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The Science of Synchronicity: Why Things Fall Into Place When You Least Expect It
Ever had things magically work out? Here’s why it’s not just a coincidence.
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Have you experienced this? The phone rings and it’s the person you were just thinking about. You keep seeing the same number everywhere you turn. The book you need falls off the shelf as you walk past. Carl Jung called it synchronicity. Most of us call it coincidence, if we call it anything at all.
Who among us hasn’t felt it? That shiver when the universe seems, just for a moment, to be speaking directly to us.
I have found myself in those moments. The job offer that arrived the day after I decided to quit. The stranger on a train who mentioned the exact obscure author I had been reading that morning. The old friend I bumped into in a city neither of us lived in, halfway around the world from where we’d last met.
We would have these moments back, if we could. The feeling that some invisible hand has reached down and nudged reality into a shape that makes a kind of cosmic sense. That we are not, after all, alone in a cold universe of blind chance and merciless cause and effect.
But what’s really happening in these moments? Is there something to synchronicity beyond wishful thinking and selective memory?
The Pattern-Recognition Machine, i.e, Our Brain
Our brains evolved to spot patterns. This isn’t mysticism, but it’s actually neuroscience.
For our ancestors, noticing that certain berries made people sick, or that particular cloud formations preceded storms, meant the difference between life and death. We are hardwired to find connections, to extract meaning from the chaos of sensory information that bombards us every waking moment.
Sometimes, this superpower backfires. We see faces in random arrangements of light and shadow. We attribute intent to random events. We remember the hits and forget the misses.
You don’t remember the thousands of times you thought of someone and they didn’t call. You remember the one time they did.
