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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff

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Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.

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Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: you all may remember Joe from Forward Thinking Um, one

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Speaker 1: of our sister podcasts. I actually appeared on a couple

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Speaker 1: of episodes talk about monsters with you guys right least

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Speaker 1: was it last October? So that was what we talked about,

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Speaker 1: monsters in the future of monsters. That was really fun.

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Speaker 1: That was that was a fun one. Got into some

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Speaker 1: of the uh the de sci fi possibilities for the

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Speaker 1: future in terms of monstrosity. And Joe's joining me this week,

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Speaker 1: going in for Julie to talk about the science of coincidence.

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Speaker 1: So I've got one for you. Tell me if you've

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Speaker 1: heard this one before. Lincoln and Kennedy. Oh, yes, you

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Speaker 1: know this. I was first exposed to this in middle

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Speaker 1: school when a teacher of mine get gave us a

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Speaker 1: list to these like it was some kind of really

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Speaker 1: important fact we needed to learn. But yeah, how about this.

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Speaker 1: Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, two American presidents, both

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Speaker 1: were elected to Congress in the year forty six. Lincoln

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Speaker 1: in eighteen forty six, Kennedy in nineteen forty six. Both

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Speaker 1: were elected president in the year sixty, Lincoln in eighteen sixty,

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Speaker 1: Kennedy in nineteen sixty. Each of their last names both

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Speaker 1: contains seven letters uh. And then there's this whole list

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Speaker 1: of coincidences that keeps going. They were both shot in

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Speaker 1: the head, they were both assassinated by Southerners. They were

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Speaker 1: both succeeded by Southerners. Their vice presidents were Southerners. Both

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Speaker 1: vice presidents were named Johnson. What are the odds? Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I remember this being rolled out, perhaps in a history class,

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Speaker 1: and uh, you know that the list would start about

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Speaker 1: these coincidences, and I would kind of tune out after

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Speaker 1: the first one or two. Um. And I guess that

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Speaker 1: that kind of boils down to the type of p

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Speaker 1: in the world, Like there there are people out there

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Speaker 1: who just tune out after the first coincidence or two,

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Speaker 1: and then there are those who obsess about it and

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Speaker 1: see this as as something something really crucial and something

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Speaker 1: really telling about these two men, about the history of

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Speaker 1: this nation, et cetera. That might be the difference between

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Speaker 1: this Robert, because I did not tune out. I was

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Speaker 1: my mind was blown to uh, to borrow from a

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Speaker 1: popular phrase. Yeah, I I sat there in my desk like, wow,

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Speaker 1: what are the odds? You know, must be some kind

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Speaker 1: of ghost spirit controlling this. It just I was amazed.

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Speaker 1: There two twin souls are basically the same entity, reincarnated

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Speaker 1: and and and tracked hunted by the same extra dimensional force. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: Or there was some sort of like cosmic literature teacher

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Speaker 1: trying to get me to observe parallels between the meaning

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Speaker 1: of these two men. Yeah, it's another one of course

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Speaker 1: that comes to mind is the of Thomas Jefferson and

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Speaker 1: John Adams, two individuals who, of course a very interconnected

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Speaker 1: in the history of the United States as well, both

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Speaker 1: instrumental in drafting the Declaration of Independence, which was signed

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Speaker 1: to July fourth, seventeen seventy six. Both men died on

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Speaker 1: the same day, July four, eighteen twenty six, exactly fifty

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Speaker 1: years to the day after the document was ratified. So

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Speaker 1: that that you know that that kind of hits you like.

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Speaker 1: I like that one because that one's nice and succinct.

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Speaker 1: You know, what were the chances? You don't need a list, Yeah,

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Speaker 1: it's right there. Yeah, I mean they were they were

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Speaker 1: good friends. So maybe there was you could imagine some

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Speaker 1: level of synchronicity about, you know, when you're giving up

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Speaker 1: and sort of handing it over to the reaper. But

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Speaker 1: but the dates are are kind of compelling there. It

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Speaker 1: would be even crazier, though, if I found out now

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Speaker 1: that you played John Adams in a production of seventeen

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Speaker 1: seventy six. No, but I was in a production of

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Speaker 1: seven times. Here you go, I played Thomas Jefferson and

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Speaker 1: been a production of seventeen seventy six. So we're tied

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Speaker 1: into it too. There's no escaping the black hole of coincidence. Okay,

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Speaker 1: I've got an even crazier coincidence. No, it's probably not.

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Speaker 1: This is kind of dumb, but why do so many

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Speaker 1: action heroes have the initials JB James Bond, Jason Bourne,

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Speaker 1: Jack Bauer, Jack Burton my favorite? Well, I mean, what

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Speaker 1: are the chances? Actually, we have no idea, do we? Yeah?

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Speaker 1: I haven't read any I mean maybe there's some really

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Speaker 1: deep statistical study on this out there, but uh yeah,

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Speaker 1: maybe is it? Is? It? On one hand, is just

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Speaker 1: possibly pure luck. And we only pick up right on

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Speaker 1: there there being a j B here, a JB there

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Speaker 1: because we're also not taking into account all the other

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Speaker 1: j B initials out there, like like does Jim Bean

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Speaker 1: factor into this, Probably not, and all of the action

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Speaker 1: heroes that aren't j B s. Yeah, And then to

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Speaker 1: what extent is it just completely almost subconscious, you know,

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Speaker 1: because you have an action hero, and and by extension

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Speaker 1: of action hero, you think of mythological hero and the

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Speaker 1: symbolic power of the hero and how it resonates through

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Speaker 1: through our culture and through through our our the way

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Speaker 1: we view the world, and and perhaps that ends up

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Speaker 1: informing it. You know, you have James Bond in your mind,

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Speaker 1: and then you end up creating Jason Bourne and Jack

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Speaker 1: Bauer in the same way. And I'm just purely spitballing here.

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Speaker 1: You could perhaps have the mythic hercules in your mind,

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Speaker 1: and then when you need to create another, you know,

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Speaker 1: mythically strong hero, perhaps you go with the Hulk. That's

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Speaker 1: the same kind of consonants. Yeah. We associate sounds with

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Speaker 1: with ideas certainly. Yeah. Now another crazy one. And I

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Speaker 1: love this one, uh, in part because it involves Edgar

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Speaker 1: Allan Poe. Of course, Edgar Allan Poe only wrote one

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Speaker 1: novel his entire career. You know, mostly known for his

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Speaker 1: his excellent short stories, but the novel in question published

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Speaker 1: an eight thirty eight the narrative of author Gordon Pym

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Speaker 1: of Nantucket. I've never read it, never mean, I never

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Speaker 1: read it there, but uh, the fiction of this story

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Speaker 1: is you have a crew of a ship called Grampus.

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Speaker 1: They wind up adrift with no food or water, and

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Speaker 1: so first they catch it toward us. They eat it,

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Speaker 1: but eventually they have to draw straws to see who

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Speaker 1: winds up has dinner. And uh, an individual named Richard

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Speaker 1: Parker draws the short straw, so they stab him and

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Speaker 1: then they eat him. And then they build a house

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Speaker 1: on the boat so that they can bury him behind

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Speaker 1: the wall. Yeah, I mean, you gotta play the greatest hits, right,

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Speaker 1: Here's where it gets crazy. Years later, in four a

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Speaker 1: yacht named the minion Net leaves England, is headed towards Sydney, Australia,

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Speaker 1: and it sinks in a storm. Four men wind up

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Speaker 1: adrift in a lifeboat. They catch a turtle. They eat

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Speaker 1: it all right, But again you're probably thinking at this point, Okay,

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Speaker 1: you know turtles, how hard are they to catch? There

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Speaker 1: are lots of turtles in the world, they're all tasty. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and if you're four men in a boat in the

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Speaker 1: middle of nowhere and you're hungry, you're gonna eat it.

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Speaker 1: No good deal. But then it turns to cannibalism, and

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Speaker 1: this too you might think, well, what a four guys

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Speaker 1: in the middle in the middle of the ocean in

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Speaker 1: a little boat. They're hungry, They've only had one turtle

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Speaker 1: to eat. It's kind of inevitable, right, Well, this is

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Speaker 1: this is crazy. But aboard this vessel, you have a

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Speaker 1: seventeen year old named Richard Parker, the same name as

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Speaker 1: the individual they ate in pose novel. This guy falls overboard,

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Speaker 1: drinks a bunch of seawater to quench his thirst. Uh,

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Speaker 1: and so he starts going. He starts deteriorating really quickly

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Speaker 1: here and they side, well, he's he's about to die.

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Speaker 1: We're gonna have to eat him, and they eat him.

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Speaker 1: So you have these this fictional account of cannibalism seeming

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Speaker 1: to inform this real life act of cannibalism years later

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Speaker 1: and in almost identical circumstances. Yeah, and it's so gruesome

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Speaker 1: you can really doubt that they staged it to happen

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Speaker 1: on purpose. Because of the novel. Yeah, Like I can't

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Speaker 1: imagine them being on the boat and someone saying, look,

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Speaker 1: I read this book, and uh, there was a guy

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Speaker 1: in the book named Richard Parker and they ate him in.

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Speaker 1: Your name's Richard Parker. So I'm not saying we have

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Speaker 1: to eat you, but come on. Yeah, it's like the

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Speaker 1: worst school play every exactly Alright. So, uh, in this

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Speaker 1: we're talking about coincidence, and in this episode we're talking

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Speaker 1: about coincidence and the science of coincidence, how we perceive

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Speaker 1: a coincidence. Uh, but let's let's get down to brass tacks.

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Speaker 1: What exactly is a coincidence? Yeah, and specifically, I think

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Speaker 1: we should think about what's the difference between a coincidence

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Speaker 1: and just an improbable event? Um so of standard Oxford Dictionaries,

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Speaker 1: definition is a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without

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Speaker 1: apparent causal connection. Okay, So that's sort of playing up

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Speaker 1: on the like the two different things coinciding, like like

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Speaker 1: the pim right, like the Gordon Pim example, or like

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Speaker 1: Jefferson and Adams, you know, dying on the same day.

