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