How do you guys explain really bizarre cases of synchronicity?

[Rodney]

You tell me. You're the one who has now claimed that intuition cannot reliably identify synchronicity (i.e. when you answered "absolutely" to my suggestion that the results of investigation could overturn the results of intuition). On what basis are you making that claim?

Linda

I have never claimed that intuition can reliably identify synchronicity. I did challenge JoeTheJuggler's assertion -- "Sometimes we get a 'bad vibe' about a person or situation. That gut feeling is just as apt to be wrong as any conscious opinion or conclusion." -- because I'm not aware of any studies proving that "bad vibes" are completely unreliable.

My main point about synchronicity is that some reported coincidences seem to stretch to the breaking point the current scientific consensus regarding the laws of probability. You seemed to indicate that there is an objective way to determine whether that is actually true, but I'm still unsure of how you would go about attempting to prove or disprove synchronicity.

 

[quarky]

I was hoping to get past this thread without revealing my personal synchronicity story.
It has no meaning or emotional punch to me, yet it feels akin, perhaps, to seeing the whole planet from space, or finding out that your best friend actually has a different name.

For a little more than a year, every time I checked the time on our digital clock, it would read 1:11 2:22 3:33 4:44 5:55 or 11:11

after a few months, the weirdness of this became mundane. I never quite expected it, yet it had become common place. I never made a big deal about it to anyone, because it simply didn't have a "big-deal" feel about it. It was almost the opposite of normal wooish stuff. The message I was receiving from the synchronious universe was the time.
The actual time. Which happened to be displayed in repeats of the same didgit.

One day, it stopped happening. This was even less of a big-deal, because of my bias.
In retrospect, the moment the synchronicity stopped should have been my big deal moment. I never got to find out if this was also happening to lots of other people, or if it stopped happening to them on that same day. I didn't even think to mark that special day on the calender, so I can't expect to discover what I suspect was an awesome synchronistic event...bunches of people suddenly looking at their clock at 2:23 instead of a minute earlier.

I don't see the point of selling the universe short, as if it is finally understood.
My clock experience, though a true story, is way, way less weird than almost anything else I can say about this universe.

 

[Bronwyn Elko]

Here's my coincidence story.

One morning I was emptying the Whitehorse Public Library's book drop with a co-worker, a lady from Germany named Fay. As we were sorting through the books, she asked me two questions. 1. Have you decided where you are moving to, Hawaii or to Salt Spring Island? 2. How does the ancient Chinese oracle, the I Ching, work? (it's a book.)

I said I hadn't made up my mind for sure, but that I was leaning toward Salt Spring Island. As for the I Ching, I tried to explain how it worked but eventually threw up my hands and said, I'd have to show you, and I don't have a copy. (Neither did the library nor the only bookstore in town.) Fay then reached into the bottom of the book drop and pulled free a book that was wedged tight. "Here's your I Ching!" she said, handing it to me. Written in flowing script on the title page was, 'Salt Spring Island'. The name written below that was in a language I could not read. Showing it to Fay, I asked, Do you know what language this is? "German," she said.

 

[Akhenaten]

Are you seriously going to suggest that someone randomly asked you those two questions?


ETA:

'Salz-Frühling Insel' is hardly indecipherable.

 

[Dr Adequate]

Sure, but if he were so spaced-out that he could bury a teapot under his house less than a decade ago and then forgot having done so, his perception wouldn't be terribly relevant.

Whereas in fact we know from his anecdote that his perceptions were ... uh .... heightened by taking LSD.

What we do not know, however, is that he's never forgotten anything, because if he'd forgotten anything then he wouldn't have remembered forgetting it and so wouldn't have included that in his anecdote.

I'm not quite sure of the meaning of your question, since I have dealt with his anecdote on the basis that it is perfectly true. If you now wish to bring up the issue that his memory may be at fault, then I agree that that too is a hypothesis, especially since he uses hallucinogenic drugs.

 

[Rodney]

I'm not quite sure of the meaning of your question, since I have dealt with his anecdote on the basis that it is perfectly true.