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Speaker 1: Another way of putting it is that it's a concurrence

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Speaker 1: of events that is quote perceived as meaningfully related with

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Speaker 1: no apparent causal connection, um and and that quotes from

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Speaker 1: a paper that we're gonna end up talking about later

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Speaker 1: in this episode. But I think that's something we should highlight,

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Speaker 1: is that a coincidence has a perceptual element. It's something

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Speaker 1: that seems to be important to us, like it has

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Speaker 1: a psychic weight. But you know it, it kind of

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Speaker 1: comes back to what we're talking about earlier about the

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Speaker 1: two students in the classroom. One of them is just

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Speaker 1: enthralled by the Kennedy Lincoln coincidence list and the other is, uh,

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Speaker 1: it's just tunes out on it. Because that that kind

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Speaker 1: of comes down to how we can look at coincidence

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Speaker 1: in the life. You can either say it's just pure dumblock,

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Speaker 1: is just a matter of statistics, And then there's the

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Speaker 1: the the view that there's something else going on here,

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Speaker 1: that there is some sort of connected, connective tissue that

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Speaker 1: we were just not privy to. And we have seen

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Speaker 1: some very you know, thoughtful and informed study on both

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Speaker 1: sides of the issue. Right there have been brilliant people

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Speaker 1: throughout the years who paid way more attention to coincidences

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Speaker 1: than we might today. I mean, we all experience coincidences.

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Speaker 1: I would be shocked if was someone who would say, no,

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Speaker 1: I've never experienced anything like a really weird concurrence. It

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Speaker 1: happens every single day. It happened to us we were

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Speaker 1: talking about while we were researching these podcasts, so like

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Speaker 1: just strange topics coming up and seemingly unrelated episodes. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I mean, of course that kind of gets down to that,

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Speaker 1: like the power of coincidence. Coincidence can can kill you,

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Speaker 1: Coincidence can can make you rich. Coincidence can just be

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Speaker 1: this seemingly meaningless, little connective tissue between two things. Um,

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Speaker 1: and it's a trapped It's so easy to fall into,

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Speaker 1: especially given how important causation and determination are in human culture. Right,

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Speaker 1: And we'll get more into that later, but I mean,

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Speaker 1: you you almost can't fault an individual for for thinking

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Speaker 1: about these coincidences in terms of some sort of connection. Now,

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Speaker 1: and you see it at every level. I mean, what

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Speaker 1: is the meat cute and every romantic comedy, it's always

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Speaker 1: some kind of coincidence that brings people together. And on

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Speaker 1: the opposite end, you've got famous scientists who have tried

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Speaker 1: to investigate, you know, what's the meaning of coincidences. I

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Speaker 1: think one great example is the Austrian biologists Paul Camera.

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Speaker 1: Uh you know, if if you ever have that feeling like, wow,

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Speaker 1: I think everything's connected, he did too. So Paul Camera

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Speaker 1: lived from eighteen eighty to nineteen twenty six and he

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Speaker 1: was a proponent of Lamarckian evolution. Have you ever I'm

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Speaker 1: sure you're familiar with this, the one to just give

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Speaker 1: everyone a quick reminder, the idea that say giraffes, their

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Speaker 1: next grow long because they're reaching for those top those

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Speaker 1: top leaves, and so it's like one generation informing the next. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: So normally, now what we believe is min Dalian genetics.

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Speaker 1: You know, you inherit, you inherit your genetic traits from

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Speaker 1: your parents germ cells, and you pass those same genetic

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Speaker 1: traits onto your kids. And unless you have a certain mutation,

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Speaker 1: that can be basically random. But the Lamarchian ideas where

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Speaker 1: that you could you know, maybe if you work out

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Speaker 1: a lot or something, your kids will be born with

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Speaker 1: bigger muscles or something will strain your neck trying to

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Speaker 1: reach something in this life, and in the next life,

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Speaker 1: your kids will have longer necks by virtue of your

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Speaker 1: your straining. Yeah, and so in one famous experiment, Camera

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Speaker 1: claimed to have caused male specimens of a of an

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Speaker 1: animal called the midwife toad to grow these black forearm

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Speaker 1: paths that some species of male toads have, and that

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Speaker 1: they used them to hold onto females during mating. Unfortunately,

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Speaker 1: some other scientists in the field examined Camera specimens and

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Speaker 1: found that the black pads on his toads had been

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Speaker 1: injected with artificial inc and so Camera denied responsibility for that.

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Speaker 1: And I guess nobody really knows whose fault that was.

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Speaker 1: But the accusation here would be that he cheated, right,

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Speaker 1: which is important because we'll come back to cheating. Right.

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Speaker 1: But Camera wasn't only interested in toads and inheritance. He

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Speaker 1: was also interested in coincidences, like he kept a diary

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Speaker 1: of daily coincidences. And just one example against it in

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Speaker 1: a in a paper that we're going to bring up

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Speaker 1: in a bit, his brother in law tells him that

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Speaker 1: he attended to concert and held both the ticket for

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Speaker 1: seat number nine and the coach check ticket numbered nine. WHOA, yeah, yeah,

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Speaker 1: But anyway, that itself doesn't seem all that interesting until

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Speaker 1: you start making lists which Camera did, and he added

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Speaker 1: them up over time. And I have to admit, when

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Speaker 1: you add it's it's kind of like the Lincoln Kennedy thing.

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Speaker 1: The first one isn't all that interesting until you start

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Speaker 1: adding them together, and then it really gets your attention.

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Speaker 1: There's this cumulative effect of this, like snowballing kind of attention,

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Speaker 1: getting significance of coincidences that pile up on each other.

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Speaker 1: So Camera organized these thoughts into a hypothesis he called

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Speaker 1: the law of seriality, uh. And he posited basically this

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Speaker 1: underlying force in reality that was a quote world mosaic

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Speaker 1: or cosmic kaleidoscope that brings like objects and events together.

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Speaker 1: So almost a kind of of emergent order, uh in

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Speaker 1: the chaos yet show which I could buy into it.

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Speaker 1: And we see in emergences as a major topic in

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Speaker 1: understanding and intelligence, evolution, etcetera. So why not coincidence? Sure?

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Speaker 1: But of course Camera wasn't the only scientist who has

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Speaker 1: been interested in coincidences and who has attributed some significant

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Speaker 1: role in the universe to them. Carl Young. Carl Young

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Speaker 1: loved coincidences. Carl So. Carl Young was a Swiss psychiatrist.

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Speaker 1: You've probably heard of him. As sort of like a

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Speaker 1: he's one of the big names in psychology and psychiatry,

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Speaker 1: following Freud. You know, it's like the Mantle, I think

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Speaker 1: union and the big big tents. But Young was was

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Speaker 1: very much into sort of interesting borderline magical esoteric ideas.

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Speaker 1: So he loved the paranormal. He was interested in meaningful

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Speaker 1: connections and mystical truths, eesp astrology, psychokinesis, all kinds of

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Speaker 1: stuff like that, and so naturally he was really interested

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Speaker 1: in coincidences. And so he wrote a book called Synchronicity

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Speaker 1: and a Causal Connecting Principle. And this book was actually,

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Speaker 1: uh it was I think extracted from a larger volume

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Speaker 1: of his work and eventually published on its own. But

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Speaker 1: I read this book when I was in college, and

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Speaker 1: I remember thinking, at the time, yet again playing up

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Speaker 1: on my I guess I'm susceptible to this kind of thing.

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Speaker 1: I was like, I wonder if he's onto something here.

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Speaker 1: It seemed really interesting. So what kind of coincidences did

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Speaker 1: Young notice? Well, he gives one example. This is the

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Speaker 1: one that's always cited. It's it's it's his favorite example.

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Speaker 1: It's the Golden Scaub. So in a nineteen fifty one.

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Speaker 1: I believe it was essay on synchronicity. Young told the

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Speaker 1: story that he had been seeing a female patient for psychoanalysis,

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Speaker 1: and Young believed basically that she was languishing because she

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Speaker 1: was in sort of a prison of rationality. She was

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Speaker 1: just too rational. She she wouldn't quote open up to

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Speaker 1: the human side of life. For Young, I think this

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Speaker 1: had a decidedly sort of supernatural tinge to it. And um,

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Speaker 1: he wanted to uh and this is from a particular

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Speaker 1: translation quote sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding.

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Speaker 1: So one day she was in psychoanalysis telling him about

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Speaker 1: a dream she'd had where someone gave her a golden

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Speaker 1: scar rub. And Young claims at that very moment, an

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Speaker 1: insect started knocking against the window of the office where

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Speaker 1: they were, and he opened the window and he caught

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Speaker 1: the insect and it was a beatle. It was a

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Speaker 1: scarub type of beetle. And he said it was like

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Speaker 1: a green color, but in the right light it reflected

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Speaker 1: the light and looked gold. And then he presented it

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Speaker 1: to her in this moment of you know, one of

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Speaker 1: those there are more things in heaven and Earth than

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Speaker 1: dreamt of in your fullosophy kind of moments, and and

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Speaker 1: he hoped that this helped shatter her rationalism. And so

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Speaker 1: I don't know if that happened to me. If I

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Speaker 1: had just been talking about a beetle and then a

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Speaker 1: beatle started knocking against the window, I'd probably think that

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Speaker 1: was interesting. But I don't know if I designed any

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Speaker 1: meaning to it. Yeah, it doesn't really smack of just

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Speaker 1: Heaven sent beetle sent to you know, open up my

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Speaker 1: mind and make me more you know, in love with life,

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Speaker 1: because they're probably just a lot of beetles flying around

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Speaker 1: out of there. Sure, but Young commented that when coincidences

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Speaker 1: like these accumulate, it's what we were talking about earlier.

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Speaker 1: The more of them happened, the more we take note

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Speaker 1: of them, uh, and with good reason, because it's harder

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Speaker 1: to explain them away by random chance. The more they accumulate,

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Speaker 1: you fill up that entire diary with them, right. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: it has weight to it exactly. So Young came up

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Speaker 1: with this term synchronicity to describe the a causal connecting

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Speaker 1: principle that links meaningfully significant events that couldn't be connected

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Speaker 1: by physical causes. So he's not saying that there's like

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Speaker 1: a there's like a you know, a ghost that put

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Speaker 1: the beetle there, because that would be in some way causal. Instead,

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Speaker 1: he's saying there's another force in the universe other than causality.

