Improbable occurrences are to be expected, say statisticians, especially considering there are 5 billion people on the planet. "We're awash in a torrent of names, numbers, dates, addresses, acronyms, telephone calls, e-mails, calendars, birth dates," says John Paulos. "The information-rich environment of modern life itself is a source of many coincidences." Even "prophetic" dreams can be explained by probability, says Paulos. This country dreams a half billion hours each night (250 million people dreaming two hours a night). Some of those dreams are bound to coincide with real events.
Mathematicians point out that people are notoriously inaccurate in predicting probability. We are, in a sense, mathematically naive. Perhaps one of the most famous experiments to demonstrate this is known as the "birthday problem." There are 365 days a year, and 366 in a leap year. To absolutely guarantee that two people in the same room share a birthday, you need 367 people. But how many people are needed to ensure a 50 percent chance of a shared birthday (such as July 4)? Most people guess about half of 366—or 183. The actual answer is surprisingly low: you need only 23 people. However, if you specify an exact birth date (July 4, 1976), you need 613 people to reach a 50 percent probability. The upshot: improbable events are quite likely to occur but specific, predicted improbable events are far less likely.
If we understood probability theory better, would we be less bewitched by coincidences? Perhaps not. Josh Tenenbaum says we're actually very good at inferring probabilities—as long as the data are presented in a way that reflects real-world thinking. "Asking people for an arbitrary number in terms of probability—such as 'What are the odds that three people share the same birthday?'—is asking them to perform a strange calculation," explains Tenenbaum. "But we are extremely good at noticing data that might have an underlying common cause." Tenenbaum and doctoral candidate Thomas Griffiths showed Stanford University undergraduates 14 sets of birth dates reflecting either randomness (such as 2, 4, 6 and 8 unrelated birthdays) or coincidence (such as 4 birthdays on the same day). The students were asked to rate how big a coincidence each set of birth dates was on a scale of 1 to 10. "There was a very high correlation between people's intuition about coincidence and the correct probability," says Tenenbaum, who suggests that if we change the way we model questions about probability we'll conclude that humans actually excel at detecting the singularity of an event.
The Other Side of Probability
We may be highly skilled at detecting and connecting anomalous events, but that doesn't help us understand events so spectacular that they are readily noticed—but not easily explained. "I have no argument with people who suggest that very unusual events happen every so often and have no intrinsic significance," says Dean Radin, author of The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena,and senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, California, which studies psychic phenomena. "I just don't accept that this explanation is correct 100 percent of the time." For instance, in laboratory studies he's found that people seem to know when they're going to view upsetting photos. A measurement of electrical activity on their skin rises before viewing disturbing photos randomly selected by a computer. The same changes do not occur before neutral or calming photos appear. "Science makes assumptions about the way things work, and yet we still understand so little. I'm willing to dance with the mystery without requiring the whole answer ahead of time," says Radin.
Radin, who studies everything from precognition to remote viewing, tests coincidence on a global scale specifically, whether events with a worldwide impact focus consciousness and influence the functioning of machines. To study this, a volunteer collaboration of 75 researchers around the world joined in the Global Consciousness Project, headed up by Radin and psychologist Roger Nelson of Princeton University. The researchers are monitoring 75 devices called random number generators. These machines generate numbers based on electronic noise like the static you hear between radio stations. The goal is to measure whether events that focus mass consciousness tip the random number generators toward significantly greater randomness or significantly greater coherence.
On September 11, 2001, a few hours before the World Trade Center was attacked, there was a large, anomalous spike in the 37 generators being monitored at that time—a uniform rise in what statisticians call variance. In a sense the generators were extremely "noisy," says Radin. "Over the course of the rest of the day," the opposite happened. There was a drop in magnitude that was uncharacteristically quiet, and unique for that entire year." On March 11, 2004, after the terror attacks in Madrid, it was also unusually "noisy," but the next day, during the demonstrations in Spain, there was once again uncharacteristic coherence, or "quiet." Disasters disrupt global consciousness (and the machines), hypothesizes Radin, while mass demonstrations and celebrations lead to a coherent mind field, which shifts these supposedly random machines toward more coherence and "quiet."
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