Something That Happens for the First Time Seems to Be Happening Again

Toward the end of 7th grade, my middle-school band took a trip to Cedar Point, which was pretty much the theme park to which midwestern heart-school bands traveled. (I imagine it still is.)  They had this indoor roller coaster there, called the Disaster Transport. My friends and I were standing in line for this roller coaster, winding up the dimly lit cement steps, when we turned a corner and came beyond a huge pile of money.

Nosotros picked information technology upward and counted information technology; it was a very specific amount of money. I don't remember now exactly how much, but for the purposes of this retelling, let'south say it was $134. That sounds close.

We had barely had time to whiplash from marveling at our good fortune to guiltily suggesting we should find somewhere to turn information technology in before a group of older kids ahead of united states of america snatched the greenbacks wad out of our hands. They claimed it was theirs; it was not theirs—they counted it in front of us and exchanged "Whoa"s and high fives. We were hapless, gangly eye schoolers (I was growing out my bangs; it was a rough year). They were confident nosotros would do nothing to stop them, and they were right. So that was the end of that.

Until, Part Two:

A footling more than a yr later, I went to a summertime program at Michigan Land Academy, a nerd military camp where you have classes like genetics for fun. One evening, equally we were sitting around in the common area, chatting and doing homework, I overheard a child telling his friends how he'd lost a bunch of money last year at Cedar Point.

With very petty endeavor at chill I interrupted their conversation and grilled him on the particulars.

Was he in that location on May any date I was also at that place? He was.

Did he lose the money in line for the Disaster Transport? In fact, he did.

How much money did he lose? $134, exactly.

* * *

Though "What are the odds?" is pretty much the catchphrase of coincidences, a coincidence is not merely something that was unlikely to happen. The overstuffed crate labeled "coincidences" is packed with an astonishing diversity of experiences, and all the same something more than rarity compels usa to group them together. They take a similar texture, a feeling that the fabric of life has rippled. The question is where this feeling comes from, why we discover sure ways the threads of our lives collide, and ignore others.

Some might say it's just because people don't understand probability. In their 1989 paper "Methods for Studying Coincidences," the mathematicians Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller considered defining a coincidence as "a rare result," merely decided "this includes too much to permit conscientious written report." Instead, they settled on, "A coincidence is a surprising concurrence of events, perceived as meaningfully related, with no apparent causal connectedness."

From a purely statistical point of view, these events are random, non meaningfully related, and they shouldn't exist that surprising because they happen all the time. "Extremely improbable events are commonplace," as the statistician David Hand says in his book The Improbability Principle. But humans more often than not aren't great at reasoning objectively about probability as they become well-nigh their everyday lives.

For one affair, people can exist pretty liberal with what they consider coincidences. If you lot encounter someone who shares your birthday, that seems like a fun coincidence, but yous might experience the aforementioned way if yous met someone who shared your mother's birthday, or your best friend's. Or if it was the day right before or after yours. So there are several birthdays that person could have that would feel coincidental.

And in that location are lots of people on this planet—more than 7 billion, in fact. According to the Law of Truly Large Numbers, "with a big plenty sample, any outrageous matter is likely to happen," Diaconis and Mosteller write. If enough people buy tickets, there will be a Powerball winner. To the person who wins, it'south surprising and miraculous, merely the fact that someone won doesn't surprise the rest of us.

Even within the relatively express sample of your ain life, in that location are all kinds of opportunities for coincidences to happen. When you consider all the people you know and all the places you go and all the places they become, chances are good that you'll run into someone y'all know, somewhere, at some signal. But it'll still seem like a coincidence when you exercise. When something surprising happens, we don't think nigh all the times information technology could have happened, but didn't. And when we include near misses as coincidences (y'all and your friend were in the same identify on the same twenty-four hour period, just non at the same time), the number of possible coincidences is of a sudden way greater.

To demonstrate how common unlikely seeming events can exist, mathematicians like to trot out what is called the birthday problem. The question is how many people need to be in a room earlier there'southward a 50/l chance that ii of them will share the same altogether. The reply is 23.

"Oh, those guys and their birthdays really get me mad," says Bernard Beitman, a psychiatrist and visiting professor at the Academy of Virginia, and writer of the forthcoming volume Connecting With Coincidence . That's non the way the average person would frame that question, he says. When someone asks "What are the odds?" odds are they aren't request, "What are the odds that a coincidence of this nature would accept happened to anyone in the room?" but something more similar, "What are the odds that this specific thing would happen to me, here and at present?" And with anything more than complicated than a birthday match, that becomes nigh impossible to calculate.

It's true that people are adequately egocentric about their coincidences. The psychologist Ruma Falk found in a report that people charge per unit their own coincidences as more surprising than other people'south. They're like dreams—mine are more interesting than yours.

