Robert Alda first performed this 1950 song from the musical Guys and Dolls. Marlon Brando sang it in the film version five years later. Sinatra made it one of his classic numbers. It’s about a gambler hoping to win a bet and get the girl of his dreams. What is luck? When unexpected outcomes surprise us is it synchronicity, coincidence or serendipity?
All the above terms are synonyms for luck. Is success the result of chance? How does intuition affect our choices and good or bad fortune? Do we influence desired results with our thoughts?
Psychiatrist Carl Jung originated the term synchronicity and described it as “meaningful coincidences.” He believed everything in the universe is connected. Later research by others established that our brain is a powerful computer making connections and seeing patterns in seemingly random happenings. The premise that our thoughts impact the outside world and the future keeps believers and skeptics writing and fascinated by the subject. Is our life mostly random and governed simply by probability? Or is there a deeper phenomenon at work? Perhaps we experience a combination of both so we don’t have to take sides in this debate.
MIT cognitive scientist Josh Tenenbaum believes that our brain connects anomalies for us so they are meaningful. Such coincidences have produced scientific discoveries and learning. Of course we may, he believes, see connections that aren’t there and get labeled as irrational.
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, key authors of the Declaration of Independence, both died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of their signing of the document.
The naysayers of metaphysical possibilities focus on the sources of interpretations and messages and ignore the “content” and the insight or wisdom being received. This skeptical thinking doesn’t surprise me, as history’s greatest theorists such as Einstein and Tesla didn’t have their theories scientifically confirmed until years after they presented their message. Author Todd Carroll in “The Skeptics Dictionary” believes there is no scientific or objective way to determine whether synchronicity is valid or not. For Carroll it’s all personal opinion and experience. Other researchers are not so sure. Using statistical tools there’s evidence that some coincidences are easily explained under probability laws but others are so unlikely there must be something important to be aware of. Let’s consider both points of view.
First we learn from the mathematics and probability schools about a well-known birthday experiment. To guarantee that two people in the same room share a birthday, you need 367 people. But if we wanted a 50 percent chance of a shared birthday (such as December 25), only 23 people are needed. Specifying that we want an exact birth date such as July 4, 1976, we’d need 613 people just to reach a 50 percent probability. Under this experiment, improbable coincidences are likely to happen but specific predicted improbable events are much less likely.
Let’s shift to the psychic phenomena field and Dean Radin, Author of The Conscious Universe and senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California. He doesn’t accept that just because unusual events happen every so often without special significance that doesn’t mean it accounts for such events 100 percent of the time. Among his studies, Radin collaborated with 75 researchers around the world to test coincidence on a global scale. His co-partner managing the project was Psychologist Roger Nelson of Princeton University. The hardware used was a total of 75 machines that generate random numbers based on static like noise like we hear between radio stations. Their question was whether mass consciousness moves the number generators toward greater randomness or significantly greater coherence. A few hours before the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks there was a large, uniform rise in variance on the 37 generators being monitored at that time. This “noise” dropped in magnitude the rest of that day and was uncharacteristically quiet for the entire year. Unusually “noisey” readings occurred in 2004 after the terror attacks in Madrid. Quiet returned on the machines the next day while people were massed together in demonstrations. Radin theorizes that disasters disrupt global consciousness as read (noisy) by the machines while mass gatherings to celebrate or demonstrate produces a coherent effect and shifts these supposedly random machines toward more quiet. Computer scientist Richard Shoup thinks this kind of result challenges those who believe coincidences are happenstance. “Maybe thoughts affect the world,” he said. With 7.6 billion people on the planet we’re bound to experience many coincidences. Yet we can’t explain them all anymore than we can prove who made the most complex of crop circles, Stonehenge, the pyramid at Giza or the heads on Easter Island. The unknown is not mystery; it is magical and still to be discovered.
