Explain That!

Prophetic dreams, incredible coincidences, sixth sense – impossible to explain? Or not?

The first thing that tends to occur in these situations is that people always look for the connections and note hits but not misses. Even with a basic understanding of statistics it is pretty clear that only looking for hits and ignoring misses is not telling the whole story. For example, we have two sharpshooters in a contest – one has scored three hits, the other 10. At this point it sounds like the latter of the two is the better marksman. However, what if I tell you that sharpshooter one scored three bullseyes with three shots whereas the other scored 10 bullseyes but took 150 shots? A very different picture.

And so this goes some way to explaining a common occurrence cited as ‘sixth sense’; the phone rings just after you are thinking of someone and it turns out to be that person. We may not have thought about them in a long time but you can bet we haven’t taken any notice of times we have thought about them and they haven’t called. We ignore the misses – they don’t even register because they are not interesting.

There are also connections that we may not be able to fathom; you may have seen an article on the news last night and it reminded you of a place or time. In turn, this was at the back of your mind and you remembered your old friend from that subconscious series of connections. However, last night your friend saw the same item on the news, was reminded of you and resolved to call you first thing the next morning. Unless you analyse (and are able to remember) every event that you have recently experienced lately, it is unlikely that either of you will ever make that connection and put it down to some unseen force of synchronicity.

Then there is the Law-of-Very-Big-Numbers. Take a prophetic dream; A month before the terrorist attacks known as ‘9/11’, I dream of an aeroplane crashing into the World Trade centre and all the disastrous consequences that follow – emergency response, deaths, terror alerts etc.

Sounds like a pretty convincing display of predicting the future? Well consider this – there are something like 7 billion people on this earth. Each one will dream several times a night. That’s a LOT of dreams just in one night. Granted, not everyone will remember every dream but we are still talking a considerable number, especially when you widen the timeline from your dream to when it ‘comes true’. Once again, like in the previous case, we only notice hits and not misses and the poor marksman begins to look superhuman again.

This Law-of-Very-Big-Numbers is also a reasonable explanation for some of the incredible coincidences that occur throughout our lives – a superb example of which is given by Paul Westwood on this very website. Of course, these occurrences are truly astonishing and even more so when it happens to us or people we know. I am always fascinated by these stories and there are some amazing cases (and no doubt quite a few plain made-up ones).

However, statistically, there are millions and millions of us dialling numbers every day and many, many misdials. Amongst all these cases where the caller has got through to the wrong person – how many times is it someone they DON’T know or have any connection with? But again, we ignore the misses and notice only the spectacular hits. Once very big numbers come into play it only increases the chances of something outwardly weird happening.

What would be really, really weird is if they never happened at all.