I have also dealt with it on the basis that Teapots Happen's account is accurate. However, Linda was correctly noting that, before giving that account credence, it would need to be thoroughly investigated.

 

[Bronwyn Elko]

Akhen: I'm not suggesting it -- I'm saying it is a fact. That's what happened.

It took Fay and I about 10-15 fifteen minutes to empty and sort the book drop, and in that time our conversation skipped over several topics. Salt Spring versus Hawaii came up because I had been talking for weeks about leaving the Yukon, and she was unhappy that I was leaving . . . we were by that time in our working relationship close friends as well as co-workers. She brought up the I Ching because I had only recently read my boyfriend's copy and had talked with Fay about it several times. Of course she thought the premise of the I Ching was incredible nonsense and so did I. Yet something about the poetry of the universal quality in the hexagrams stuck in my mind: I thought the language was very beautiful. That's why Fay brought up the I Ching: I had been talking about it for days without explaining how it worked. Indeed, I wasn't convinced it could work let alone how. And I'm not now saying I think the I Ching can predict the future. It was/is, however, an amazing coincidence permanently etched on my mind.

 

[Akhenaten]

Akhen: I'm not suggesting it -- I'm saying it is a fact. That's what happened.

It took Fay and I about 10-15 fifteen minutes to empty and sort the book drop, and in that time our conversation skipped over several topics. Salt Spring versus Hawaii came up because I had been talking for weeks about leaving the Yukon, and she was unhappy that I was leaving . . . we were by that time in our working relationship close friends as well as co-workers. She brought up the I Ching because I had only recently read my boyfriend's copy and had talked with Fay about it several times. Of course she thought the premise of the I Ching was incredible nonsense and so did I. Yet something about the poetry of the universal quality in the hexagrams stuck in my mind: I thought the language was very beautiful. That's why Fay brought up the I Ching: I had been talking about it for days without explaining how it worked. Indeed, I wasn't convinced it could work let alone how. And I'm not now saying I think the I Ching can predict the future. It was/is, however, an amazing coincidence permanently etched on my mind.

my embiggening


I don't see any co-incidences. Things that you had been talking about came up in the conversation again when appropriate reminders were encountered. So what?

 

[Bronwyn Elko]

A ten-minute conversation involving Salt Spring Island and how the I Ching worked with a German co-worker that is interrupted by the appearance of a donated copy of the I Ching inscribed with "Salt Spring Island" and a name written in German, a book that was dropped into a library book drop which Fay and I emptied only twice a week, doesn't sound like a remarkable coincidence?

Methinks your definition differs from mine, and many others besides. No harm, no foul.

 

[Akhenaten]

Kewl with me.

Cheers.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

My point was that there is a causal connection, but Jung was looking for it in the wrong place. Had he been a clearer thinker, he would have realized that the connection is created entirely by the observer.

But again, the way people use the term synchronicity is to insist that it's neither a random coincidence nor a causally linked event. This of course is a logical contradiction or internal inconsistency in the concept. It's like a 4 sided triangle.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

My main point about synchronicity is that some reported coincidences seem to stretch to the breaking point the current scientific consensus regarding the laws of probability.

Name one.

Again, you still haven't been able to answer what distinguishes a mere coincidence from synchronicity. I've proven that it's not the fact that the odds are long (even extremely long).

You seemed to indicate that there is an objective way to determine whether that is actually true, but I'm still unsure of how you would go about attempting to prove or disprove synchronicity.

And I'm still wondering the same thing about you. You asserted the need to "investigate" synchronicity earlier, and you still haven't said how you'd go about doing it.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

My bolding.

For a little more than a year, every time I checked the time on our digital clock, it would read 1:11 2:22 3:33 4:44 5:55 or 11:11

after a few months, the weirdness of this became mundane. I never quite expected it, yet it had become common place.

I suspect a bit of confirmation bias going on. I suspect that once you thought to look for that pattern, whenever you saw it, you mentally recorded it as yet another instance but you simply forgot about the times when you looked at the clock and didn't see the pattern.