"A coincidence itself is in the eye of the beholder," says David Spiegelhalter, the Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge. If a rare outcome happens in a wood and no one notices and no one cares, it's not really a coincidence.

* * *

I told Spiegelhalter my Cedar Point story on the phone—I couldn't help information technology. He collects coincidences, see. (A thriller novel chosen The Coincidence Authority has a professor character based on him.) He has a website where people can submit them, and says he'southward gotten almost four,000 or 5,000 stories since 2011. Unfortunately, he and his colleagues haven't done much with this treasure trove of data, more often than not because a pile of free-form stories is a pretty hard information set to measure. They're looking for someone to practice text-mining on it, but and so far all they've been able to analyze is how many coincidences fall into the different categories you can cheque off when y'all submit your story:

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Common Types of Coincidences

David Spiegelhalter

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He says he'd categorize mine every bit "finding a link with someone you meet." "But it'southward a very dissimilar sort of connexion," he says, "not like having lived in the same house or something similar that. And it'southward a very stiff one, it'south not just like you lot were both at the theme park. I love that. And you lot think information technology after all this time."

And the craziest thing is not that I found someone's money and then that I was in a room with him a year subsequently, just that I found out almost it at all. What if he hadn't brought it upwardly? Or "you lot might not have heard him if you'd been somewhere slightly away," Spiegelhalter says. "And yet the coincidence would have been there. Y'all would take been half-dozen anxiety away from someone who lost their coin. The coincidence in a sense would have physically occurred. It was simply because y'all were listening that you noticed it. And so that's why the astonishing thing is not that these things occur, it's that we find them."

"This is my big theory about coincidences," he continues, "that'due south why they happen to certain kinds of people."

Beitman in his research has found that certain personality traits are linked to experiencing more coincidences—people who describe themselves as religious or spiritual, people who are cocky-referential (or likely to chronicle data from the external globe back to themselves), and people who are high in meaning-seeking are all coincidence-decumbent. People are also likely to meet coincidences when they are extremely sad, angry, or anxious.

"Coincidences never happen to me at all, because I never discover anything," Spiegelhalter says. "I never talk to everyone on trains. If I'chiliad with a stranger, I don't endeavor to find a connexion with them, because I'm English."

Beitman, on the other mitt, says, "My life is littered with coincidences." He tells me a story of how he lost his dog when he was 8 or 9 years old. He went to the police station to ask if they had seen information technology; they hadn't. Then, "I was crying a lot and took the incorrect way home, and there was the dog … I got into [studying coincidences] simply considering, hey, look Bernie, what's going on here?"

For Beitman, probability is not enough when it comes to studying coincidences. Because statistics can describe what happens, simply tin't explain it any further than chance. "I know there's something more than going on than we pay attending to," he says. "Random is non enough of an explanation for me."

Random wasn't enough for the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung either. Then he came upwards with an alternative explanation. Coincidences were, to him, meaningful events that couldn't exist explained by cause and effect, which, so far so skillful, but he as well thought that at that place was another force, exterior of causality, which could explain them. This he called "synchronicity," which in his 1952 book, he called an "acausal connecting principle."

Meaningful coincidences were produced by the strength of synchronicity, and could exist considered glimpses into another of Jung'south ideas—the unus mundus, or "1 earth." Unus mundus is the theory that in that location is an underlying order and structure to reality, a network that connects everything and everyone.

For Jung, synchronicity didn't just account for coincidences, just also ESP, telepathy, and ghosts. And to this day, research shows that people who feel more than coincidences tend to exist more likely to believe in the occult too.

This is the trouble with trying to find a deeper explanation for coincidences than randomness—it can rapidly veer into the paranormal.

* * *

Beitman, like Spiegelhalter, is interested in sorting and labeling different kinds of coincidences, to develop categories "similar an early botanist," he says, though his categories are more than expansive and include not merely things that happen in the earth simply people'southward thoughts and feelings as well. In our conversation, he divides coincidences into three broad categories—environs-surroundings interactions, mind-environment interactions, and mind-listen interactions.

Environment-surround are the almost obvious, and easiest to understand. These coincidences are objectively observable. Something, or a series of things, happens in the physical world. You're at a gin joint in Morocco and your long-lost dear from Paris shows up. I found some money and a year later I met the person who lost it.

A nurse named Violet Jessop was a stewardess for White Star Line and lived through three crashes of its ill-blighted fleet of sea liners. She was on the Olympic when it collided with the HMS Hawke in 1911. In 1912, she was there for the big 1: the Titanic. And 4 years later, when White Star'due south Britannic, reportedly improved afterward its sister ship'due south disaster, also sank, Jessop was there. And she survived. That ane, I judge, is an environment-environment-surroundings.

