When is something not a coincidence

That sounds close. We had barely had time to whiplash from marveling at our good fortune to guiltily suggesting we should find somewhere to turn it in before a group of older kids ahead of us snatched the cash wad out of our hands. We were hapless, gangly middle schoolers I was growing out my bangs; it was a rough year. They were confident we would do nothing to stop them, and they were right. So that was the end of that. A little more than a year later, I went to a summer program at Michigan State University, a nerd camp where you take classes like genetics for fun.

With very little attempt at chill I interrupted their conversation and grilled him on the particulars. They have a similar texture, a feeling that the fabric of life has rippled. The question is where this feeling comes from, why we notice certain ways the threads of our lives collide, and ignore others.

For one thing, people can be pretty liberal with what they consider coincidences. Or if it was the day right before or after yours. So there are several birthdays that person could have that would feel coincidental. And there are lots of people on this planet—more than 7 billion, in fact.

If enough people buy tickets, there will be a Powerball winner. Even within the relatively limited sample of your own life, there are all kinds of opportunities for coincidences to happen. And when we include near misses as coincidences you and your friend were in the same place on the same day, just not at the same time , the number of possible coincidences is suddenly way greater. To demonstrate how common unlikely seeming events can be, mathematicians like to trot out what is called the birthday problem.

The answer is He collects coincidences, see. A thriller novel called The Coincidence Authority has a professor character based on him. I love that.

And you remember it after all this time. You would have been six feet away from someone who lost their money. The coincidence in a sense would have physically occurred. It was only because you were listening that you noticed it.

Beitman in his research has found that certain personality traits are linked to experiencing more coincidences—people who describe themselves as religious or spiritual, people who are self-referential or likely to relate information from the external world back to themselves , and people who are high in meaning-seeking are all coincidence-prone. People are also likely to see coincidences when they are extremely sad, angry, or anxious.

For Beitman, probability is not enough when it comes to studying coincidences. So he came up with an alternative explanation. And to this day, research shows that people who experience more coincidences tend to be more likely to believe in the occult as well. This is the trouble with trying to find a deeper explanation for coincidences than randomness—it can quickly veer into the paranormal.

In our conversation, he divides coincidences into three broad categories—environment-environment interactions, mind-environment interactions, and mind-mind interactions. Environment-environment are the most obvious, and easiest to understand. These coincidences are objectively observable. Something, or a series of things, happens in the physical world.

I found some money and a year later I met the person who lost it. A nurse named Violet Jessop was a stewardess for White Star Line and lived through three crashes of its ill-fated fleet of ocean liners. In , she was there for the big one: the Titanic. And she survived. That one, I guess, is an environment-environment-environment.

Anybody could say anything. Another sort of mind-environment interaction is learning a new word and then suddenly seeing it everywhere.

Or getting a song stuck in your head and hearing it everywhere you go, or wondering about something and then stumbling onto an article about it. The things on our minds seem to bleed out into the world around us. And then the final category, mind-mind, of course, is straight-up mystical. This produces some fairly brain-mangling results. For example, it only takes 23 people in a room to make it more likely than not that two have the same birthday.

There is some nice, fairly simple maths that allows you to work out how many people you need to have a good chance of a match for any characteristic. For a birthday match, this means that we need around 1.

This makes it easy to make money from people. Suppose you have 30 people together. Bet the group that two of them have a birthday within one day of each other. What are the chances you will win? First consider the chance that any two people say me and you match in this way: if my birthday is August 16th which it is , then a match would happen if you were born on the 15th, 16th, or 17th, which is 3 out of days, or a 1 in chance. In other words, with 30 people in a room you are almost certain to win.

Regardless of the number of people gathered together, you can make money off them provided they are a bit gullible, preferably drunk, and not good at probability. So, get these 50 people to choose a number at random between 1 and , and bet them that they will not all choose different numbers. And people tend to choose particular numbers anyway — avoiding those ending in a zero, preferring odd numbers and so on — increasing the chance of match.

However, although you may make money, you may also lose friends. The final explanation for coincidences is what is called the law of truly large numbers, which says that anything remotely possible will eventually happen, if we wait long enough. Or to put it another way, even genuinely rare events will occur, given enough possibilities.

This is clearly a rare event. But there are one million families in the UK with three children under 18, and so we should expect around eight families to have children with matching birthdays, and that new cases crop up around once a year.

Which they do: new examples in the UK occurred on 29 January , 5 February and 7 October So given all this, it would be really strange if memorable coincidences did not happen to you. But this may be difficult to keep in mind when you are walking past a phone box, it rings, you decide to answer it, and you find the call is for you. When this happens to someone , they remember it for years. But just think of all the people you have ever known.

Then think of all the people that you have had some connection with, such as attending the same school, being friends of friends and so on. It will be tens of thousands. If you are the sort of person who talks to strangers, you will keep on finding connections.

If you are not, then think: you might have sat on a train next to a long-lost family member, and never realized it.