Try picking any 3 digit number and then looking for it for a few weeks. At some point it will feel like that number is everywhere. Indeed it will feel as if you're seeing that number more now than you ever did in your life. In fact, you're just looking for it. In the past, you simply ignored random occurrences of that same number.

Again, this tendency is well explained by the fact that we evolved to spot patterns and we therefore have a tendency to spot them even in random data.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

Just curious - why would a name look different when it's written in German?
(Presuming it wasn't originally written in Greek, Korean or whatever. )

 

[Akhenaten]

That's what Babelfisch wanted to know. I had to trick it to get my translation.

 

[Rodney]

Name one.

Lots of good ones on this thread, but here is one of my all-time favorites:

"The French writer Émile Deschamps claims in his memoirs that in 1805, he was treated to some plum pudding by a stranger named Monsieur de Fontgibu. Ten years later, the writer encountered plum pudding on the menu of a Paris restaurant and wanted to order some, but the waiter told him that the last dish had already been served to another customer, who turned out to be de Fontgibu. Many years later, in 1832, Émile Deschamps was at a diner and was once again ordered plum pudding. He recalled the earlier incident and told his friends that only de Fontgibu was missing to make the setting complete—and in the same instant, the now senile de Fontgibu entered the room." See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity

Again, you still haven't been able to answer what distinguishes a mere coincidence from synchronicity. I've proven that it's not the fact that the odds are long (even extremely long).

Please demonstrate that with the above plum pudding story.

And I'm still wondering the same thing about you. You asserted the need to "investigate" synchronicity earlier, and you still haven't said how you'd go about doing it.

I would examine the seemingly most unlikely coincidences, attempt to ascertain all relevant facts regarding each sequence of events, and then try and estimate what the odds against that sequence were.

 

[Vitor Moura]

I think that has to be the response to every example given. The classic example is you answer a ringing phone only to find it's the person you were just thinking of on the other end. Amazing, right? Maybe, until you think about how many times you think about someone and they don't call, and how many times you pick up the phone and it isn't the person you were just thinking about.

3 articles of this year - 2009 - tested this claim and the 3 articles found evidence for telepathy:

First article:

A rapid online telepathy test.Sheldrake R, Beharee A.
Perrott-Warrick Project, London, UK. rsheldrake@clara.co.uk

Psychol Rep. 2009 Jun;104(3):957-70.

In an automated online telepathy test, each participant had four senders, two actual and two virtual, generated by the computer. In a series of 12 30-sec. trials, the computer selected one of the senders at random and asked him to write a message to the subject. After 30 sec., the participant was asked to guess who had written a message. After the computer had recorded his guess, it sent him the message. In a total of 6,000 trials, there were 1,599 hits (26.7%), significantly above the chance expectation of 25%. In filmed tests, the hit rate was very similar. The hit rate with actual senders was higher than with virtual senders, but there was a strong guessing bias in favour of actual senders. When high-scoring subjects were retested, hit rates generally declined, but one subject repeatedly scored above chance.

Second article:

Do You Know Who is Calling? Experiments on Anomalous Cognition in Phone Call Receivers
The Open Psychology Journal, 2009, 2, 12-18
Stefan Schmidt, Devi Erath, Viliana Ivanova and Harald Walach

Abstract: Many people report that they know in advance who is on the phone when the telephone is ringing. Sheldrake and Smart [1, 2] conducted experiments where participants had to determine which one of four possible callers is on the phone while the telephone was still ringing. They report highly significant hit rates that cannot be explained by conventional theories. We attempted to replicate these findings in a series of three experiments. In study one, 21 participants were asked to identify the callers of 20 phone calls each. Overall 26.7 % were identified correctly (mean chance expectation 25%, ns). In a second study a pre-selection test was introduced in a different experimental setting. Eight participants identified 30% of the calls correctly (p = .15). However one of the participants recognized 10 out of 20 calls correctly (p = .014). We conducted a third study with only this participant. In an additional 60 trials she could identify 24 callers correctly (p = .007). We conclude that we could not find any anomalous cognition effect in self-selected samples. But our data also strongly suggest that there are a few participants who are able to score reliably and repeatedly above chance.