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Speaker 1: It sort of runs parallel to causality that connects events

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Speaker 1: and and creates links of significance. But it's not physics, Okay,

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Speaker 1: Like I kind of in making sense of it in

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Speaker 1: my own head, I thought of it in terms of

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Speaker 1: this room or recording in in which case we have

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Speaker 1: wires that are running outside of the walls, then running

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Speaker 1: across the floor and under the table, and then there

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Speaker 1: are the wires within the wall that we cannot see.

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Speaker 1: And so the wires that are running outside of the

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Speaker 1: walls are are kind of like causality. We can we

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Speaker 1: can see them. We're in causality. We've our brain spends

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Speaker 1: a lot of time making sense of cause and effect.

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Speaker 1: But then there's this idea that there might be some

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Speaker 1: other force at work within the walls. We can't see it,

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Speaker 1: we're not we're not privy to it. It's exact in

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Speaker 1: an ins and outs, but it's it's making things interconnected.

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Speaker 1: It's it's these connections are popping up throughout our life,

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Speaker 1: throughout the times game. Yeah, causality connects events in the

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Speaker 1: physical realm, and according to Young, synchronicity would connect events

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Speaker 1: in sort of like the psychic meaningfulness realcom that it

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Speaker 1: was this force it makes things have meaning and shows

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Speaker 1: us meaning by bringing unlikely events together. Okay, so this

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Speaker 1: would be kind of like in um, you seen Interstellar? Yes, okay,

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Speaker 1: so there's the whole bit in there about love. Is

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Speaker 1: this uh, this connecting force like that seems to line

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Speaker 1: up rather closely with this idea of synchronicity. Yeah, I

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Speaker 1: think that makes sense. So coincidences obviously have this power

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Speaker 1: over us. They captivate us, they seem significance. They make

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Speaker 1: us wonder if there is some kind of magical or

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Speaker 1: super psychic force at work. And sometimes it can be

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Speaker 1: hard to tell because we don't know how to analyze coincidences.

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Speaker 1: You know, like there when something happens, like you get

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Speaker 1: a number nine from the coach check and then you're

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Speaker 1: in seat number nine. There's really no reason to ask

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Speaker 1: why something like that happened, but you can perhaps ask,

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Speaker 1: wait a minute, did anything significant actually happen? Indeed, now

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Speaker 1: we've talked about the the sort of supernatural end of

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Speaker 1: the pool, the idea that there is some sort of

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Speaker 1: of intrinsic synchronicity connecting these these events. And now we're

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Speaker 1: gonna we're gonna look at a more critical and more

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Speaker 1: skeptical side of the pool. Right, So, several times so

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Speaker 1: far in this podcast we've referred ahead to a paper,

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Speaker 1: and this is sort of a classic paper in statistics

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Speaker 1: and mathematical analysis of coincidences, and it's called Methods for

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Speaker 1: Studying Coincidences. It was published by the Journal of the

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Speaker 1: American Statistical Association in December nineteen nine. I think it

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Speaker 1: had been given at a been given as a presentation

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Speaker 1: in a couple of years before. But it's by Percy

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Speaker 1: Diaconis and Frederick Moss Stellar, and they were I believe,

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Speaker 1: Harvard mathematicians, and Diaconis and moss Stellar offer four main

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Speaker 1: categories of explanation for seeming examples of synchronicity. You know,

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Speaker 1: they refer to camera, they refer to young and they say,

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Speaker 1: what what do we make of these events? And and

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Speaker 1: how can we tell if something is actually going on

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Speaker 1: that's worth noting. So the first of the options is

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Speaker 1: that there is an actual causal link. It's not a coincidence,

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Speaker 1: because there's a cause that to seemingly disparate events happen together. Uh.

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Speaker 1: The second one is psychology. It's something about the way

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Speaker 1: our brains work, the fact that we're noticing what seemed

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Speaker 1: to be coincidences, and will definitely have more on that later.

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Speaker 1: Another point is what they call the multiplicity of end points,

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Speaker 1: and this is going to be about how how we

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Speaker 1: count something as a hit. And then the last one

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Speaker 1: that they site is called the law of truly large numbers,

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Speaker 1: and that's going to be about statistical context. So I

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Speaker 1: think we should go back and look at causes first.

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Speaker 1: So when something happens that's seemingly just a huge coincidence,

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Speaker 1: you should always consider the fact that there might be

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Speaker 1: a cause that's more obvious than you realize. Yeah, this

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Speaker 1: would of course be the birthday problem, right, which is

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Speaker 1: a problem that that people will encounter just everywhere, right

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Speaker 1: and in your workplace, at school, et cetera. I mean

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Speaker 1: we can encounter it right here in the podcast Chamber

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Speaker 1: Joe Win your Birthday July six, Minds October six, whoa synchronicity?

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Speaker 1: Are you serious? I'm serious? Were sixteen sixteen. Okay, what

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Speaker 1: happened when you were sixteen? What city were you in? Oh, Paris, Tennessee.

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Speaker 1: I was in Tennessee too when I was sorry, I

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Speaker 1: was in fatal Tennessee. But still Tennessee, Tennessee. Man, something

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Speaker 1: weird is going on. Yeah, or but but worth noting

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Speaker 1: here is notice how we're we're singling in on the hits.

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Speaker 1: We totally missed the same day birthday by by many months,

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Speaker 1: but we're counting as a hit because we both had sixteen. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: so here's the birthday problem. Let's say you're in a

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Speaker 1: subway car and you're riding around with some random strangers,

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Speaker 1: and because you are extremely rude, you start getting people's attention,

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Speaker 1: getting them to take their headphones off, and you you

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Speaker 1: ask the strangers in the car all of their birthdays.

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Speaker 1: That's not rude, that's just good manners. I mean, it's

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Speaker 1: a it's a nice breaker. Okay, Yeah, you might want

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Speaker 1: to know if today's their birthday, and you should offer

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Speaker 1: them this cake that you found on the ground. Exactly. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: So how many people would you have to ask before

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Speaker 1: It's more likely than not that you'd find two people

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Speaker 1: with the same exact birthday. Well, let's see three sixty

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Speaker 1: five days in a year. Uh, so you'd think, well,

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Speaker 1: maybe I need a talk to three d sixty five people, right,

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Speaker 1: or maybe twice that. Yeah, I mean I'm not good

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Speaker 1: at doing math like that immediately, but that's where I

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Speaker 1: would have gone the first place in my head. Okay,

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Speaker 1: it's got to be like one in three sixty five

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Speaker 1: times two or something like that. But no, the answer

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Speaker 1: is twenty three. Okay, But we're not going to take

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Speaker 1: the time to explain all the math. You can go

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Speaker 1: look that up online. It is well documented. Uh, this

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Speaker 1: is a classic problem. If you ask twenty three people

424
00:24:17,400 --> 00:24:19,639
Speaker 1: in a room, in a train car, whatever, you have

425
00:24:19,720 --> 00:24:22,480
Speaker 1: reached the fifty fifty odds that two of them will

426
00:24:22,560 --> 00:24:25,080
Speaker 1: have the same birthday. And one of the key points

427
00:24:25,080 --> 00:24:28,400
Speaker 1: here is that you're not starting with the specified birthday.

428
00:24:28,400 --> 00:24:30,639
Speaker 1: You're not saying how many people do I have to

429
00:24:30,640 --> 00:24:34,040
Speaker 1: ask before I find somebody with my birthday? You're just

430
00:24:34,080 --> 00:24:37,240
Speaker 1: trying to find one match, right, Yeah, in this group

431
00:24:37,359 --> 00:24:41,000
Speaker 1: of if you ask twenty three people, odds are two

432
00:24:41,000 --> 00:24:43,639
Speaker 1: of them will have the same birthday. What if you

433
00:24:43,680 --> 00:24:46,400
Speaker 1: want to find three people with the same birthday, that's

434
00:24:46,400 --> 00:24:49,240
Speaker 1: got to be astronomical, right I would think so. I

435
00:24:49,240 --> 00:24:52,200
Speaker 1: mean you think that would just multiply it. Yeah. No, Actually,

436
00:24:52,240 --> 00:24:55,240
Speaker 1: if your train car can hold people, chances are in

437
00:24:55,280 --> 00:24:57,840
Speaker 1: your favor you reach odds again if you ask a

438
00:24:57,960 --> 00:25:03,880
Speaker 1: D eight. So that just shows that the statistical probability

439
00:25:03,920 --> 00:25:06,520
Speaker 1: of in this case, this is a birthday match occurring,

440
00:25:06,880 --> 00:25:11,959
Speaker 1: he's actually uh, far greater than we we we may

441
00:25:12,000 --> 00:25:14,560
Speaker 1: get a credit at the surface. Yeah, I think the

442
00:25:14,600 --> 00:25:17,760
Speaker 1: point is that we are often surprised by events that

443
00:25:17,840 --> 00:25:23,080
Speaker 1: are not statistically unlikely at all, Like they just don't

444
00:25:23,119 --> 00:25:28,800
Speaker 1: match our intuitions. Basically, we we have exaggerated intuitions for

445
00:25:28,840 --> 00:25:33,280
Speaker 1: how unlikely some things are, especially it turns out particular

446
00:25:33,320 --> 00:25:35,880
Speaker 1: types of things, for example, things that happened to us.

