The Power of Coincidence By: Jill Neimark

Summary: Whether coincidences are meaningful is a mystery. But our
talent for noticing and manipulating them is increasingly clear.
The life of psychiatrist Elisabeth Targ was haunted by coincidences.
In 1972 her father, physicist Russell Targ, cofounded the Stanford
Research Institute to investigate psychic phenomena. Elisabeth
participated in his ESP experiments, and he encouraged her
to "remotely view" and predict her birthday presents before she
opened them (and claims she was correct most of the time). Elisabeth
Targ was an academic superstar. She graduated from high school at age
15, was fluent in Russian, German and French, and eventually
graduated from Stanford Medical School

In July of 1998, Targ and colleagues at California Pacific Medical
Center in San Francisco published a double-blind study in the Western
Journal of Medicine that rocketed her to fame in the field of
complementary and alternative medicine: Forty healers around the U.S.
were recruited to pray for the health of patients with advanced AIDS.
The prayed-for group had significantly fewer opportunistic illnesses
than the control group, and Targ instantly became the poster child
for a fledgling new field exploring prayer and healing. "Elisabeth is
our hero," wrote Mitchell Krucoff, a Duke University Medical Center
cardiologist who has pioneered complementary therapies in patients
with heart disease.

Targ's research was impressive enough that in January of 2002 the
National Institutes of Health gave her $1.5 million to carry out two
more distant-prayer studies, one on AIDS and another on glioblastoma
multiforme, an aggressive and almost inevitably fatal brain tumor. In
Europe and the U.S. there are approximately two to three new cases
per 100,000 people annually. "It is a particularly gnarly disease
from which people rarely recover," says her father, "and that's why
she wanted to study it."

Two months later, in March of 2002, Targ, who was 40, began fertility
treatments: she and her fiancé, physicist Mark Comings, wanted a
family. That spring, however, she began finding it difficult to
pronounce words with the letter "b," and one morning the left side of
her face sagged. A high-resolution MRI revealed that she was
suffering from a rapidly growing grade 4 glioblastoma multiforme
brain tumor. Word of the horrific diagnosis spread, and healers began
calling, visiting and praying from a distance—in a truly eerie echo
of her newly funded study. But they could not save her. Targ died on
July 18, 2002, at 11:11 p.m., 111 days after her diagnosis.

The coincidences, if we may call them that, did not end with Targ's
death. Kate MacPherson, a healer and registered nurse in Salinas,
California, had participated in Targ's first study on AIDS and
prayer. "About a month after Elisabeth died," says MacPherson, "I had
a dream."

In the dream, Comings (who married Targ shortly before her death was
sitting on a weathered wooden box in an old European town with
cobbled streets and stone buildings. "He was devastated," recalls
MacPherson, "and Elisabeth kept repeating something to him. I
couldn't understand it. I thought maybe it was Hebrew. The sounds
were ya vas liu bliu. I wrote down the dream and phonetics and sent
it to Mark, whom I knew in passing."

Russell Targ recalls the Sunday morning when Comings came over to his
home and read MacPherson's letter out loud. Targ instantly recognized
the syllables as the Russian words for "I love you." Elisabeth was
not only fluent in the language but had traveled there with her dad.

Yet another coincidence? "So many mystical things have happened to me
in the aftermath of Elisabeth's death," says Comings, who to this day
wears not only his wedding ring, but Elisabeth's as well. "The
stories are mind-blowing, even to the parapsychologists who study
these things for a living."

Lucky Accidents

One thing is certain about coincidence. The phenomenon fascinates
believers and skeptics alike. It's a porthole into one of the most
interesting philosophical questions we can ask: Are the events of our
lives ultimately objective or subjective? Is there a deeper order, an
overarching purpose to the universe? Or are we the lucky accidents of
evolution, living our precious but brief lives in a fundamentally
random world that has only the meaning we choose to give it?

