This year, he sat motionless in a chair, unable to spoon his own mashed potatoes. I needed a distraction. I decided to look for a Massachusetts plate, because I spent a lot of time there with my dad. When the first one popped up, the numbers nearly leapt off my screen.
It was a plate, the same year my dad was born, with the numbers My mom was born in February 2 of , and they married in He had thousands of them. That the seller and I shared a yearning for dads who were no longer there? At least according to psychiatrist Bernard Beitman, a visiting psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences professor at the University of Virginia, and a coincidence researcher.
Beitman suspects humans transmit some unobserved energetic information, which other people then process or organize into emotion and behavior. Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer believed coincidences arise out of unknown forces, or waves, that he called seriality.
He wrote a book on the subject in The very definition of coincidence relies on us picking out similarities and patterns. So when we see an unusual configuration, we think it must hold some significance, that it must be special. Yet most statisticians argue that unlikely occurrences happen frequently because there are so many opportunities for surprising events to happen. Spiegelhalter collects anecdotes of coincidences. In , an independent data firm analyzed these stories and revealed 28 percent of them involve dates and numbers.
But no matter what the nature of a coincidence is, Spiegelhalter claims coincidences are in the eye of the beholder. The woman on the other end had the wrong number; yet, for reasons unexplained, they continued to talk, and it came out that the other woman had an abusive boyfriend. The other woman sounded fearful and unstable, and after hanging up the married woman decided to separate from her husband after all.
This, Beitman says, is a meaningful coincidence that fundamentally altered her psychology and outlook on life. It is also why meaningful coincidences are so important. With the exception perhaps of the chilliest of rationalists, these types of events tend to have deeply visceral, sometimes life-changing effects. Coincidences are everywhere and can happen any time. When your soul is ready, they will come. All that is required is that you open your heart. Where a belief in meaningful coincidences can become dangerous, however, is when it begins to impair your judgment.
For one, it can make you think illogically. But while these might seem like small-time issues — UFOs, Freudian slips — there are sometimes larger questions at play. For instance, when the anti-vaccination movement was embraced in the United States, children died or had their health imperilled by parents who aligned rising rates of autism in children to the rising number of vaccines being given.
Something has to be making certain children around the age of vaccinations get sick, they thought. A belief in meaningful coincidence is, from an existential perspective, surprisingly rational. That is it. Is the realm of the unknown a place of spirituality and existential significance for you, or does the world remain entirely material? Beneath the statistical incorrectness, beneath any economic ploys, beneath even the potentially grave errors that can result, a belief in meaningful coincidence is, from an existential perspective, surprisingly rational.
If your father were to choke to death across the country at the same time that you felt a phantom choking, you might know, intellectually, that there was no mysterious, invisible connection at play.
There is, after all, a difference between statistical significance and human significance — one does not always dictate the other. Wrong and right all at once. Modern biomedicine sees the body as a closed mechanistic system. But illness shows us to be permeable, ecological beings. Nitin K Ahuja. Thinkers and theories. Some see Plato as a pure rationalist, others as a fantastical mythmaker. His deft use of stories tells a more complex tale. Why do these extraordinary events happen?
Various strange forces have been put forward. More mundane explanations are possible, though. First, some kind of hidden cause or common factor could be present — maybe you and a friend have both heard that the Pyrenees is a good place to go on holiday? Psychological studies have identified our unconscious capacity for heightened perception to a recently heard word or phrase, so that we notice when something on our mind immediately comes up in a song on the radio.
And of course we only hear about the matches that do occur, not all the people you have spoken to with whom you had nothing in common, and indeed were pleased to get away from. Simple chance can be a strange and unintuitive thing that throws up surprising concurrences more often than we might think, since truly random events tend to cluster — if you throw a bucket of balls on the floor they do not arrange themselves in a nice regular pattern.
This produces some fairly brain-mangling results. For example, it only takes 23 people in a room to make it more likely than not that two have the same birthday. There is some nice, fairly simple maths that allows you to work out how many people you need to have a good chance of a match for any characteristic. For a birthday match, this means that we need around 1.
This makes it easy to make money from people. Suppose you have 30 people together. Bet the group that two of them have a birthday within one day of each other. What are the chances you will win? First consider the chance that any two people say me and you match in this way: if my birthday is August 16th which it is , then a match would happen if you were born on the 15th, 16th, or 17th, which is 3 out of days, or a 1 in chance. In other words, with 30 people in a room you are almost certain to win.
Regardless of the number of people gathered together, you can make money off them provided they are a bit gullible, preferably drunk, and not good at probability.
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