447
00:25:36,040 --> 00:25:38,720
Speaker 1: This is a funny thing. We're we're way more surprised

448
00:25:38,720 --> 00:25:42,679
Speaker 1: about coincidences that happened to us than coincidences that happened

449
00:25:42,680 --> 00:25:44,960
Speaker 1: to other people. Oh yeah, because we're all the center

450
00:25:44,960 --> 00:25:47,080
Speaker 1: of our own stories, right, we're going to be We're

451
00:25:47,080 --> 00:25:50,000
Speaker 1: more interesting, We're more invested in this one. Um. I

452
00:25:50,000 --> 00:25:53,680
Speaker 1: mean just to come back to back to the statistical possibilities,

453
00:25:53,720 --> 00:25:55,239
Speaker 1: I mean, just thinking back to how we both were

454
00:25:55,280 --> 00:25:58,080
Speaker 1: like whoa sixteen whoa Tennessee. But when you really break

455
00:25:58,080 --> 00:26:00,720
Speaker 1: it down, like the chances of us scoring the same day,

456
00:26:01,040 --> 00:26:03,560
Speaker 1: I mean the same date within a month, that's what

457
00:26:03,960 --> 00:26:07,480
Speaker 1: one and thirty one chance for the most part, and

458
00:26:07,680 --> 00:26:10,040
Speaker 1: Tennessee what we could say, Well, we're both living and

459
00:26:10,080 --> 00:26:14,760
Speaker 1: working in Atlanta, so there's probably a reasonable chance that

460
00:26:14,840 --> 00:26:17,880
Speaker 1: we would come from a southern state, of which there

461
00:26:17,920 --> 00:26:22,200
Speaker 1: are I mean, but not that many. There's very many

462
00:26:22,240 --> 00:26:28,040
Speaker 1: literature majors from Tennessee end up in Atlanta. That's not unusual, yea. Um,

463
00:26:28,080 --> 00:26:30,600
Speaker 1: but so hey, there could be another cause though. So

464
00:26:30,840 --> 00:26:35,840
Speaker 1: that's just the apparent cause. The cause that's um readily available,

465
00:26:36,000 --> 00:26:39,480
Speaker 1: you just haven't looked at the math. There could also

466
00:26:39,600 --> 00:26:43,080
Speaker 1: be a hidden cause. When something appears to be a coincidence,

467
00:26:43,119 --> 00:26:46,320
Speaker 1: it's not actually a coincidence because there's an actual causal

468
00:26:46,400 --> 00:26:50,240
Speaker 1: link that you don't know about. Um. The classic example

469
00:26:50,280 --> 00:26:53,560
Speaker 1: of this would be cheating and gambling. Yes, this is

470
00:26:53,560 --> 00:26:56,239
Speaker 1: where a person rolls a dice, right, Yeah, So so

471
00:26:56,280 --> 00:26:58,320
Speaker 1: you roll a pair of dice, you know, a hundred

472
00:26:58,320 --> 00:27:01,920
Speaker 1: times in a row. And let's say you you roll

473
00:27:02,040 --> 00:27:05,800
Speaker 1: a seven nineties six out of those hundred times. Yeah,

474
00:27:05,960 --> 00:27:08,239
Speaker 1: like the more the more every time you roll when

475
00:27:08,280 --> 00:27:10,600
Speaker 1: you get the same number he gets, that gets even

476
00:27:10,640 --> 00:27:15,000
Speaker 1: more astronomical. That have happened? How could that possibly have happened? Well,

477
00:27:15,040 --> 00:27:18,000
Speaker 1: obviously if there's a hidden cause, which is the dice

478
00:27:18,080 --> 00:27:20,800
Speaker 1: are loaded so that they will turn up a seven

479
00:27:20,800 --> 00:27:23,800
Speaker 1: pretty much every time. So there you go. You don't

480
00:27:23,800 --> 00:27:25,000
Speaker 1: have to be a god to do it. You just

481
00:27:25,040 --> 00:27:27,159
Speaker 1: have to be a cheater with with a pair of

482
00:27:27,160 --> 00:27:30,080
Speaker 1: loaded diet exactly. And another example comes to mind. This

483
00:27:30,160 --> 00:27:34,000
Speaker 1: was going back to Carl Young. Carl Young was associated

484
00:27:34,080 --> 00:27:38,639
Speaker 1: with the physicist of Wolfgang Polly, and Paully was famous

485
00:27:38,680 --> 00:27:42,280
Speaker 1: for coming up with the Poully exclusion principle, which is

486
00:27:42,320 --> 00:27:44,919
Speaker 1: important in quantum mechanics. I don't remember exactly what it

487
00:27:44,960 --> 00:27:48,920
Speaker 1: does right now, but it's something that's right. But yeah,

488
00:27:49,000 --> 00:27:52,040
Speaker 1: he um. So he was a known physicist and it

489
00:27:52,119 --> 00:27:55,480
Speaker 1: did really important work. But Paul, I think, was also

490
00:27:55,600 --> 00:27:59,520
Speaker 1: sort of interested in the you know, strange synchronicity type ideas,

491
00:28:00,160 --> 00:28:03,359
Speaker 1: and Polly, in addition to the Polly principle, which is

492
00:28:03,359 --> 00:28:07,600
Speaker 1: an actual principle of science, was known for the Polly effect,

493
00:28:07,760 --> 00:28:11,760
Speaker 1: which is a more anecdotal effect. But the story goes

494
00:28:11,800 --> 00:28:16,280
Speaker 1: like this everywhere Wolfgang Polly went, machines broke. Ah. This

495
00:28:16,320 --> 00:28:19,920
Speaker 1: is the classic watch stopper scenario. Yeah, so he would

496
00:28:19,920 --> 00:28:22,600
Speaker 1: show up in a lab somewhere to test out some

497
00:28:22,640 --> 00:28:25,720
Speaker 1: equipment and what do you know, the equipment and working today.

498
00:28:25,760 --> 00:28:27,720
Speaker 1: Can't figure it out, And then he'd leave the lab

499
00:28:28,040 --> 00:28:30,800
Speaker 1: and suddenly it'd start working again. Uh. We don't know

500
00:28:30,840 --> 00:28:33,160
Speaker 1: how many of these stories are actually true, but this

501
00:28:33,240 --> 00:28:37,240
Speaker 1: is a popular anecdotal legend, and we'll just accept that

502
00:28:37,320 --> 00:28:40,080
Speaker 1: it's true for the purpose of the conversation that everywhere

503
00:28:40,120 --> 00:28:42,320
Speaker 1: he went it seemed like stuff wouldn't work. In fact,

504
00:28:42,360 --> 00:28:46,280
Speaker 1: there was even one anecdote I read about where some

505
00:28:46,320 --> 00:28:49,080
Speaker 1: people were working in a lab and their equipment stopped working,

506
00:28:49,120 --> 00:28:51,960
Speaker 1: and they joked, is you know Wolf going here? Is

507
00:28:52,320 --> 00:28:54,800
Speaker 1: as he'd come down the hall. Uh. And then later

508
00:28:54,840 --> 00:28:57,640
Speaker 1: they found out that he just happened to have been

509
00:28:57,840 --> 00:29:01,720
Speaker 1: changing trains in that city on that day at the

510
00:29:01,760 --> 00:29:07,520
Speaker 1: time that their equipment malfunction. He has some long reaching effects.

511
00:29:07,560 --> 00:29:12,920
Speaker 1: So whether or not that's true, right, let's go ahead

512
00:29:12,960 --> 00:29:15,520
Speaker 1: and settle now on. But but if it were true,

513
00:29:15,960 --> 00:29:19,800
Speaker 1: you could perhaps look for actual hidden causes. It might

514
00:29:19,840 --> 00:29:23,520
Speaker 1: not be a synchronistic coincidence that you know that the universe,

515
00:29:23,640 --> 00:29:27,160
Speaker 1: the the Unice, the Unice Mundi is trying to tell

516
00:29:27,880 --> 00:29:31,320
Speaker 1: Wolfgung Polly something about his relationship with machines or something.

517
00:29:31,640 --> 00:29:34,560
Speaker 1: It could be perhaps that Polly had a habit of

518
00:29:34,600 --> 00:29:37,360
Speaker 1: scuffing around his office carpet before heading into the lab,

519
00:29:37,720 --> 00:29:39,880
Speaker 1: and that led him to discharge a lot of static

520
00:29:39,920 --> 00:29:43,760
Speaker 1: electricity which could break some really delicate instruments. Or Polly

521
00:29:44,000 --> 00:29:46,800
Speaker 1: is just really clumsy. Yeah, And of course it's also

522
00:29:46,800 --> 00:29:48,760
Speaker 1: not taken to account all the machines that are not

523
00:29:48,800 --> 00:29:52,320
Speaker 1: breaking in Polly's life, right, it's literally everything he touches.

524
00:29:52,440 --> 00:29:55,000
Speaker 1: Does it just fall apart and rust, you know, before

525
00:29:55,120 --> 00:29:57,880
Speaker 1: his very eyes? Or is it just oh this thing broke?

526
00:29:59,000 --> 00:30:01,400
Speaker 1: How could that happen? How get a machine and this

527
00:30:01,480 --> 00:30:05,640
Speaker 1: little device made by human? How could this possibly stop working?

528
00:30:06,480 --> 00:30:08,000
Speaker 1: You know? So you end up that you end up

529
00:30:08,040 --> 00:30:11,120
Speaker 1: honing in on those instances where it doesn't work, right.

530
00:30:11,160 --> 00:30:14,320
Speaker 1: And it's also i think probably not communicating the reality

531
00:30:14,400 --> 00:30:17,320
Speaker 1: about lab equipment, which is that it probably breaks all

532
00:30:17,360 --> 00:30:19,000
Speaker 1: the time, and there's a lot of it. Any lab

533
00:30:19,080 --> 00:30:20,800
Speaker 1: is going to have a lot of equipment, and all

534
00:30:20,840 --> 00:30:23,840
Speaker 1: of it has a half life, and and and a

535
00:30:24,520 --> 00:30:28,360
Speaker 1: death point. Yeah. Um so, so yeah, that's the idea

536
00:30:28,400 --> 00:30:30,479
Speaker 1: of the hidden cause. And then, of course those are

537
00:30:30,520 --> 00:30:34,040
Speaker 1: just some hypothetical examples we're offering. The true hidden cause

538
00:30:34,040 --> 00:30:36,520
Speaker 1: would be the one we haven't even thought of, you know,

539
00:30:36,600 --> 00:30:40,120
Speaker 1: the cause that's an actual physical causal link that's causing

540
00:30:40,440 --> 00:30:44,200
Speaker 1: things to malfunction in police presence, but we can't even

541
00:30:44,240 --> 00:30:48,520
Speaker 1: guess what it is it might be there. Yeah, so

542
00:30:48,560 --> 00:30:50,400
Speaker 1: I think we should move on to another one of

543
00:30:50,440 --> 00:30:53,160
Speaker 1: the points that Diaconis and Mostell are making their paper,

544
00:30:53,440 --> 00:30:57,400
Speaker 1: which is the quote multiplicity of end points or the

545
00:30:57,640 --> 00:31:01,160
Speaker 1: sort of like the cost of close point. Yeah, because

546
00:31:01,160 --> 00:31:04,720
Speaker 1: if we have already illustrated close counts and coincidence, Like

547
00:31:04,720 --> 00:31:07,280
Speaker 1: when we're talking about birthdays, we were looking for the

548
00:31:07,360 --> 00:31:10,200
Speaker 1: same day in the same month, but we settled for sixteen.

