I've been noticing for the past few months that weird coincidences happen regularly in my life. For example, I think of someone and they call me five minutes later, or I keep running into the same number multiple times a day. Jung called that synchronicity, but I wonder if it's actually something mystical or if my brain is just looking for patterns that don't really exist.
It's mainly your brain playing tricks on you, not really anything mystical. You notice the coincidences that match what you're thinking about and you forget the 99 times it didn't happen - that's just classic selective attention.
You notice patterns, but do you also count the times you think about someone and they never call? That's the thing - our brain is excellent at spotting connections, even when they're just due to statistical chance. Jung had a nice idea, but scientifically it's mostly confirmation bias. You forget the thousands of thoughts that go nowhere and you remember the handful that "stick."
That said, it doesn't mean you're hallucinating - coincidences definitely exist, it's just that with billions of events happening every day, some are bound to seem weird just by pure probability. The coincidences we notice say more about how our brain filters information than about something mystical actually going on.
The thing is, if you really want to test this, you'd need to keep track for two weeks every time you think about someone without them calling, and every time you see a number without specifically looking for it - then you'd have an actual comparison instead of just remembering the weird stuff. Our brain is designed to spot patterns, that's its job, so of course it's going to find connections everywhere if you let it. Jung was an interesting philosophical idea, but scientifically nobody's ever shown that synchronicity was anything other than our natural tendency to see meaning everywhere, even when it's just random chance.
Log into answer.