Mind-environment coincidences are premonition-esque—you lot're thinking of a friend and then they call you, for case. Only unless you happen to write downward "I am thinking of so-and-so [timestamp]" before the telephone call happens, these are absurd for the person they happen to, only not really measurable. "Nosotros banned premonitions from our site," Spiegelhalter says. "Because, where's the proof? Anybody could say anything."

Another sort of mind-environs interaction is learning a new discussion and so of a sudden seeing it everywhere. Or getting a song stuck in your caput and hearing it everywhere you get, or wondering nigh something and then stumbling onto an article about information technology. The things on our minds seem to bleed out into the world around us. Just, though it makes them no less magical, life's motifs are created not past the world around usa, just by humans, by our attention.

This is an effect that the Stanford linguistics professor Arnold Zwicky calls "the frequency illusion," and it'south non the same every bit a premonition. It's just that once you've noticed something, your brain is primed to detect it again the next time you encounter it. A discussion or a concept yous've just learned feels relevant to you—you may take seen it hundreds of times before and just never noticed. Just at present that you're paying attention, information technology'south more than likely to pop out at you lot the adjacent time it whizzes by.

And and so the final category, heed-mind, of course, is directly-up mystical. I example of this is "simulpathity," a term Beitman coined to describe feeling the pain or emotion of someone else at a distance. His interest in this particular type of coincidence is deeply personal.

"In San Francisco, in 1973, February 26, I stood at a sink uncontrollably choking," he says, clarifying, "There was nada in my pharynx that I knew [of]."

"It was around 11 o'clock in San Francisco. The side by side solar day my blood brother chosen, and told me my father had died at ii a.m. in Wilmington, Delaware, which was 11 in San Francisco, and he had died by choking on blood in his pharynx. That was a dramatic experience for me, and I began to look to see if other people had experiences similar this. And many people accept."

* * *

This is where we start to exit the realm of science and enter the realm of belief. Coincidences are remarkable in how they straddle these worlds. People have surprising, connective experiences, and they either create meaning out of them, or they don't.

Leaving a coincidence equally zip more than than a curiosity may exist a more evidence-based mindset, but it's not fair to say that the people who make significant from coincidences are irrational. The process by which we notice coincidences is "function of a full general cognitive architecture which is designed to make sense of the world," says Magda Osman, an associate professor in experimental psychology at Queen Mary University of London. Information technology's the same rational process nosotros use to larn cause and consequence. This is ane way to scientifically explain how coincidences happen—equally past-products of the encephalon's meaning-making system.

People like patterns. We wait for them everywhere, and past noticing and analyzing them nosotros tin can empathise our world and, to some small caste, control information technology. If every time you moving picture a switch, a lamp across the room turns on, y'all come to understand that that switch controls that lamp.

When someone sees a pattern in a coincidence, "there's no way I can say 'Yeah, that was definitely a chance result,' or 'In that location was an bodily causal mechanism for it,' because I'd have to know the world perfectly to be able to say that," Osman says.

Instead what we practise is weigh whether it seems likelier that the event was caused by chance, or by something else. If chance is the winner, nosotros dismiss it. If non, we've got a new hypothesis about how the earth works.

Have the case of ii twins, who were adopted past different families when they were iv weeks old. When they were later reunited, their lives had … a lot of similarities. They were both named James past their adoptive families, were both married to a Betty and had divorced a Linda. One twin's first son'southward proper noun was James Alan, the other's was James Allan. They both had adoptive brothers named Larry and pet dogs named Toy. They both suffered from tension headaches, and both vacationed in Florida within three blocks of each other.

Yous could hypothesize from this that the ability of genetics is so strong, that even when identical twins are separated, their lives play out the same way. In fact, the twins were part of a University of Minnesota study on twins reared apart that was asking just that question, though it didn't propose that there was any factor that would make someone attracted to a Betty, or likely to name a dog Toy.

Cartoon inferences from patterns like this is an advantageous thing to do, fifty-fifty when the pattern isn't 100 percent consistent. Take learning language as an example. There isn't going to exist a dog, or even a picture of a dog, nearby every time a child hears the word "dog." But if dad points at the family unit Fido enough times while proverb "dog," the kid will learn what the word ways anyway.

"Modest children are justified in being conspiracy theorists, since their world is run by an inscrutable and all-powerful arrangement possessing secret communications and mysterious powers—a earth of adults, who act past a arrangement of rules that children gradually master as they abound upward," write the cognitive scientists Thomas Griffiths and Joshua Tenenbaum in a 2006 study on coincidences.