549
00:31:10,360 --> 00:31:12,960
Speaker 1: You know, we were looking for the same Tennessee town

550
00:31:13,000 --> 00:31:15,200
Speaker 1: and oh my god, we accidentally went to the same

551
00:31:15,280 --> 00:31:17,400
Speaker 1: high school and didn't realize it. But we'll settle for

552
00:31:17,440 --> 00:31:20,000
Speaker 1: just the same state. And that's what we're doing. We're

553
00:31:20,840 --> 00:31:23,680
Speaker 1: we're constantly looking for these these little coins as to

554
00:31:23,760 --> 00:31:25,840
Speaker 1: line up, and we'll settle for something that's close. And

555
00:31:25,880 --> 00:31:30,160
Speaker 1: if you settle for close the statistical possibilities just blow up,

556
00:31:30,240 --> 00:31:33,640
Speaker 1: such as with the birthday situation. Um, if you want

557
00:31:33,680 --> 00:31:36,120
Speaker 1: to uh to, uh to, if you want to hit

558
00:31:36,120 --> 00:31:38,720
Speaker 1: a near birthday match with a group of people, so

559
00:31:38,840 --> 00:31:41,240
Speaker 1: make sure you're back on the back in the train

560
00:31:41,280 --> 00:31:44,760
Speaker 1: car and you're willing to to settle for all right,

561
00:31:44,840 --> 00:31:47,320
Speaker 1: let's see who on this train car has a birthday

562
00:31:47,320 --> 00:31:49,480
Speaker 1: within a day of each other. You know, we'll settle

563
00:31:49,520 --> 00:31:52,800
Speaker 1: for a close match. Then you only seven people are

564
00:31:52,880 --> 00:31:58,400
Speaker 1: needed for that chance. So yeah, so so coming down

565
00:31:58,440 --> 00:32:01,000
Speaker 1: from from a perfect match to a near match just

566
00:32:01,040 --> 00:32:04,440
Speaker 1: opens it up tremendously. And then, of course, when you

567
00:32:04,480 --> 00:32:08,440
Speaker 1: think about the accumulation effect that we were talking about earlier,

568
00:32:08,720 --> 00:32:13,520
Speaker 1: it makes it much easier if you are accumulating close matches.

569
00:32:14,600 --> 00:32:17,160
Speaker 1: You keep building up close matches, and over time they

570
00:32:17,200 --> 00:32:20,840
Speaker 1: start to look significant because they just turned into hits

571
00:32:20,840 --> 00:32:23,560
Speaker 1: in your memory. You know, you don't remember, well, that

572
00:32:23,640 --> 00:32:26,400
Speaker 1: was kind of close. You remember there's a hit, and

573
00:32:26,440 --> 00:32:29,200
Speaker 1: then another hit, and then another hit, and some of

574
00:32:29,200 --> 00:32:31,320
Speaker 1: these might be actual hits, some of these might be

575
00:32:31,680 --> 00:32:35,160
Speaker 1: close hits, but they all kind of blend together. Yeah,

576
00:32:35,240 --> 00:32:37,720
Speaker 1: this brings to mind like cold readings and uh, you know,

577
00:32:37,760 --> 00:32:40,800
Speaker 1: and the whole psychic game right where you throw out,

578
00:32:40,800 --> 00:32:43,200
Speaker 1: oh i'm i'm I think there's somebody named Joe in

579
00:32:43,560 --> 00:32:45,400
Speaker 1: your life, and you know I have an uncle Joseph.

580
00:32:45,440 --> 00:32:48,200
Speaker 1: There you go, close becomes a perfect match and then

581
00:32:48,160 --> 00:32:49,520
Speaker 1: in the blink of an eye, and then that is

582
00:32:49,560 --> 00:32:53,640
Speaker 1: how you reckon your memory. Okay. Then, also when studying coincidences,

583
00:32:53,720 --> 00:32:56,760
Speaker 1: that this is another category of of Diaconis and Mustellar.

584
00:32:56,840 --> 00:32:59,800
Speaker 1: There's the law of truly large numbers. And this is

585
00:32:59,800 --> 00:33:04,520
Speaker 1: a point about context. So let's say somebody encounters of

586
00:33:04,680 --> 00:33:08,160
Speaker 1: an event that is truly incredibly unlikely for a person

587
00:33:08,200 --> 00:33:10,680
Speaker 1: to experience. So it's not one of those things with

588
00:33:10,720 --> 00:33:13,600
Speaker 1: a hidden cause. It's not one of those things where

589
00:33:13,680 --> 00:33:16,400
Speaker 1: the odds are actually, you know, much more probable than

590
00:33:16,440 --> 00:33:21,040
Speaker 1: you realize. It's truly unlikely. You still have to consider context.

591
00:33:21,120 --> 00:33:25,160
Speaker 1: You have to consider this event against the vast number

592
00:33:25,200 --> 00:33:29,280
Speaker 1: of uncounted dice rolls of human experience that it is

593
00:33:29,360 --> 00:33:33,120
Speaker 1: nestled in. So here's an analogy. Let's say you're talking

594
00:33:33,120 --> 00:33:36,440
Speaker 1: to a professional poker player and she tells you one

595
00:33:36,480 --> 00:33:39,160
Speaker 1: time she was playing five card poker and she was

596
00:33:39,240 --> 00:33:42,080
Speaker 1: dealt a royal flush on the opening bet. Of a

597
00:33:42,120 --> 00:33:44,760
Speaker 1: hand then to trade any cards. She just got a

598
00:33:44,840 --> 00:33:47,800
Speaker 1: royal flush. Now, the odds of being dealta royal flush

599
00:33:47,800 --> 00:33:50,680
Speaker 1: are about one in six fifty thousand. I think it's

600
00:33:50,720 --> 00:33:53,880
Speaker 1: like sixty nine thousand or something like that, about one

601
00:33:53,880 --> 00:33:58,280
Speaker 1: and six. But you wouldn't say to this poker player, oh,

602
00:33:58,280 --> 00:34:00,920
Speaker 1: you must be lying or like you know, or you

603
00:34:00,960 --> 00:34:04,080
Speaker 1: must have been cheating in this game, because you understand

604
00:34:04,080 --> 00:34:06,880
Speaker 1: that the anecdote is in context. If she's a professional

605
00:34:06,920 --> 00:34:09,520
Speaker 1: poker player, depending on how long she's playing, she might

606
00:34:09,600 --> 00:34:12,880
Speaker 1: have been dealt hundreds of thousands of hands in her life.

607
00:34:13,320 --> 00:34:15,960
Speaker 1: And on top of that, she's one player out of many,

608
00:34:16,040 --> 00:34:19,359
Speaker 1: and maybe not everybody has had that experience. So when

609
00:34:19,400 --> 00:34:24,919
Speaker 1: considered in context, really improbable events start looking like, oh, okay, well, yeah,

610
00:34:24,960 --> 00:34:27,400
Speaker 1: this is the one chance in however many. Yeah, this

611
00:34:27,520 --> 00:34:29,120
Speaker 1: is kind of the you know, it's bound to happen

612
00:34:29,160 --> 00:34:32,680
Speaker 1: eventually clause Right, Like ive enough people are trying a

613
00:34:32,719 --> 00:34:35,440
Speaker 1: given thing, it's gonna line up. The monkeys are going

614
00:34:35,480 --> 00:34:38,680
Speaker 1: to compose the complete works of Shakespeare with thin enough time. Yeah.

615
00:34:38,719 --> 00:34:41,600
Speaker 1: So there are improbable events, but there are just a

616
00:34:41,600 --> 00:34:44,959
Speaker 1: lot of chances to achieve them. There are seven point

617
00:34:45,000 --> 00:34:48,080
Speaker 1: three billion people on Earth today and according to the

618
00:34:48,120 --> 00:34:51,080
Speaker 1: Population Reference Bureau, there is an estimated a hundred and

619
00:34:51,160 --> 00:34:55,239
Speaker 1: eight billion people who have ever lived. So considering that

620
00:34:55,280 --> 00:34:57,239
Speaker 1: if there's an event that has a one in a

621
00:34:57,280 --> 00:35:00,480
Speaker 1: million chance per year of occurring in somebody's life, let's

622
00:35:00,480 --> 00:35:02,680
Speaker 1: say it's I don't know what the actual chance of

623
00:35:02,719 --> 00:35:05,680
Speaker 1: this is, but having a baseball bat thrown over a

624
00:35:05,680 --> 00:35:08,800
Speaker 1: wall and it hits you on the head or something, Uh,

625
00:35:08,840 --> 00:35:12,759
Speaker 1: it should still happen to seventy three hundred people every year,

626
00:35:12,920 --> 00:35:16,359
Speaker 1: just given the population of the Earth, that that is

627
00:35:16,400 --> 00:35:21,240
Speaker 1: the probability. If there's a one in ten billion chance

628
00:35:21,360 --> 00:35:24,720
Speaker 1: of something ever occurring in a human's life, it should

629
00:35:24,719 --> 00:35:27,160
Speaker 1: still have happened to at least ten people in human history.

