Significant (?) Coincidence

One of the starkest and most symptomatic divides in our culture between rationalist skeptics and what I guess you could call spiritual hopefuls, or optimistic agnostics -- optimystics! -- is their take on coincidence. In the new-age worldview (I use small letters to distinguish it from the self-identified New Age movement, far beyond which it's spread), significant coincidences are taken to be signatures of a loving and meaningful intelligence permeating the universe. They succor the unchurched with some of the solace and guidance more traditional folks get from organized religion. (UPDATE: And they succor the churched, too: note this moving recent post at Kobayashi Maru, and these marvelous, marveling, afterthoughts on it.) They're messages that someone/something knows and cares we're here; that we're on the right track; that we were destined to meet the significant people in our lives. Deepak Chopra had a bestseller devoted to the subject, The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence. Some of the farther reaches of this worldview (which I'd quarantine under capital N capital A New Age) are at this website.

On the other side, here's a typical debunking article from Bruce Martin at CSICOP, the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. Skeptics like Martin say that what appear to us to be highly unlikely and personally mind-blowing coincidences -- God's mouth to our ear -- are actually confections of probability and psychology. They show that a) occurrences we think are rare, such as two people discovering they have the same birthday, actually have a high probability, and b) that, in Martin's words, "we tend to overlook the powerful reinforcement of coincidences, both waking and in dreams, in our memories. Non-coincidental events do not register in our memories with nearly the same intensity."

Martin does a probabilistic analysis of the likelihood that two or more people in a group will have the same birthday.

In a random selection of twenty-three persons there is a 50 percent chance that at least two of them celebrate the same birthdate. . . .[On a] plot of the probability of at least one common birthdate, P, versus the number of people, n . . . [t]he curve shows that the probability of at least two people sharing a common birthdate rises slowly, at first passing just less than 12% probability with ten people, rising through 50% probability at . . . twenty-three people, then flattening out and reaching 90% probability in a group of forty-one people. This means that on the average, out of ten random groups of forty-one persons, in nine of them at least two persons will celebrate identical birthdates. No mysterious forces are needed to explain this coincidence. . . . The same principle may be used to calculate the probability that at least two people in a random group possess birthdates within one day (same and two adjacent days). This condition is less restrictive than the former, and 50% probability is passed with just fourteen people.

Martin does admit that if the birthday in question is specified -- the usual case naturally being, "What is the chance that someone in this group of people shares my birthday?" -- the probably is far less, if still a lot higher than the "one in a million" it feels like:

If we specify a particular birthdate, such as today, a crowd of 253 people is required to have an even chance for even one person with that birthdate. For at least two persons to possess a specified birthdate, the 50% probability is not reached until there is a mob of 613 people. This huge difference of twenty-three versus 613 for 50% probability of at least two persons with a common birthdate is due to the fact that the date is unspecified for the group and specified for the mob. That some improbable event will occur is likely; that a particular one will occur is unlikely.

He concludes:

If coincident birthdates are so much more common than we would have guessed, isn't it likely that many of those other striking coincidences in our lives are the outcome of probability as well? We should not multiply hypotheses: the principle of Occam's Razor states that the simplest explanation is to be preferred.

As is my rather tiresome wont, I come down somewhere in the middle. Seeing meanings and messages EVERYWHERE is not only exhausting and ultimately meaningless, it's a symptom of paranoid psychosis, or short of that, of severe New Age poisoning. (Or just of being Thomas Pynchon.) On the other hand, I enjoy the mysterious and penetrating thrill of a good coincidence as much as anyone -- the way it makes you feel like God just nailed you with a glance and a chuckle; the way it momentarily renders the universe radiant and transparent, revealing what appear to be its connecting nerves and veins. Is this merely self-comforting delusion, a kind of intellectual thumb-sucking that deforms your mind's bite? I don't know.

What's missing from the analysis of birthday coincidences above is an explanation of why the people you meet who do have the same birthday as you are so often connected to you in other momentous ways as well. Martin would say that you've also met a number of people with your birthday whom you promptly forgot because they bored you silly, and bore no messages. I'm sure that's true. But how do you explain these four of my birthday coincidences? I was born on April 12. (I originally had the year here, because it is significant in one of these stories, but I was kindly advised by blogfriend Kobayashi Maru that this is an invitation to identity theft.)

-- When I was 11 or 12, Marta Dagestad, a Norwegian nanny who had cared for my father when he was a child and also helped with the next generation, set out to find me a pen pal in her home town, Voss, who was involved with the Norwegian equivalent of the Girl Scouts. Gurid Haaland and I began writing to each other, and discovered almost immediately that we were both born on April 12; she was one year older than me. We remained close friends for the rest of her life, finally meeting in our 20s when she became a flight attendant for SAS. (She died suddenly at age 54 of a ruptured brain aneurysm.)

-- When Jacques' former wife, who'd remained his friend, remarried in (I think) the late '70s, we found out that her new husband was also born on April 12. What's more, like me, he was one of six kids. He was the youngest; I was the oldest. The oldest in his family was named Ann.

-- In the mid-'70s, while writing capsule book reviews for a pre-publication service, I happened on an essay called "Peaks and Vales" by a psychologist I'd never heard of before, named James Hillman, in a book called On the Way to Self Knowledge, edited by Jacob Needleman and Dennis Lewis. The essay absolutely ran me through; it was like nothing I'd ever read before, and it talked to me, baby. I loved it so much that, paradoxical as it may seem, I didn't pick up another book by Hillman for over a decade. Then, in the mid-'80s, I burned through most of them -- at just the right time to save my life, by getting me to recognize what could have been a very destructive literal adventure as a soul adventure that did not need acting out. I was enough of a fan to attend an "Archetypal Psychology" conference in Hillman's honor held at Purdue University in, I don't know, the mid-'90s. One of the workshops was on "the horoscope of James Hillman." I walked into the classroom and Hillman's birth date was chalked on the blackboard: April 12, exactly twenty years before me.