For those with a highly empirical bent, a coincidence is
happenstance, a simultaneous collision of two events that has no
special significance and obeys the laws of probability. "In reality,
the most astonishingly incredible coincidence imaginable would be the
complete absence of all coincidence," says John Allen Paulos,
professor of mathematics at Temple University in Philadelphia, and
best-selling author of Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its
Consequences. "Believing in the significance of oddities is self-
aggrandizing," he adds. "It says, 'Look how important I am.' People
find it dispiriting to hear, `It just happened, and it doesn't mean
anything.'"

To the mystically inclined, however, coincidence is a synchronicity,
the purposeful occurrence of two seemingly unrelated events. The
argument is not likely to be resolved anytime soon. Of late, though,
the phenomenon of coincidence has begun to yield new scientific
insights. It turns out that we may actually be hardwired to connect
anomalies in a meaningful way. Many of the remarkable feats our
brains regularly perform—including our ability to learn the meaning
of words or decode the unspoken laws of social decorum depend on our
penchant for noticing coincidences. In fact, mathematicians,
cognitive scientists and paranormal researchers are applying the
tools of statistics and probability to tease out just where
coincidences lie on the bell curve of everyday experience. Are they
easily explained, or so improbable they must signify something?

Comets, Dogs and Dalmatians

In A.D. 66 a comet was seen across the sky in Jerusalem just as the
Jewish people were revolting against the Romans. In 1066, another
comet appeared, just before the fateful Battle of Hastings was fought
over the throne of England. Were these merely strange coincidences—or
are comets portents of divine intent?

In 1705 English astronomer Edmund Halley was looking through old
records of comets when he noticed a coincidence: The bright comets of
1531, 1607 and 1682 had almost the same orbits and appeared
approximately every 75 years. Halley concluded they were one comet
and predicted it would reappear in 1758. On Christmas night of 1758,
Halley's comet appeared, forever changing our understanding of
comets.

Indeed, coincidences help prod science along. "They are a true
paradox," says MIT cognitive scientist Josh Tenenbaum. "On the one
hand they seem to be the source of our greatest irrationalities—
seeing causal connections when science tells us they aren't there. On
the other hand, some of our greatest feats of scientific discovery
depend on coincidences."

According to Tenenbaum, we could not learn language and syntax
without the ability to notice strange coincidences. "Consider the
challenge in learning just a single word," says Tenenbaum. "Every
word is in a sense an infinite object. It's not just a name for an
individual thing, it refers to an infinite set of things." Take the
word "dog"—to understand that simple word you have to understand the
name (Rover), the type (say, a black Labrador), all dogs, all
mammals, all animals, all Labradors, all black Labradors (or black
poodles, or black Great Danes), all running things, all furry
things. "Yet even children under 5 can be given just a few relevant
examples of dog and learn to use it," marvels Tenenbaum. Even more
remarkable is that between the ages of 1 and 5, children are learning
at least five new words a day.

Children make these cognitive leaps by noticing coincidences —
Labradors and poodles and other dogs bark, pant with their tongues on
hot days and, in cities at least, appear on leashes led by humans.
Tenenbaum has demonstrated that we can generalize meaningfully from
just a few examples of a novel word. In one study, 25 adults were
shown sets of photographs (animals, vegetables, vehicles), and
presented with a "novel" non-English word (such as "blick") as the
name for the object. They were asked to point out instances
of "blick" in additional photographs. Tenenbaum found that after
seeing an object (such as a Dalmatian) with the name "blick" only
once, adults were able to infer that the word either referred to all
Dalmatians or all dogs. If they were shown three Dalmatians as three
examples of "blick," they were much more likely to infer that "blick"
referred only to Dalmatians. A pilot study found that even 4-year-old
children could generalize properly if presented "blick" three times.

"Coincidences drive so many of the inferences our minds make," says
Tenenbaum. "Our neural circuitry is set up to notice these anomalies
and use them to drive new learning. There is an old saying that
neurons that fire together wire together. So you could say that
coincidence operates at the level of the synapse, whenever neurons
fire at the same time." If our minds are primed to find coincidences,
it's not surprising that we sometimes see connections where they
don't exist. But do we fall into that trap too often?