630
00:35:27,520 --> 00:35:29,680
Speaker 1: And it it kind of comes back around to the

631
00:35:29,960 --> 00:35:34,200
Speaker 1: idea of synchronicity, the union idea, because even though we're

632
00:35:34,239 --> 00:35:38,120
Speaker 1: we're talking about about real numbers and uh, and just

633
00:35:38,160 --> 00:35:40,880
Speaker 1: our sort of our inability to really make statistical sense

634
00:35:41,040 --> 00:35:45,120
Speaker 1: of the actual odds of things, uh, those actual odds

635
00:35:45,160 --> 00:35:47,480
Speaker 1: of the computation of those odds, they kind of exist

636
00:35:47,520 --> 00:35:50,359
Speaker 1: within the wall. They kind of exist outside of our

637
00:35:50,400 --> 00:35:54,640
Speaker 1: perception and our understanding of life in the small sense

638
00:35:54,640 --> 00:35:59,400
Speaker 1: in the individual sense. So in a way, uh, the

639
00:35:59,560 --> 00:36:03,520
Speaker 1: synchronoy city lines up well with with it with the

640
00:36:03,960 --> 00:36:07,120
Speaker 1: statistical likelihood of things happening. We're just we're just not

641
00:36:07,239 --> 00:36:09,080
Speaker 1: privy to it. Yeah. I think that connects back to

642
00:36:09,120 --> 00:36:11,759
Speaker 1: the fact that there is a personal significance for us,

643
00:36:11,760 --> 00:36:16,160
Speaker 1: even if there is not a statistical significance. Again, it's

644
00:36:16,200 --> 00:36:19,319
Speaker 1: not surprising that somebody won the lottery. It would be

645
00:36:19,360 --> 00:36:22,800
Speaker 1: really surprising if you won the lottery. That's not actually

646
00:36:22,800 --> 00:36:26,799
Speaker 1: objectively surprising, it's just surprising to you, which of course

647
00:36:26,840 --> 00:36:29,320
Speaker 1: brings us to psychology. Yeah, and we save this for

648
00:36:29,480 --> 00:36:33,359
Speaker 1: last because I think this might be the most significant

649
00:36:33,400 --> 00:36:36,160
Speaker 1: of all of these factors. And this is the fact

650
00:36:36,280 --> 00:36:39,839
Speaker 1: that sometimes it's not even the numbers. Sometimes it's not

651
00:36:39,920 --> 00:36:43,640
Speaker 1: even the data. It's just that we are wired to

652
00:36:43,880 --> 00:36:48,280
Speaker 1: bow at the altar of coincidence. It's how our brains work. Indeed,

653
00:36:48,280 --> 00:36:50,080
Speaker 1: I mean, that's just how we survive. That's how we

654
00:36:50,160 --> 00:36:52,840
Speaker 1: make sense of the stimuli in our environment, that's how

655
00:36:52,920 --> 00:36:55,440
Speaker 1: we form our memories, and that's how we plan for

656
00:36:55,480 --> 00:36:59,120
Speaker 1: the future. Yeah, So let's look at some psychological phenomenon

657
00:36:59,200 --> 00:37:02,520
Speaker 1: that that are sort of related to our tendency to

658
00:37:02,680 --> 00:37:05,680
Speaker 1: take note of coincidences and maybe a tribute to them

659
00:37:05,719 --> 00:37:09,839
Speaker 1: more magical significance than they might actually have. Uh, how

660
00:37:09,840 --> 00:37:13,920
Speaker 1: about you even heard of the batter main Hoff phenomenon. Yeah,

661
00:37:13,960 --> 00:37:17,239
Speaker 1: this is the frequency illusions. This is I guess the

662
00:37:17,239 --> 00:37:19,440
Speaker 1: famous example of this would be you just learn a

663
00:37:19,440 --> 00:37:22,919
Speaker 1: new word, you know, you either encounter in a book

664
00:37:22,920 --> 00:37:24,719
Speaker 1: and he's like, WHOA, I don't know that when you

665
00:37:24,760 --> 00:37:27,279
Speaker 1: look it up and your rather taken with it, and

666
00:37:27,320 --> 00:37:30,479
Speaker 1: then it seems to pop up everywhere you just learned

667
00:37:30,480 --> 00:37:32,520
Speaker 1: about it, and it's all around you. So it's like

668
00:37:32,560 --> 00:37:35,520
Speaker 1: discovering a flower exists for the first time you've never

669
00:37:35,520 --> 00:37:37,840
Speaker 1: seen before, and then suddenly it seems to be growing

670
00:37:37,880 --> 00:37:41,520
Speaker 1: in every pot across town. Yeah. Yeah, And so the

671
00:37:41,560 --> 00:37:45,319
Speaker 1: weird name actually comes from a West German terrorist organization,

672
00:37:45,719 --> 00:37:48,520
Speaker 1: doesn't have anything to do with them. Really. I read

673
00:37:48,560 --> 00:37:52,200
Speaker 1: that the origin of this was that the phenomenon supposedly

674
00:37:52,200 --> 00:37:54,800
Speaker 1: got its name because a message board user somewhere online

675
00:37:54,800 --> 00:37:58,200
Speaker 1: told the story of encountering information about the bad or

676
00:37:58,280 --> 00:38:01,920
Speaker 1: mine Hoff gang and then just suddenly seeing that again

677
00:38:02,040 --> 00:38:05,040
Speaker 1: within like twenty four hours. Um, and I'm sure this

678
00:38:05,080 --> 00:38:06,839
Speaker 1: has happened to you. It's happened to me all the time.

679
00:38:07,520 --> 00:38:10,319
Speaker 1: This actually happened to me while I was researching these

680
00:38:10,320 --> 00:38:13,920
Speaker 1: podcasts were recording today. So in the other podcast we're

681
00:38:13,960 --> 00:38:17,400
Speaker 1: recording today, Uh, there's a mention of Prince Cheep, a

682
00:38:17,520 --> 00:38:20,560
Speaker 1: island off of the west coast of Africa, and I

683
00:38:20,600 --> 00:38:22,920
Speaker 1: had when I when I got to them in the research,

684
00:38:22,960 --> 00:38:25,440
Speaker 1: I realized I had just been reading about that island

685
00:38:25,440 --> 00:38:28,120
Speaker 1: for the first time, like less than twenty four hours before,

686
00:38:29,080 --> 00:38:32,360
Speaker 1: for completely unrelated reason, not related to astronomy or anything. No,

687
00:38:33,920 --> 00:38:35,760
Speaker 1: but see, Yeah, you see those kind of weird littal

688
00:38:35,800 --> 00:38:39,959
Speaker 1: coincidences pop up, yeah all the time, And uh, I've

689
00:38:39,960 --> 00:38:43,320
Speaker 1: often found that to be the case too, seemingly unrelated episodes,

690
00:38:43,360 --> 00:38:46,239
Speaker 1: but there'll be some little thread that connects them. Um.

691
00:38:46,280 --> 00:38:48,960
Speaker 1: You know. Another example the frequency illusion that I often

692
00:38:48,960 --> 00:38:51,400
Speaker 1: see is I'll I'll come across like a new concept

693
00:38:51,760 --> 00:38:53,520
Speaker 1: or a concept I wasn't that familiar with, and I'll

694
00:38:53,520 --> 00:38:55,280
Speaker 1: do a deep dive in in it for a podcast

695
00:38:55,320 --> 00:38:59,719
Speaker 1: podcast such as h super Normal Stimuli was a big one,

696
00:39:00,239 --> 00:39:02,719
Speaker 1: and after I researched it, I was just I was

697
00:39:02,760 --> 00:39:04,920
Speaker 1: just seeing it everywhere like it it kind of a

698
00:39:05,000 --> 00:39:08,399
Speaker 1: topic like that of you know sufficient depth. It kind

699
00:39:08,400 --> 00:39:10,560
Speaker 1: of changes the way you look at the world and

700
00:39:10,600 --> 00:39:13,719
Speaker 1: then you see reflections of it just all around you. Yeah,

701
00:39:14,280 --> 00:39:17,799
Speaker 1: and uh and and so it can be something as

702
00:39:17,800 --> 00:39:20,560
Speaker 1: simple as a as a word. It can be something

703
00:39:20,600 --> 00:39:23,680
Speaker 1: that's you know, a particular place, a particular you know,

704
00:39:23,719 --> 00:39:26,680
Speaker 1: a particular band, a particular work of a literature, or

705
00:39:26,719 --> 00:39:30,280
Speaker 1: it can be uh, you know, a philosophical mindset suddenly

706
00:39:30,480 --> 00:39:32,880
Speaker 1: because you're aware of it, you're hyper aware of it,

707
00:39:32,920 --> 00:39:35,680
Speaker 1: you're excited about it, You're going to see it in

708
00:39:35,719 --> 00:39:38,439
Speaker 1: the rest of the world. Yeah, um, yeah, And there

709
00:39:38,480 --> 00:39:40,759
Speaker 1: there could be lots of reasons. One could be that

710
00:39:40,840 --> 00:39:44,440
Speaker 1: hidden causal connection. You know, there are actually reasons that

711
00:39:44,480 --> 00:39:48,040
Speaker 1: you're investigating similar stories around the same time or reading

712
00:39:48,080 --> 00:39:50,960
Speaker 1: similar material that might use a new and unfamiliar word

713
00:39:51,000 --> 00:39:54,480
Speaker 1: around the same time, because you have interests and drives

714
00:39:54,480 --> 00:39:57,839
Speaker 1: that are sort of unified by time. Uh. Also, the

715
00:39:57,840 --> 00:40:00,440
Speaker 1: authors of the paper we were talking about earlier, have

716
00:40:01,239 --> 00:40:03,799
Speaker 1: they have their own sort of mathematical analysis of this,

717
00:40:03,880 --> 00:40:06,279
Speaker 1: don't they? And they sort of explain how it's not

718
00:40:06,360 --> 00:40:09,799
Speaker 1: that unusual that you should, you know, at a certain point,

719
00:40:09,960 --> 00:40:14,120
Speaker 1: after acquiring a word for the first time, see it again. Yeah,

720
00:40:14,160 --> 00:40:17,200
Speaker 1: that's just sort of expected to happen. Yeah, they're just there.