-- This one may be the strangest of all. In 1962 a boy named Carl Nagin who loved flamenco ran away from prep school and came to Greenwich Village, where a flamenco coffeeshop owner named Jacques took him under his capacious wing. In 1965, Carl was in the college theatre world at Boston University when I was in the college theatre world at Harvard, and I went to a party at his apartment, where I met a guy I liked. (Trial run.) In 1972 in New York, my college theatre friend Francine Stone, who had been introduced to Jacques by Carl, introduced me to Jacques. The rest is history.

Jacques had a connection to a bargain student travel organization, and in maybe 1973 or '74, Carl asked us to get him a student travel card. He had to send us his date of birth. It came, and I opened the envelope. Carl was born on the same April 12, the exact same day as me. (On that date, Jacques was a prisoner in Russia.)

UPDATE: I just realized that this is a post about Intelligent Design.

Comments

[Arthur]

interesting entry! thanks for sharing!

[david]

Dang...

[Matt]

A-- I like your stories... I agree with you: no matter what the odds of these coincidences (and I guess we do have millions of interactions each day that go unnoted, only remembering those rare ones that, for whatever reason, grab our attention), these moments hold value for us because they help illuminate some connection that is important for us. We are pattern-seekers by nature, I think, and your stories show more of the places we may find them.

[Natalie]

Do you know Arthur Koestler's book on Serial Coincidence?It's most interesting and not in a new-agey way.
I am always puzzled as to why many people associate this kind of thing, including telepathy etc. with God and/or mysticism. I happen to believe in God (if rather unconventionally, as you know if you've seen my comic strips "Augustine interviews God") but I don't think there's anything mystical about what might be called the paranormal. We probably have more than five senses some of which are under-developed. If certain "serial coincidences", telepathic phenomena etc. can eventually be demonstrated to be fact and not fiction or superstition, it would not necessarily have anything to do with whether or not God exists. In my (humble? No) opinion, that's an entirely different question.

[Kobayashi Maru]

Even stranger: the timestamps on this post pre-date the posts it refers to! (OK, maybe that one has more conventional explanations. :)

Thanks for the TBs, Amba. Three thoughts:

1) Martin uses an overly simple, easy example to make a blanket case, without really addressing the expected frequency of far more complex and unlikely phenomena. That's partly due, I should think, to the fact that some of the phenomena I and others find most remarkable are absolutely unique.

E.g., a gutter-cleaning company "accidentally" coming to my house and cleaning my gutters (for free - because they were at the wrong house!) the very day that my brother relapsed with cancer, which was the day I was supposed to have called another gutter-cleaning company to come out. I didn't pick up the telephone to call. "Someone" got my subconscious message anyway.

There's no way to run an experiment on such a thing - for obvious reasons. But we know it's insanely unlikely and fortuitous.

2) What if coincidences are simply the 'glue' to ensure that we pay attention to key turning points in our lives? (e.g., some of the events you describe) We retain free will. It may be our actions (often but not always) resulting from our surprise at the coincidence that keep us on the right track on our life's path... that introduce us to a key person, that force us to stop and ponder, etc.

3) How is probability in any way contradictory to God? (Martin's supposition, not yours.) At the core of quantum mechanics and string theory lie "probability"... which is where I expect we'll eventually find God as well, as many scientists including Einstein have said.

P.S. putting your exact birthdate on a public website is a dangerous troll for identity theft.

[Comment Pimpette]

I like the story as well and the other day I was reminded about somthing that I was able to do as a young girl and another talent I had picked up in my 20's.

1. As a teenager, I used to know exactly what song would play next, before it was played or announced. I never put much thought into it at first and then later I mulled over all of the different possiblilities. I came to the conclusion (without ever really confirming it) that there must have been a certain pattern in the way the songs would be played.

this one is a little more difficult to explain:

In my 20's - when the phone would ring - before picking up the phone, I would state the name of the caller and then pick up. I was always correct and I didn't have caller ID, as a matter of fact caller ID didn't exist back then. That one was explained by me and anyone who saw this as knowing the different times of day that people are usually able to talk. That was all fine till one day the phone rang and I stated the name of a person that I hadn't heard from in 3 years - I was correct and the guy that was there was just blown away.

I still say coincidence.

[amba]

That's not coincidence, it's psi -- a touch of telepathy and/or precognition. It's a common observation -- people seem to "call" us mentally before they pick up the phone and call us physically. It also works that you think of someone and a few minutes later they call. Sometimes that's coincidence, often it seems unlikely to be,

Knowing the song that's about to play: I was once walking to the supermarket and for no reason thinking of a fairly obscure '70s song that I hadn't heard in years -- "Time Passages" by Al Stewart -- and I walked into the store and it was playing on the PA system.

The funniest song coincidence I've ever had was once just as I began to drive into the Lincoln Tunnel, the radio began to play Bruce Springsteen's "Tunnel of Love."

[Comment Pimpette]

Ah, yes the sixth sense (for females - for males it is hunger).

You really had me thinking about all the freaky things today. How do we explain the wierd Ouija board things that I've been through?

[amba]

Ooh, like what?? Tell, tell!

[Comment Pimpette]

Okay, I got it up on my blog:

http://sillylittleblonde.blogspot.com/2006/06/creepy-again-im-just-not-able-to-link.html

Enjoy!

[Comment Pimpette]

sorry - cancel that other link and here is the new one:

http://sillylittleblonde.blogspot.com/2006/06/creepy.html