I often feel like something is about to happen, and then it actually does. My friend says it's just statistics and I only notice the coincidences. But how do you explain me sensing calls from people I haven't seen in months?
Have you ever actually counted how many times you waited for a call that never came? Not just remembered it later, but actually kept track?
Because your friend is right, but not entirely. Yeah, your brain works selectively and remembers the hits while forgetting the misses. But there's another thing: intuition isn't magic, it's your subconscious at work. It processes tons of signals that you don't consciously notice. For example, you saw that this person always calls you on Tuesdays at 19:00, and your brain registered that, even though you're not thinking about it. When Tuesday comes around and it's getting close to 19:00, you feel anxious - and it seems like a premonition, but really it's just your memory of the pattern.
You can trust your intuition, but with a caveat: it works not like magic, but like very fast information processing. When you get the feeling that something's off with a person, it often means your brain picked up on a microexpression, a tone of voice, something in their behavior that signals danger or deception. That's useful. But when it comes to random events - calls, coincidences - you shouldn't trust it completely. Test yourself: keep a diary of your hunches for at least a week and see what percentage of them actually pan out. That'll give you an honest answer.
The selective attention effect explains exactly that: you remember the moments when your gut feeling came true, and you forget hundreds of times when you were waiting for a call that never came. Ask yourself to honestly count just one week: how many times did you think "X is going to call now" and how many of those times actually happened. Intuition does exist and it's often useful - it's accumulated experience, recognition of micro-signals that your brain processes unconsciously - but its predictive power is way more modest than it seems when you only remember the hits.
I have something similar happen - like, I'll think about someone and they'll message the chat literally five minutes later. But then I notice that most of the time I'm just thinking about people who message me often anyway, so there are more coincidences than if I were remembering random strangers.
Try keeping honest track for a week or two: write down not just when your intuition paid off, but also when you had a hunch about something and it didn't happen. Usually there are way more of those cases than your memory makes it seem. That doesn't mean intuition is fake, it's just that your brain is really good at airbrushing out the failed predictions.
Try keeping a simple tracker for a week: write down every time you get a hunch (whether it comes true or not), and mark the result. After that you'll see for yourself the actual ratio of hits and misses. Your friend isn't wrong about selective attention, but it works both ways - you only notice the striking moments when things line up, but you forget about dozens of evenings when you were waiting for a call and nothing happened. Intuition is real, but it's not magic: it's just your brain processing tons of tiny signals subconsciously and producing a hunch. The problem is that you can only tell the difference between "I had a hunch and it happened" and "I had hunches lots of times and sometimes they match up" with actual facts.
Don't write anything down specifically - just pay attention over the course of a week to when you have a premonition about a call but it doesn't come, and compare that to the times you actually guess right. Your friend is probably onto something with selective memory: your brain loves finding patterns and overestimates coincidences that stuck with you emotionally. But that doesn't mean your intuition is complete nonsense; it's just not working like a sixth sense - it's more like you're processing barely conscious signals: someone's habits, when they usually call you. You shouldn't trust it blindly, but you shouldn't ignore it either.
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