721
00:40:17,239 --> 00:40:19,279
Speaker 1: There's a finite number of words, so you're going to

722
00:40:19,280 --> 00:40:24,920
Speaker 1: see them again. Um. And of course this plays into apophenia. Uh.

723
00:40:25,040 --> 00:40:27,400
Speaker 1: This is uh. This is a term comes to us

724
00:40:27,680 --> 00:40:31,319
Speaker 1: from German scientists Claus Konrad, who coined apophenia from the

725
00:40:31,320 --> 00:40:35,200
Speaker 1: Greek appo away and uh uh and Finian to show

726
00:40:35,600 --> 00:40:40,440
Speaker 1: in n He was studying acute schizophrenia, during which connections

727
00:40:40,440 --> 00:40:44,600
Speaker 1: and meanings seem to web together around unrelated details. So

728
00:40:44,640 --> 00:40:47,439
Speaker 1: this is the basic idea here is we're always looking

729
00:40:47,480 --> 00:40:49,839
Speaker 1: for patterns and signals from our environment. I mean, that's

730
00:40:49,840 --> 00:40:52,160
Speaker 1: how we think, that's how we live, that's how we survive,

731
00:40:52,760 --> 00:40:57,440
Speaker 1: particularly when it comes to assessing threats. Okay, um, And

732
00:40:57,480 --> 00:40:59,840
Speaker 1: so we have we often have this tendency to perceive

733
00:41:00,040 --> 00:41:06,560
Speaker 1: patterns and connections in random or meaningless data. Um. For instance. Uh.

734
00:41:06,640 --> 00:41:08,480
Speaker 1: One example that comes to mind here is you have

735
00:41:08,520 --> 00:41:10,879
Speaker 1: some sort of silly police drama. On right, they're looking

736
00:41:10,920 --> 00:41:12,719
Speaker 1: at a map of the city and they have little

737
00:41:12,760 --> 00:41:15,040
Speaker 1: pins showing where the crimes are at. And then what

738
00:41:15,080 --> 00:41:17,480
Speaker 1: do they see. They see like a pentagram rights some

739
00:41:17,520 --> 00:41:19,759
Speaker 1: sort of order. And of course in the show. It

740
00:41:19,800 --> 00:41:23,040
Speaker 1: always makes sense, right, Like the the Satanic Killer actually

741
00:41:23,160 --> 00:41:25,359
Speaker 1: is trying to kill people so that his crimes look

742
00:41:25,400 --> 00:41:27,839
Speaker 1: like a pentagram in a map. But you can see

743
00:41:27,840 --> 00:41:31,239
Speaker 1: that pentagram without any planning at all or some other symbol. Yeah,

744
00:41:31,239 --> 00:41:33,200
Speaker 1: if you want to see that pentagram in the planning,

745
00:41:33,239 --> 00:41:34,920
Speaker 1: you can see that pentagram in the planning of just

746
00:41:35,000 --> 00:41:38,440
Speaker 1: about anything. Um. But what this basically breaks down to

747
00:41:38,960 --> 00:41:43,760
Speaker 1: is a false positive in statistics, a type one error

748
00:41:43,800 --> 00:41:47,239
Speaker 1: in cognition. And this is something that plays into religion, gambling,

749
00:41:47,400 --> 00:41:50,759
Speaker 1: conspiracy theory, and just are and also our need to

750
00:41:50,800 --> 00:41:53,719
Speaker 1: see faces everywhere. Right, it's the reason we see uh,

751
00:41:53,960 --> 00:41:56,480
Speaker 1: figures in the constellations in the sky, right. I mean

752
00:41:56,560 --> 00:41:59,680
Speaker 1: i'd say very few people these days actually think that

753
00:41:59,800 --> 00:42:02,759
Speaker 1: the stars were arranged to look like a figure from

754
00:42:02,800 --> 00:42:04,880
Speaker 1: Greek myth. Yeah, because you think whoever was doing it

755
00:42:04,880 --> 00:42:07,319
Speaker 1: would do a better job. I mean, yeah, it's it's

756
00:42:07,360 --> 00:42:10,920
Speaker 1: not very good. It's kind of a crappy portrait, but

757
00:42:11,760 --> 00:42:15,239
Speaker 1: you know people saw it. Yeah, yeah, they saw the

758
00:42:15,280 --> 00:42:17,160
Speaker 1: pattern and we just can't help but see. Patterns were

759
00:42:17,200 --> 00:42:21,520
Speaker 1: pattern recognition engines, as we've mentioned before here. And there's

760
00:42:21,600 --> 00:42:25,000
Speaker 1: the thing is there's an evolutionary advantage for us pattern

761
00:42:25,160 --> 00:42:29,120
Speaker 1: recognition apes in making that type one air because essentially

762
00:42:29,160 --> 00:42:30,640
Speaker 1: you have you have you have a type one air

763
00:42:30,640 --> 00:42:33,920
Speaker 1: and you have a type two right false positive, false negative.

764
00:42:34,320 --> 00:42:37,720
Speaker 1: And the classic example is that of you know, rustling

765
00:42:37,760 --> 00:42:41,120
Speaker 1: in the bushes on the on the prehistoric savannah, right,

766
00:42:41,480 --> 00:42:44,800
Speaker 1: because there's a possibility that a big cat is about

767
00:42:44,800 --> 00:42:47,359
Speaker 1: to spring out of those rustling bush bushes and kill us.

768
00:42:47,520 --> 00:42:50,640
Speaker 1: Or it could be the statistical noise of wind. Exactly.

769
00:42:51,160 --> 00:42:54,080
Speaker 1: A false positive just gets you hot and bothered over

770
00:42:54,120 --> 00:42:55,960
Speaker 1: nothing and maybe a good laugh. I thought it was

771
00:42:55,960 --> 00:42:58,760
Speaker 1: a tiger and it was just wind. But a false

772
00:42:58,800 --> 00:43:02,760
Speaker 1: negative that gets you killed. Yeah, so obvious. There's obviously

773
00:43:02,760 --> 00:43:07,160
Speaker 1: a selection pressure to favor false positives. Yeah, exactly. So,

774
00:43:07,280 --> 00:43:09,919
Speaker 1: I mean, so that just plays into how we think

775
00:43:09,960 --> 00:43:13,440
Speaker 1: and how we behave as humans and are overwhelming tendency

776
00:43:13,840 --> 00:43:16,080
Speaker 1: to see the pattern when there isn't one, to see

777
00:43:16,120 --> 00:43:18,719
Speaker 1: the connective tissue between events, in this case, when there

778
00:43:18,760 --> 00:43:20,879
Speaker 1: isn't any right. So yeah, and so in that way

779
00:43:20,920 --> 00:43:23,960
Speaker 1: a coincidence can represent a pattern to us, we start

780
00:43:24,120 --> 00:43:27,439
Speaker 1: thinking what does it mean? Yeah, I mean, and there's

781
00:43:27,480 --> 00:43:30,759
Speaker 1: likely a connection between apophenia and creativity This is a

782
00:43:30,800 --> 00:43:33,600
Speaker 1: theory that was put put forth by Swiss neurologist Peter

783
00:43:33,680 --> 00:43:36,960
Speaker 1: Bruger Uh in a two thousand one book, Hauntings and

784
00:43:37,000 --> 00:43:41,160
Speaker 1: Poulter Guy's Multi Disiplinary Perspectives. And he was studying apophenian

785
00:43:41,239 --> 00:43:44,799
Speaker 1: patients suffering from psychotic episodes that were beginning to find

786
00:43:44,800 --> 00:43:47,880
Speaker 1: spontaneous meaning and random aspects of their life. And his

787
00:43:47,960 --> 00:43:52,080
Speaker 1: research revealed that high levels of dopamine disposes his patients

788
00:43:52,120 --> 00:43:55,720
Speaker 1: to find meetings, patterns, significance where there was there was none.

789
00:43:56,160 --> 00:44:01,839
Speaker 1: So creativity apophenia, Uh, you know, it's what is creativity.

790
00:44:01,880 --> 00:44:04,799
Speaker 1: But ultimately, you know, finding new patterns, new connections, new

791
00:44:04,840 --> 00:44:09,359
Speaker 1: ways to arrange existing ideas and motifs uh into something new,

792
00:44:09,560 --> 00:44:12,960
Speaker 1: right of course, Yeah, I mean we often see that

793
00:44:13,000 --> 00:44:15,319
Speaker 1: as sort of the core of the creative principle. It's

794
00:44:15,680 --> 00:44:18,920
Speaker 1: you know, understanding like, oh, this is connected to this

795
00:44:18,960 --> 00:44:23,040
Speaker 1: other thing. Very often the connections you see between events

796
00:44:23,120 --> 00:44:26,440
Speaker 1: or objects or ideas and say a literature class or

797
00:44:26,520 --> 00:44:31,200
Speaker 1: something like that, are they are still psychic phenomenon. It's

798
00:44:31,239 --> 00:44:33,919
Speaker 1: something that we are putting together out of our need

799
00:44:34,000 --> 00:44:37,239
Speaker 1: defined meaning, that's right, and a lot of times that

800
00:44:37,320 --> 00:44:39,880
Speaker 1: meaning that we need to find. You know, we we

801
00:44:39,920 --> 00:44:42,120
Speaker 1: already have our our minds made up about what that

802
00:44:42,200 --> 00:44:45,480
Speaker 1: meaning is. This brings us to confirmation bias, which of

803
00:44:45,520 --> 00:44:48,120
Speaker 1: course is always a big one. This, of course is

804
00:44:48,120 --> 00:44:50,640
Speaker 1: the idea that we have a tendency to search for

805
00:44:50,840 --> 00:44:54,560
Speaker 1: or interpret information in a way that confirms your preconceptions

806
00:44:55,280 --> 00:45:00,560
Speaker 1: about life, about about basically anything, which leads to statistical

807
00:45:00,760 --> 00:45:03,520
Speaker 1: errors that cloud your decision and problem decision making a

808
00:45:03,520 --> 00:45:06,120
Speaker 1: problem solving ability. Yeah, so this would come into play

809
00:45:06,200 --> 00:45:10,160
Speaker 1: if say you are already looking for a pattern of coincidences,

810
00:45:10,520 --> 00:45:14,640
Speaker 1: say you've had to like to sort of synchronous strange

811
00:45:14,680 --> 00:45:17,960
Speaker 1: events happen in one day, you're looking for a third

812
00:45:18,920 --> 00:45:22,000
Speaker 1: and that's going to bias the way that you sample data.

