possibly have happened? Well, 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 you you don't have to be a
god to do it. You just have to be a
cheater with a pair of loaded dice exactly. And another
example comes to mind. This was a going back to
Carl Young. Carl Young was associated with the physicist Wolfgang Polly,
(28:06):
and Polly was famous for coming up with the Polly
exclusion principle, which is important in quantum mechanics. I don't
remember exactly what it does right now, but that's right,
but yeah, he um, so he was a known physicist
and it did really important work. But Polly, I think,
was also sort of interested in the you know, strange
(28:27):
synchronicity type ideas, and Polly, in addition to the Polly principle,
which is an actual principle of science, wasn't 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
(28:49):
would show up in a lab somewhere to test out
some 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. 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,
(29:11):
there was even one anecdote I read about where some
people were working in a lab and their equipment stopped
working and they joked, is you know Wolfgang here is
as he 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.
(29:36):
So whether or not that's true, right, let's go ahead
and settle now. 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 Eunice Mundi is trying to tell Wolfgang
(29:57):
Polly something about his relationship with miche Jeans 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 he's also
not taken to account all of the machines that are
(30:18):
not 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 could 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.
(30:40):
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 were offering. The true hidden cause
(31:03):
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 Poulic's 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
(31:27):
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
(31:49):
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 of 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
you're back on the train car, back on the train car,
(32:11):
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. 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 think about
(32:34):
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
(32:55):
then another hit and then another hit. And some of
these might be actual hits, 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 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're like, well, I have an uncle Joseph. There
you go, close becomes a perfect match and then in
(33:17):
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
to experience. So it's not one of those things with
(33:40):
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
nestled in. So here's an analogy. Let's say you're talking
(34:02):
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 not to trade any cards, she just got a
royal flush. Now, the odds of being dealt a royal
flush or about one in six fifty thousand. I think
it's like sixty nine thousand or something like that, about
(34:23):
one and six d fifty. But you wouldn't say to
this poker player he 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. And on top of that, she's one
(34:44):
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 it'll it's bound to happen eventually, right, Like enough
people are trying a given thing, it's gonna line up.
The monkeys are going to compose the complete works of
(35:06):
Shakespeare than 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's an estimated
a hundred and eight billion people who have ever lived.
So considering that, if there's an event that has a
(35:26):
one in a 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
(35:48):
one in ten billion chance of something ever occurring in
a human's life, it should still have happened to at
least ten people in human history. And it kind of
comes back around to the idea of think nicity 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
(36:12):
of things. Uh, those actual odds, 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 synchronicity lines up well with with
(36:32):
it with the statistical likelihood of things happening. We just
we're just not 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
(36:55):
course brings us to psychology. Yeah, and we save this
for 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
(37:16):
brains work, indeed, I mean, that's just how we survive.
That's how we make sense of the stimuli and 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 attribute to
them more magical significance than they might actually have. Uh,
(37:39):
how about even heard of the batter main Hoff phenomenon. Yeah,
this is the frequency illusion. 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 you're 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 it,
(38:00):
and it's all around you. So it's like discovering a
flower exists for the first time you've never 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 I read that
the origin of this was that the phenomenon supposedly got
(38:21):
its name because a message board user somewhere online told
the story of encountering information about the batter 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,
(38:44):
there's a mention of Prince Chipi island off of the
west coast of Africa, and I 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 read.
I'm not related to astronomy or anything, but see. Yeah,
you see those kind of weird littal coincidences pop up
(39:07):
all the time, and uh, I've often found that to
be the case to seemingly unrelated episodes, 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
super Normal Stimuli. It was a big one, and after
(39:30):
I researched it, I was just I was just seeing
it everywhere like it. It kind of a 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. And uh
and and so it can be something as simple as
a as a word. It can be something that's you know,
(39:50):
a particular place, a particular you know, a particular band,
a particular work of a literature, or 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
(40:12):
are actually reasons that you're investigating similar stories around the
same time, are reading 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 that they have their own sort of mathematical analysis
(40:33):
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, 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 that
you're going to see them again. Um. And of course
this plays into apothenia. Uh. This is uh, this is
(40:55):
a term comes to us from German science. Is Claus
Konrad who coined api finia from the Greek appo away
and uh uh and finea to show in nine and
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
(41:17):
and signals from our environment. I mean, that's how we think,
that's how we live, that's how we survive, 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
(41:37):
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
do they see. They see like a pentagram, Right, there's
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
(41:59):
other or 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 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
(42:21):
the reason we see uh, figures in the constellations in
the sky, right. I mean it's a very few people
these days actually think that 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, right,
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,
(42:44):
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 the thing is there's an evolutionary advantage for
us pattern recognition apes in making that type one error
because essentially you have you have a you have a
type one air or any other type two right, false positive,
false negative. And the classic example is that of you know,
(43:06):
rustling in the bushes on the on the prehistoric savannah, right,
because there's a possibility that a big cat is about
to spring out of those rustling 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
(43:28):
negative that gets you killed. Yeah, so obvious, there's obviously
a selection pressure to favor false positives. Yeah, exactly. So
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
(43:50):
a coincidence can represent a pattern to us, we start
thinking what does it mean? I mean, and there's 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 Multidisiplinary Perspectives. And he was studying Apophanian patients suffering
(44:11):
from psychotic episodes UH that were beginning to find spontaneous
meaning and random aspects of their life. And his research
revealed that high levels of dopamine H 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
(44:34):
ways to arrange existing ideas and motifs uh into something new, 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.
And very often the connections you see between events or
objects or ideas and say a literature class or something
(44:56):
like that, are they are still psychic phenomenon. It's 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
(45:18):
that we have a tendency to search for or interpret
information in a way that confirms your preconceptions 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
(45:41):
to like to sort of synchronous strange events happen in
one day, You're looking for a third 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 something you might have ignored otherwise
to confirm your pattern. Hypoth assists that there's gonna be
(46:02):
something in line with this second thing. You know, it's
the same like people dye in threes. I was just
thinking of that. Yeah, like you, if you're lucky, you'll
get like to a list celebrities dying at the same time.
But then often like the third one has to be
like a radio star for the whole 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 by us.
(46:23):
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
like that they have the theme for the show, and
like the intro hits the theme, the second segment really
hits the theme, the third segment, 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,
(46:43):
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
you're talking about belief in UFOs, ancient Egyptians and alien tech, bigfoot,
or or office conspiracies, well, whatever it happens to be.
If you're looking for something to be true, uh, you
(47:06):
can find it. So if 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
scow your the results of the experimentation in your favor.
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 and being
(47:26):
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
existing distrust rather than evidence that challenges it. Oh yeah,
people are definitely likely to oversample stuff that confirms their
bigotry or biases. So if yeah, if if you have
(47:48):
a preconceived stereotype, you're looking to make things fit evidence
that doesn't fit it, you just kind of like 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
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
(48:09):
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
unified story again in which we are the central character. Yeah,
I mean, that's just simply how our memory. Yeah, I mean,
you you always see the pattern of clue is left
(48:31):
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. All right, So there you
have it, the science of coincidence. Hope you enjoyed the
rerun or the first run if you had not heard
the previous one. Yeah, So I hope you will take
something away from this that you can apply to your
(48:52):
everyday life when you think about all those strange coincidences
you encounter day in and day out, and do they
really mean something. Indeed, now, in the meantime, if you
want to explore more episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind,
head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
After you will find all the podcast episodes. You'll find videos,
you'll find blog posts, you'll find link out to our
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(49:13):
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Mind at how stuff works dot com. Well more on
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