The Power of Coincidence

Targ's research was impressive enough that the National Institutes of Health gave her $1.5 million to carry out two more distant-prayer studies, one on AIDS and another on glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive and almost inevitably fatal brain tumor. In Europe and the U.S. there are approximately two to three new cases per 100,000 people annually. "It is a particularly gnarly disease from which people rarely recover," says her father, "and that's why she wanted to study it."

Two months later, Targ, who was 40, began fertility treatments: she and her fiance, physicist Mark Comings, wanted a family. That spring, however, she began finding it difficult to pronounce words with the letter "b," and one morning the left side of her face sagged. A high-resolution MRI revealed that she was suffering from a rapidly growing grade 4 glioblastoma multiforme brain tumor. Word of the horrific diagnosis spread, and healers began calling, visiting and praying from a distance—in a truly eerie echo of her newly funded study. But they could not save her. Targ died at 11:11 p.m., 111 days after her diagnosis.

The coincidences, if we may call them that, did not end with Targ's death. Kate MacPherson, a healer and registered nurse in Salinas, California, had participated in Targ's first study on AIDS and prayer. "About a month after Elisabeth died," says MacPherson, "I had a dream."

In the dream, Comings (who married Targ shortly before her death) was sitting on a weathered wooden box in an old European town with cobbled streets and stone buildings. "He was devastated," recalls MacPherson, "and Elisabeth kept repeating something to him. I couldn't understand it. I thought maybe it was Hebrew. The sounds were ya vas liu bliu. I wrote down the dream and phonetics and sent it to Mark, whom I knew in passing."

Russell Targ recalls the Sunday morning when Comings came over to his home and read MacPherson's letter out loud. Targ instantly recognized the syllables as the Russian words for "I love you." Elisabeth was not only fluent in the language but had traveled there with her dad.

Yet another coincidence? "So many mystical things have happened to me in the aftermath of Elisabeth's death," says Comings, who to this day wears not only his wedding ring, but Elisabeth's as well. "The stories are mind-blowing, even to the parapsychologists who study these things for a living."

Lucky Accidents

One thing is certain about coincidence. The phenomenon fascinates believers and skeptics alike. It's a porthole into one of the most interesting philosophical questions we can ask: Are the events of our lives ultimately objective or subjective? Is there a deeper order, an overarching purpose to the universe? Or are we the lucky accidents of evolution, living our precious but brief lives in a fundamentally random world that has only the meaning we choose to give it?

For those with a highly empirical bent, a coincidence is happenstance, a simultaneous collision of two events that has no special significance and obeys the laws of probability. "In reality, the most astonishingly incredible coincidence imaginable would be the complete absence of all coincidence," says John Allen Paulos, professor of mathematics at Temple University in Philadelphia, and best-selling author of Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences. "Believing in the significance of oddities is self-aggrandizing," he adds. "It says, 'Look how important I am.' People find it dispiriting to hear, 'It just happened, and it doesn't mean anything.'"

To the mystically inclined, however, coincidence is a synchronicity, the purposeful occurrence of two seemingly unrelated events. The argument is not likely to be resolved anytime soon. Of late, though, the phenomenon of coincidence has begun to yield new scientific insights. It turns out that we may actually be hardwired to connect anomalies in a meaningful way. Many of the remarkable feats our brains regularly perform—including our ability to learn the meaning of words or decode the unspoken laws of social decorum depend on our penchant for noticing coincidences. In fact, mathematicians, cognitive scientists and paranormal researchers are applying the tools of statistics and probability to tease out just where coincidences lie on the bell curve of everyday experience. Are they easily explained, or so improbable they must signify something?