813
00:45:22,360 --> 00:45:24,440
Speaker 1: It's probably going to make you look for things that

814
00:45:24,480 --> 00:45:26,799
Speaker 1: are sort of a close hit is something you might

815
00:45:26,840 --> 00:45:32,319
Speaker 1: have ignored otherwise to confirm your pattern hypothesis that there's

816
00:45:32,320 --> 00:45:34,920
Speaker 1: gonna be something in line with this second thing. You know,

817
00:45:35,000 --> 00:45:38,200
Speaker 1: it's the same like people dye in threes ideas just

818
00:45:38,239 --> 00:45:40,680
Speaker 1: thinking of that. Yeah, like you, if you're lucky, you'll

819
00:45:40,719 --> 00:45:44,040
Speaker 1: get like to a list celebrities dying at the same time.

820
00:45:44,040 --> 00:45:45,960
Speaker 1: But then often like that third one has to be

821
00:45:46,360 --> 00:45:48,520
Speaker 1: like a radio star for the days. You know, it's

822
00:45:48,600 --> 00:45:50,600
Speaker 1: something that doesn't really match up, but you'll take it.

823
00:45:50,600 --> 00:45:54,120
Speaker 1: It's totally fleets the prophecy exactly right. It's confirmation bias.

824
00:45:54,120 --> 00:45:56,200
Speaker 1: You're you're bringing it in because you've got to make

825
00:45:56,239 --> 00:45:59,480
Speaker 1: it fit the pattern. Yeah, it's kind of like when

826
00:45:59,480 --> 00:46:02,120
Speaker 1: you listen to an episode of This American Life and

827
00:46:02,239 --> 00:46:04,040
Speaker 1: like the they have the theme for the show, and

828
00:46:04,080 --> 00:46:06,319
Speaker 1: like the intro hits the theme, the second segment really

829
00:46:06,400 --> 00:46:09,960
Speaker 1: hits the theme. The third segment and the second third segment,

830
00:46:10,000 --> 00:46:11,799
Speaker 1: you know they mostly hit this theme, and that last

831
00:46:11,840 --> 00:46:14,359
Speaker 1: one you're kind of like, I don't know close enough,

832
00:46:14,480 --> 00:46:16,919
Speaker 1: close enough to close out the show, but you're really

833
00:46:16,960 --> 00:46:20,239
Speaker 1: kind of strayed from the overall theme. Um. But then

834
00:46:20,280 --> 00:46:24,160
Speaker 1: that's pretty much how we approach life in general, whether

835
00:46:24,200 --> 00:46:29,080
Speaker 1: you're talking about belief in UFOs, ancient Egyptians and alien tech, Bigfoot,

836
00:46:29,640 --> 00:46:33,480
Speaker 1: or or you know, office conspiracies or whatever it happens

837
00:46:33,520 --> 00:46:36,560
Speaker 1: to be. If you're looking for something to be true, uh,

838
00:46:36,640 --> 00:46:40,759
Speaker 1: you can find it. That So it plays into scientific analysis.

839
00:46:40,920 --> 00:46:43,000
Speaker 1: You have a you know, a theory you want and

840
00:46:43,080 --> 00:46:45,399
Speaker 1: you want to see it proven out, and you subconsciously

841
00:46:45,440 --> 00:46:49,319
Speaker 1: scow your the results of the experimentation in your favor. Uh,

842
00:46:49,440 --> 00:46:52,040
Speaker 1: you want to love that new movie that just hit

843
00:46:52,080 --> 00:46:54,560
Speaker 1: the theaters, so you wind up looking for reasons to

844
00:46:54,600 --> 00:46:57,360
Speaker 1: love it and focusing more on that and being perhaps

845
00:46:57,400 --> 00:46:59,520
Speaker 1: a little less critical than you normally will. And then,

846
00:46:59,520 --> 00:47:02,440
Speaker 1: of course there's a racial aspect too, right you You

847
00:47:02,520 --> 00:47:05,200
Speaker 1: if you happen to distrust members of another racial group,

848
00:47:05,200 --> 00:47:07,799
Speaker 1: you wind up focusing on the evidence that supports your

849
00:47:07,800 --> 00:47:11,680
Speaker 1: existing distrust rather than evidence that challenges it. Oh. Yeah,

850
00:47:11,680 --> 00:47:16,439
Speaker 1: people are definitely likely to oversample stuff that confirms their

851
00:47:16,440 --> 00:47:19,239
Speaker 1: bigotry or biases. So yeah, if if you have a

852
00:47:19,239 --> 00:47:23,640
Speaker 1: preconceived stereotype, you're looking to make things fit evidence that

853
00:47:23,680 --> 00:47:25,880
Speaker 1: doesn't fit it, you just kind of like, yeah, that's noise,

854
00:47:25,920 --> 00:47:27,480
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter. Yeah, I mean, for the most part,

855
00:47:27,520 --> 00:47:30,680
Speaker 1: you're kind of maintaining the castle of you know, fortress

856
00:47:30,680 --> 00:47:34,359
Speaker 1: sanity and fortress worldview and uh and and so you

857
00:47:34,400 --> 00:47:36,640
Speaker 1: want to to focus as much on the stuff that

858
00:47:36,719 --> 00:47:39,560
Speaker 1: keeps the walls up as possible. Yeah. Of course this

859
00:47:39,640 --> 00:47:42,600
Speaker 1: all works perfectly because post addiction is largely a result

860
00:47:42,960 --> 00:47:47,120
Speaker 1: of the brain's task of continually integrating sensory stimuli and

861
00:47:47,160 --> 00:47:52,800
Speaker 1: reconciling conflicting information into a unified vision of reality, a

862
00:47:52,920 --> 00:47:56,560
Speaker 1: unified story again in which we are the central character. Yeah.

863
00:47:56,680 --> 00:47:58,480
Speaker 1: I mean that's just simply how our memory. Yeah, I

864
00:47:58,520 --> 00:48:01,360
Speaker 1: mean you always see the the pattern of clue is

865
00:48:01,440 --> 00:48:04,200
Speaker 1: left by the mystery writer once you've had the ending revealed.

866
00:48:04,760 --> 00:48:07,400
Speaker 1: You might not notice it while you're going through the

867
00:48:07,440 --> 00:48:12,719
Speaker 1: novel to the first time. So there you have it. Coincidence. Um.

868
00:48:12,880 --> 00:48:15,640
Speaker 1: We we've kind of hit some of the the more

869
00:48:15,920 --> 00:48:18,839
Speaker 1: you know, fringey ideas of what could be happening with

870
00:48:18,880 --> 00:48:22,120
Speaker 1: this perceived synchronicity in life and what is actually going

871
00:48:22,160 --> 00:48:24,959
Speaker 1: on when it comes to the statistics of the world

872
00:48:24,960 --> 00:48:28,720
Speaker 1: around us and the way we perceive our world. Yeah.

873
00:48:28,800 --> 00:48:31,000
Speaker 1: So one of the authors of that paper we talked

874
00:48:31,000 --> 00:48:34,880
Speaker 1: about earlier, Percy Diaconis, he had this quote that I

875
00:48:34,880 --> 00:48:37,760
Speaker 1: saw in an interview or said, probability isn't a fact

876
00:48:37,800 --> 00:48:41,320
Speaker 1: about the world, it's a fact about the observers and knowledge.

877
00:48:41,760 --> 00:48:44,959
Speaker 1: And I think that's number one that seems very true,

878
00:48:45,000 --> 00:48:48,200
Speaker 1: but also it's um, it's a good way of informing

879
00:48:48,239 --> 00:48:51,400
Speaker 1: this discussion we've had about what coincidence means when you

880
00:48:51,440 --> 00:48:55,680
Speaker 1: actually examine probability and statistics. Very often, the real magic

881
00:48:55,840 --> 00:48:58,360
Speaker 1: is happening inside our heads, in our in our quest

882
00:48:58,400 --> 00:49:01,200
Speaker 1: to construct meaning in sort of are are actually the

883
00:49:01,280 --> 00:49:03,960
Speaker 1: great links that we go through mentally to weave events

884
00:49:04,000 --> 00:49:08,439
Speaker 1: together and produce tapestries of significance in our lives. So

885
00:49:08,719 --> 00:49:11,480
Speaker 1: think about that the next time you know, some of

886
00:49:11,480 --> 00:49:14,520
Speaker 1: these little coincidences pop up in your life and you

887
00:49:14,560 --> 00:49:18,720
Speaker 1: start drawing those imaginary lines in the in the world

888
00:49:18,800 --> 00:49:23,319
Speaker 1: of synchronicity. Hey. In the meantime, if you want more

889
00:49:23,320 --> 00:49:25,000
Speaker 1: episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, if you want

890
00:49:25,040 --> 00:49:27,160
Speaker 1: to read blog posts, you want to see videos, you

891
00:49:27,160 --> 00:49:29,279
Speaker 1: want links out of social media accounts, you should head

892
00:49:29,320 --> 00:49:31,759
Speaker 1: on over to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

893
00:49:31,880 --> 00:49:34,560
Speaker 1: That's the mothership, and on the landing page for this

894
00:49:34,600 --> 00:49:37,120
Speaker 1: episode will make sure to include links to related content

895
00:49:37,160 --> 00:49:41,120
Speaker 1: as well as outside content of note, And if you

896
00:49:41,120 --> 00:49:43,839
Speaker 1: want to send us an example of some crazy coincidence

897
00:49:43,840 --> 00:49:46,080
Speaker 1: in your own life, you can send it to blow

898
00:49:46,120 --> 00:49:51,120
Speaker 1: the mind at how stuff works dot com. For more

899
00:49:51,160 --> 00:49:53,760
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff

900
00:49:53,800 --> 00:50:00,439
Speaker 1: Works dot com