It's Just a Coincidence!

"What are the odds of that?" asks SQuire Rushnell [sic] again and
again in his best-selling book, When God Winks, an entertaining
collection of confounding coincidences, from star-crossed lovers to
holocaust survivors who were reunited years later. When Rushnell
began writing the book, he was pondering the famous fact that John
Adams and Thomas Jefferson, two men who shaped the Declaration of
Independence, both died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of
the signing of that historic document.

"I sat in my small study wondering whether there were more
coincidences connecting the two men," recalls Rushnell. He pulled a
reference book off his shelf, but it had no useful information. "Then
I noticed a thin, homely, old volume right next to the reference
book. I'd brought it back in a box of books after my grandfather's
funeral and never noticed it before. It was a collection of Daniel
Webster's speeches, and the first one was a eulogy for Adams and
Jefferson." The speech described many coincidences linking the two
men. In later research, Rushnell discovered that the book was
available in only one public library in the Eastern U.S., the rare
book section of the Library of Congress. "Yet here was a copy from my
grandfather, sitting right there on my shelf, just when I needed it,"
exclaims Rushnell. "What are the odds of that?"

Not as small as you'd think, answer mathematicians who study the laws
of probability. "In 10 years there are 5 million minutes," says
Irving Jack Good, a professor in the department of statistics at
Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg. "That means each person
has plenty of opportunity to have some remarkable coincidences in his
life." Good recalls his own remarkable coincidence: He was at a
conference listening to a speaker who described a mathematical proof,
and later that day opened a mathematics textbook at random in the
library. On the open page was a shorter proof of the same theorem. "I
estimated that coincidence had a probability of 10¹¹."

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.

Since 1998 Radin, who has studied everything from precognition to
remote viewing, has been testing 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.

"We've studied 168 events from August 1998 to November 2003," says
Radin. 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."

What does this have to do with coincidence—besides that the data
itself might be a mere coincidence? Computer scientist Richard Shoup,
president of the Boundary Institute in Saratoga, California, which
studies psychic phenomena, thinks this kind of data may challenge the
assumption of fundamental randomness that is at the core of theories
like quantum mechanics—and thereby challenge the worldview of those
who chalk up coincidences to happenstance. Shoup wonders if other
sources of random data on September 11, such as devices that were
scanning the radio spectrum for signals, also showed a shift. "The
data seem to show that observation can change things, that maybe
thoughts affect the world," says Shoup. "We need more people to think
about this." One person who is thinking deeply about this is Mark
Comings. A week after Elisabeth Targ died, he happened to be at a
bank around the corner from the place in Palo Alto, California, where
they'd had their first dinner in 1981. The site is now a Border's
Books store, but the courtyard and tables where they ate are still
there. "I was filled with emotion remembering our meeting so long ago
and thinking what a profound impact she'd had on my life," recalls
Comings. "Then all of a sudden I heard her voice in my head,
saying, `Get that book.' I turned around and at that moment a person
was pushing a cart of books by me, and on the cart was a cardboard
sign with a hand pointing down that read, `This one is for you.' I
walked over to the book it was pointing at. It was called The Field:
The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe. I picked it up and
opened to a footnote about Elisabeth and a famous remote viewing
experiment she'd done." It turned out there was an entire chapter
about Elisabeth Targ, so Comings bought the book, and brought it to
Russell Targ. "He hadn't seen it. It was a new book that had just
been published."

Comings finds solace in his view of the universe, which embraces the
import of coincidences. "I have a sense of real and dynamic
interaction between [me and Elisabeth]. But I have a unique view of
the world," he says.

He also finds comfort in Targ's enduring legacy. One hundred fifty
patients with glioblastomas are enrolled in the study she devised
before succumbing to the cancer. Preliminary results are expected
this fall.

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