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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,

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Speaker 1: Lauren Boglebaum. Here, what's the connection between basketball superstar Michael

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Speaker 1: Jordan's A Beat Generation, novelist William Burrows, comedian Harpo Marx,

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Speaker 1: and mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. The number twenty three,

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Speaker 1: But that's not all. In the Bible numbers twenty three.

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Speaker 1: Twenty three contains the phrase what hath God wrought, which

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Speaker 1: happens to be the first message senting code on the

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Speaker 1: telegraph by Samuel Morris back in eighteen forty three. If

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Speaker 1: you add up the four digits of the year that

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Speaker 1: Nirvana's Kurt Cobain was born in nineteen sixty seven, they

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Speaker 1: come to twenty three, which is also the sum of

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Speaker 1: the four digits for four, the year in which he died.

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Speaker 1: We humans largely have twenty three pairs of chromosomes in

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Speaker 1: our genetic makeup, and the medieval Catholic military order, the

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Speaker 1: Knights of Templar, had twenty three grand masters during its existence.

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Speaker 1: Now a skeptic might ascribe all this two mere chance,

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Speaker 1: but some people will think there's more than that. If

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Speaker 1: you poke around the Internet, you'll discover thousands of web

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Speaker 1: pages devoted to something called the twenty three enigma, essentially

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Speaker 1: a belief that the number has some sort of magical

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Speaker 1: or mystical significance or power because of all the instances

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Speaker 1: in which it occurs. There's even a Facebook page for

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Speaker 1: as people who are fascinated with the numbers sometimes call themselves.

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Speaker 1: It's filled with posts containing the number, ranging from a

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Speaker 1: picture of a restaurant check number twenty three that was

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Speaker 1: issued to table twenty three due to the music video

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Speaker 1: for the hip hop song twenty three by Mike will

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Speaker 1: Made It So how did all this get started? According

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Speaker 1: to Barnaby Rogerson's compendium Rogerson's Book of Numbers, The Culture

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Speaker 1: of Numbers from one thousand and one Nights to the

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Speaker 1: Seven Wonders of the World, the twenty three obsessions started

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Speaker 1: with William Burrows, famous for his strange flights of disturbing,

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Speaker 1: hallucinogenic fantasy and novels such as Naked Lunch. While in

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Speaker 1: Tangier in nineteen sixty, Burrows claimed to have met a

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Speaker 1: sea captain named Clark, who boasted that had never had

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Speaker 1: an accident in twenty three years Later that day, his

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Speaker 1: ship sank, killing him. That night, Burrows supposedly heard a

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Speaker 1: radio news story about a flight twenty three that had

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Speaker 1: crashed in Florida, also piloted by Captain Clark. Aircraft records

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Speaker 1: for nineteen sixty, however, don't show any such crash, though

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Speaker 1: perhaps Burrows was thinking of the flight twenty three that

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Speaker 1: was destroyed by a bomb in nineteen thirty three. Whatever

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Speaker 1: the case. From then on, Burrows started keeping track of

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Speaker 1: events that included the number twenty three, and years later

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Speaker 1: published a short story entitled twenty three Scado. Burrows passed

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Speaker 1: along his fascination with twenty three to his friend Robert

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Speaker 1: Anton Wilson, and figures prominently in The Illuminatous Trilogy, a

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Speaker 1: series of novels that Wilson wrote with his friend Robert Shay.

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Speaker 1: The novels contain an assortment of twenty three occurrences, take

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Speaker 1: a seventeenth century Irish archbishop's belief that the world started

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Speaker 1: on October four, thousand and four b c E. Or

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Speaker 1: the fact that Harpo Marx's birthday was November any There's

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Speaker 1: also a mention of the EA Ching's hexagram twenty three

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Speaker 1: and Bonnie and Clyde's death on May twenty thirty four,

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Speaker 1: but these authors weren't the only ones with the three fixation.

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Speaker 1: Take the Nobel Prize winning mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr.

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Speaker 1: Who struggled to overcome mental illness, is portrayed in A

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Speaker 1: Beautiful Mind. He once told a student at the Massachusetts

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Speaker 1: Institute of Technology that twenty three was his favorite prime number,

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Speaker 1: and insisted that he had appeared on the cover of

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Speaker 1: Life magazine disguised as Pope John the twenty three. Nash

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Speaker 1: would die in a car accident on May. The twenty

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Speaker 1: three enigma was even the subject of a two thousand

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Speaker 1: seven movie called The Number twenty three, in which a

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Speaker 1: troubled man named Walter Sparrow portrayed by Jim Carey, becomes

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Speaker 1: obsessed with a book entitled The Number twenty three, a

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Speaker 1: Novel of Obsession, and is convinced that it contains the

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Speaker 1: key to his own past. And then there's Michael Jordan,

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Speaker 1: who started wearing the number twenty three in high school

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Speaker 1: because it was as close as he could get to

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Speaker 1: half of the number four five worn by his older

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Speaker 1: brother Larry Lebron. James also has worn twenty three as

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Speaker 1: an homage to Jordan's. So what does this all really mean.

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Speaker 1: It's hard to say, though. Out of all of the

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Speaker 1: days in a year, three point nine percent of them

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Speaker 1: have the number twenty three in the date. So there's

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Speaker 1: a lot of opportunity for births, deaths, accidents, and other

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Speaker 1: memorable events to occur on those days. And there are

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Speaker 1: plenty of others so called magic numbers. It could all

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Speaker 1: be mere happenstance. But what if it's more. Some coincidences,

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Speaker 1: after all, can be meaningful. We spoke via email with

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Speaker 1: Dr Bernard Bateman, a psychiatrist who's the founder of the

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Speaker 1: field of coincidence studies an author of the book Connecting

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Speaker 1: with Coincidence, the New Science for using synchronosity and serendipity

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Speaker 1: in your life. According to him, coincidences are important exactly

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Speaker 1: because people interpret them as signals to look for hidden causes.

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Speaker 1: He said. A baby cries and the mother comes, coincidence,

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Speaker 1: Maybe there's a connection. The baby learns that crying brings

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Speaker 1: her mother to her. Some people overdo the search for

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Speaker 1: explanation of coincidences, and others underdo. I think you have

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Speaker 1: to overdo and then analyze, since somewhere among those pebbles

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Speaker 1: might be a gold nugget. He also said when it

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Speaker 1: comes to numbers like twenty three, I don't know, but

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Speaker 1: even Dr Bateman, as it turns out, has a twenty

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Speaker 1: three connection. He said, twenty three was my football number

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Speaker 1: and seemed to follow along with me for many years.

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Speaker 1: It served as a comforter and supporter, and then disappeared.

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Speaker 1: Dr Bateman notes that it's possible for two things to

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Speaker 1: be meaningfully related without a common cause. He explained that

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Speaker 1: is a statistician's favorite approach to coincidences. The two elements

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Speaker 1: come together randomly, and people then make up meaning. This

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Speaker 1: black and white approach to explanation misses the gray in between.

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Speaker 1: Sometimes low probability coincidences do have a common cause. Today's

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Speaker 1: episode was written by Patrick J. Kiger and produced by

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Speaker 1: Tyler Clang for iHeart Media and How Stuff Works. For

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Speaker 1: more illness and lots of other topics that may or

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Speaker 1: may not be coincidental, visit our home planet, how Stuff

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Speaker 1: Works dot com