Third article:

Sensing the Sending of SMS Messages: An Automated Test. Sheldrake R, Avraamides L, Novák M. Explore (NY). 2009 September - October;5(5):272-276.

Objective
The aim of this study was to carry out automated experiments to test for telepathy in connection with text messages.

Method
Subjects, aged from 11 to 72, registered online with the names and mobile telephone numbers of three senders. A computer selected a sender at random and asked him/her to send a short message service (SMS) message to the subject via the computer. The computer then asked the subject to guess the sender's name and delivered the message after receiving the guess. A test consisted of nine trials. The effects of subjects' sex and age and the effects of delay on guesses were evaluated. The main outcome measure was the proportion of correct guesses of the sender's name, compared with the 33.3% mean chance expectation.

Results
In 886 trials, there were 336 hits (37.9%), significantly above the 33.3% chance level (P = .001). The hit rate in incomplete tests was 38.4% (P = .03), showing that optional stopping could not explain the positive results. Most tests were unsupervised, which left open the possibility of cheating, but high-scoring subjects were retested under filmed conditions, where no cheating was detected, with 19 hits in 43 trials (44.2%; P = 0.09).

All articles are online, you can find them using google very easily.

 

[Akhenaten]

Yikes!

 

[quarky]

My bolding.


I suspect a bit of confirmation bias going on. I suspect that once you thought to look for that pattern, whenever you saw it, you mentally recorded it as yet another instance but you simply forgot about the times when you looked at the clock and didn't see the pattern.

Try picking any 3 digit number and then looking for it for a few weeks. At some point it will feel like that number is everywhere. Indeed it will feel as if you're seeing that number more now than you ever did in your life. In fact, you're just looking for it. In the past, you simply ignored random occurrences of that same number.

Again, this tendency is well explained by the fact that we evolved to spot patterns and we therefore have a tendency to spot them even in random data.

I can see why you suspect confirmation bias. Its the most logical solution.
It would be pointless for me to argue that my observations were accurate.
Its certainly not something I'd want to repeat for verification, nor would I expect success in that..especially because I don't have something to prove.
The implications of my report, if true and honest, still don't describe some new aspect of how the universe works, nor do they refute science.

As mentioned, there are much stranger observations, with tastier data, that I'm more fascinated with than waht time it is.
I saw a sparrow riding a red-tailed hawk, for instance; hanging on to the hawk's head feathers as the hawk tried to shake it loose.
I've seen (and photographed) a ground hog climbing a tree. Did you know that groundhogs can climb trees? I didn't. Observations of this sort have some punch, so to speak. Meeting God through signs from a digital read out has nothing to teach about the world.

 

[fromdownunder]

Lots of good ones on this thread, but here is one of my all-time favorites:

"The French writer Émile Deschamps claims in his memoirs that in 1805, he was treated to some plum pudding by a stranger named Monsieur de Fontgibu. Ten years later, the writer encountered plum pudding on the menu of a Paris restaurant and wanted to order some, but the waiter told him that the last dish had already been served to another customer, who turned out to be de Fontgibu. Many years later, in 1832, Émile Deschamps was at a diner and was once again ordered plum pudding. He recalled the earlier incident and told his friends that only de Fontgibu was missing to make the setting complete—and in the same instant, the now senile de Fontgibu entered the room." See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity

Please bear in mind that I am not attempting to denigrate the story, but perhaps it is not as wild as it sounds. Over a twenty seven year period, these people met three times in restaraunts and "Plum Pudding" was a common factor.

How pupular was Plum Pudding in Paris in the early 19th Century?

How many times did these gentlemen visit Restaraunts over this period and not run into each other?

How often did they order Plum Pudding compared to how often they didn't order plum pudding? Perhaps they both had or acquired a Plum Pudding fetish, and ordered it every time they dined in a Restaraunt.

How many restaurants were even around in early 19th Century Paris?
I have no figures (and no desire to investigate this story), but I suspect that they would be less in frequency than now.

Were these middle/upper class Restaurants where well known people would regularly dine? If so, the fact that this event only occured three times in 27 years reduces the odds considerably.

Norm