Synchronicity Bites
Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 10:31AM I was discussing the influence of Karl Jung with my Mrs recently in a fairly light hearted humorous way I might add. My Mrs is a shrink, she knows about this stuff. Synchronicity, it's relevance in the modern world and my slight prejudice against Jung due to the more drippy and annoying elements of the hippie movement I'd had contact with in the past.
So this morning I was on my constitutional walk, stomping up the hills around where I live. Once I get out of the woodland (I love hearing birdsong) I slip on my headphones and started listening to a seminar from the Long Now Foundation, excellent talk about seed banks and biodiversity.
I climb a gate I'm very familiar with, my daughter once fell over in a big muddy puddle there when she was about 4 years old and was terribly upset because her new coat got muddy.
As I walk through a small copse I spy the tree that has a rope tied to it that generations of kids have swung from. Just then the man giving the seminar, Jim Richardson, says the word Dublin, obviously in reference to his visit there. But as he said Dublin I suddenly noticed, carved into the trunk of the swing tree, the word Dublin. Quite large letters carved into the bark. I stopped, heart literally skipping the beat. Ba-doom. How? What the? Hang on..?
I have walked past that tree a thousand times and never seen this carving before. I walk up close and check, no, it's not just been carved, there are small moss growths inside the carved letters, it's been there years. Dublin.
In my minds eye hearing the word Dublin and seeing the carving happened within an instant. Utterly baffling, mildly annoying because I don't like 'oogie-boogie shit' like astrology and 'psychic healing' but I have no explanation.
Reader Comments (12)
Ha! I love it when things like that happen. Often I'll say a word in conversation that is quite, I guess, obscure (I can be annoyingly verbose, as my wife would confirm!), at exactly the same time that someone says it on the wireless. Not that it's spooky, it just makes me laugh at how mad & unpredictable existence is.
No mystery. Hearing the word "Dublin" you were probably just primed to notice any reference. That you happened to be walking past at the time is a coincidence. Think, just how many other words are in that seminar, in other's you've heard, in books you've read. There's are just hundreds or thousands of possible coincidences that simply don't happen as the events don't coincide. This is just one of the very few that did.
The strange thing would be if unlikely coincidences did not happen, not if, occasionally one does. There must be (literally) countless examples where they don't.
Also, Jung, Freud and the like were not, in any real sense, scientists. They are a sort of narrator of the human condition. They perform roles comparable to those of the insights of novelists - some might find therapy or comfort. Some might build a life philosophy, or some sort of thread of explanation. What they are not is any form of rigorous science - they fall outside that paradigm.
(I said something like this on Twitter but then thought why not say it here!)
The explanation is simple and doesn't involve mysticism or woo-woo of any kind. It's a coincidence. You never noticed the carving before, because it held no real importance for you (you'd be amazed at the vast number of things we never notice everyday). You noticed it today because you heard the word at the same time it was in your field of view and hey presto you see the pattern. Plus the brain will often register two things as instantaneous when in fact they are seperated by a very small time frame.
Reading the word and hearing the word at the same time is not unlike the common example of:
"I was thinking of X and just then the phone rang and it was X! Amazing, that's not the only time something like that has happened!" and you remember it precisely because it seemed weird, or memorable. You don't remember the countless, much more common times, when you think of X and X never calls, because that is not 'weird' and hence not memorable. And that is why superstition grows...
It's enjoyable when it happens. Makes life fun!
Hiya, I just came here having seen your tweet.
This sort of thing has happened to me (and no doubt a lot of people) a number of times, but has a rational explanation.
If you consider during all the years you've been alive, you've been listening to one thing whilst watching / reading another innumerable times, but on virtually all of those occasions, none of the words you were reading matched those you were hearing, so there was no reason for your conscious mind to take note of these "mismatches".
However, statistically, there are bound to be a few occasions where, by pure chance, a word or phrase you're listening to matches what you're reading, but since this is an unusual event, your conscious mind takes note of it. Our minds have evolved to pattern match and seek meaning in all that we experience, so if one is not careful, it's easy to believe that there is some kind of significance to the event.
In essence, human brains have a hard time understanding probability at an intuitive level, and so are apt to see significance where there is none.
On a side note, I've recently been enjoying all your Fully Charged videos on YouTube. Do you have a time frame for the next one?
Dave (@AnimalTrackers)
Further to the replies about remembering matches but not mismatches, a more mundane example is the often held belief that the supermarket queue you are in always moves more slowly than others. What is more likely is that you only remember the few times when this does happen and not the many occasions when this does not happen. Of course with online food shopping becoming more and more popular I will soon not be able to use this example.
It is indeed just co-incidence.
The likelihood of it happening is *astronomical*, but the chance still exists for it to occur.
Million to one chances (possibly billion to one in this case) appear to happen way more than they should, but each individual incident is an independent roll of the billion sided dice. One occasion of this occurring does not influence another incidence occurring.
Hence:
"a million-to-one chance succeeds nine times out of ten" -pTerry
You should play the lottery more often
Just you wait, Bobbert: you'll be working on a Fully Charged episode one morning and discover that your toast has an image of a Nissan Leaf burned onto it. ;)
Robert, I love your spirit! Thank you for sharing your thoughts and moments of your life. They never fail to make me think, or sometimes, just give me a happy feeling about being relatively prosperous and alive.
As a side note, maybe one day in your blog or one of your video productions, you can explain the term "wet liberal" vis-a-vis how it might translate to politics outside the UK. I'm a Yank, who if forced to, would describe myself as a "liberal", but in listening to some of your views, I suspect I may be "wet".
I just saw a car with the registration number KU09 BXG
What are the chances of that?!?
(Nicked from Richard Feynman)
Sitting here in my local bar in Valencia, Spain and I just heard the barman say Dublin. Just I was reading this post! How weird is that?