🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE: What’s really going on when we encounter uncanny connections?
The most notable coincidence in my life was just a few days shy of my first Thanksgiving without my dad — at least as I’d known him. He’d had heart surgery in January 2017, followed by complications ranging from strokes to a life-threatening bacterial infection. The repeated assaults on his system transformed him. Last Thanksgiving, he had run circles around my 3-year-old. This year, he sat motionless in a chair, unable to spoon his own mashed potatoes.
“I lost my dad last December, after a 10-year battle with Parkinson’s disease,” he wrote. “He was my best friend. Every time I box up a plate, it kills me, but I do it for my son and nephew’s college fund.” “Just as sharks have ampullae in their skin that detect small electromagnetic changes to help them locate their prey … it’s plausible, maybe even probable, that humans have similar mechanisms that detect coincidences,” he says.
The very definition of coincidence relies on us picking out similarities and patterns. “Once we spot a regularity, we learn something about what events go together and how likely they are to occur,” says Magda Osman, an experimental psychologist at the University of London and one of the study’s authors. “And these are valuable sources of information to begin to navigate the world.”
A classic example: In a room of 23 people, there’s just over a 50/50 chance two of them will share a birthday. Most of us would view that as an inexplicable coincidence, but mathematical law suggests such events are random and bound to happen. Any meaning we attribute to them is all in our heads.
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