We retain this capability, even when nosotros're older and take figured out well-nigh of these more obvious patterns. Information technology tin can even so be very useful, specially for scientists who are working on unsolved questions, merely for most adults in their daily lives, whatsoever new casual connectedness is likely to exist specious. From a scientific perspective, anyway. If we realize that, and so nosotros wave it off every bit "merely a coincidence," or what Griffiths, a professor of psychology and cognitive science at the Academy of California, Berkeley, calls a "mere coincidence."

On the flip side, for someone who believes in ESP, thinking of a friend right before she calls may not exist a coincidence to them at all, simply simply more evidence to support what they already believe. The same goes for someone who believes in divine intervention—a chance meeting with a long-lost lover may be, to them, a sign from God, non a coincidence at all.

"You actually come across a question of just what conventionalities arrangement you have about how reality works," Beitman says. "Are you lot a person who believes the universe is random or are you a person who believes at that place's something going on here that perchance we gotta pay more attention to? On the continuum of explanation, on the left-hand side we've got random, on the correct-hand side we've got God. In the heart we've got little Bernie Beitman did something here, I did it but I didn't know how I did it."

In the middle zone lie what Griffiths calls "suspicious coincidences."

"To me, that'south a cardinal office of what makes something a coincidence—that it falls in that realm between being certain that something is faux and being certain that something is true," he says. If enough suspicious coincidences of a certain nature pile up, someone'south uncertainty tin can cantankerous over into belief. People tin stumble into scientific discoveries this way—"Hmm, all these people with cholera seem to be getting their water from the same well"—or into superstition—"Every time I wearable mismatched socks, my meetings go well."

Merely you can stay in that in-between zone for a long time—suspicious, but unsure. And this is nowhere more obvious than in the coincidences that present as bear witness for some kind of hidden but equally-nonetheless undiscovered ordering principle for reality, be that synchronicity or a sort of David Mitchell–esque "Everything Is Connected" web that ensnares us in its pattern. Meaningful connections can seem created by blueprint—things are "meant to be," they're happening for a reason, even if the reason is elusive. Or as Beitman puts it, "Coincidences alarm us to the mysterious hiding in plainly sight."

I suppose no one can testify at that place isn't such a thing, but it'south definitely impossible to bear witness that at that place is. So you lot're left with … not much. Where you autumn on the continuum of explanation probably says more about y'all than information technology does most reality.

* * *

In The Improbability Principle, Mitt cites a 1988 U.South. National Academy of Sciences report that concluded that in that location was "no scientific justification from research conducted over a menses of 130 years for the being of parapsychological phenomena."

"One hundred thirty years!" Hand writes. The fact that people kept trying to detect proof for the paranormal was "a testament to the ability of hope over experience if there ever was one."

But I disagree. It may be that researching the paranormal is partly an human activity of hope that you lot'll detect something where no 1 has constitute anything before. Only information technology seems like, frequently, experiences are the building blocks of belief in the paranormal, or in an underlying strength that organizes reality. Even if they're not doing formal research, people are seeking explanations for their experiences. And structure is a much more than appealing caption than chance.

Where you fall on the chance-construction continuum may take a lot to do with what you think adventure looks like in the first place. Research shows that while most people are pretty bad at generating a random string of numbers, people who believe in ESP are even worse. Even more than so than skeptics, believers tend to think that repetitions in a sequence are less likely to exist random—that a money flip sequence that went "heads, heads, heads, heads, tails" would be less likely to come up randomly than 1 that went "heads, tails, heads, tails, heads," fifty-fifty though they're every bit likely.

And so we have psychology to explain how and why we notice coincidences, and why nosotros want to make meaning from them, and we take probability to explicate why they seem to happen and then frequently. Only to explain why whatever individual coincidence happened involves a snarl of threads, of decisions and circumstances and chains of events that, even if ane could untangle information technology, wouldn't tell you lot anything virtually any other coincidence.

Jung seems to have been annoyed by this. "To grasp these unique or rare events at all, nosotros seem to be dependent on equally 'unique' and individual descriptions," he writes, despairing of the lack of a unifying theory offered by scientific discipline for these strange happenings. "This would event in a chaotic collection of curiosities, rather like those sometime natural-history cabinets where ane finds, cheek by jowl with fossils and anatomical monsters in bottles, the horn of a unicorn, a mandragora manikin, and a dried mermaid."

This is supposed to exist unappealing (surely these things should exist put in order!), but I rather like the image of coincidences equally a curio chiffonier full of odds and ends nosotros couldn't find anywhere else to put. It may non be what we're virtually comfortable with, but a "chaotic collection of curiosities" is what we've got.

Julie Beck is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where she oversees the Family unit department, and is the creator of "The Friendship Files."

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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/the-true-meaning-of-coincidences/463164/