When 'unique' events happen really close together.

[heyheysg]

Hi, I would like to know how many of you have these 'coincidences' happen really close together.

Like having a really strange word, or a sequence of events that are fairly unique happen closely in a small space of time, like less than a day or within an hour?

For example, I just watched Brazil for the first time yesterday, heard the name Tuttle for the first time.

Then after the show I was surfing the net, reading some reviews, clicking on a Vera Farmiga bio and found out that her body double for 'Up in the Air' was a woman named Sarah Tuttle.

Time to coincidence 3 hours or less.

I've had it happen several times over the years, usually when I'm in a stressed out condition (work issues this time)

On google, people attribute it to fate, creating destiny with your mind etc and all other nonsense.

The closest I could find to a scientific explanation was Jung's idea of Synchronicity.

Has this happened to you and what do you think of it?

 

[Simple Bluff]

A song would be playing in my head, then out of nowhere, someone would start singing the same one out loud. Its happened a number of times. A few reasons for this:
1) I can see the future. Without realising it.
2) Everyone around me is clarevoyant.
3) God damned inception, man.
4) Some other super power I don't already know I have.
5) Whatever events led to me thinking up that song also happened to the same guy.
6) Coincedence?
I say options 1 through 4 are most likely.

Another example I can think of is when my step-dad taught me about "Perigrine Falcons", him with his useless knowledge. I never heard of them before, but the very next day my real dad (living in Germany) told me he saw a perigrine falcon. The wonders of fatherly love, eh?

 

[WayOutThere]

Apparently it's called the Baader Meinhof phenomenon. I'm not sure if it has to do with Jung though the article does mention sychronicity.

 

[BonsaiK]

Hi, I would like to know how many of you have these 'coincidences' happen really close together.

Has this happened to you and what do you think of it?

Yes it has. It's probably happened to everyone reading this.

When experiments have been done where humans have tried to predict random outcomes, such as guessing the results of a coin toss, what researchers have found is that humans tend to predict less consecutives than what actually occurs - in other words humans inject too much artificial randomness into the results. If asked to guess, humans will rarely predict, out of a series of coin tosses, five heads or five tails in a row, but the odds of this happening in the natural world are actually quite high, only 1 in 16. This is reflected in that humans also expect less consecutive appearances of events in the real world compared to what the natural randomness of the world actually dictates.

In other world, the world is certainly random, it's just that humans have trouble conceptualising the true nature of randomness, so we look for consecutives and go "oooh, isn't that a coincidence, isn't that weird". No, it's not weird, it's pretty normal actually.

 

[StBishop]

Hi, I would like to know how many of you have these 'coincidences' happen really close together.

Like having a really strange word, or a sequence of events that are fairly unique happen closely in a small space of time, like less than a day or within an hour?

For example, I just watched Brazil for the first time yesterday, heard the name Tuttle for the first time.

Then after the show I was surfing the net, reading some reviews, clicking on a Vera Farmiga bio and found out that her body double for 'Up in the Air' was a woman named Sarah Tuttle.

Time to coincidence 3 hours or less.

I've had it happen several times over the years, usually when I'm in a stressed out condition (work issues this time)

On google, people attribute it to fate, creating destiny with your mind etc and all other nonsense.

The closest I could find to a scientific explanation was Jung's idea of Synchronicity.

Has this happened to you and what do you think of it?

There's an alternative, you only notice things like the name Tuttle after it's been brought to your attention.

Go buy a slightly unusual car, (ie. not a prius, or corolla, or whatever is normal where you live) you'll see them pretty regularly afterward. It's because you notice them when you see them, they don't just pass by "under the radar".