What does coincident mean? Is it just something that happens without any planning and calculation? Or it refers to something that your subconscious mind has already planned?
Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy. Few years earlier to that he had addressed a speech defending ‘the fair play for cuba committee’, of which he was a member. After he killed the president, some investigators reversed his speech. Turns out that when he says, ’and the fair play for cuba’ becomes, ‘I wish to kill president’. Some people call it, his subconscious confession of the crime he was going to commit. Well, it’s not that. If anybody says ‘and the fair play for cuba’ and reverses it, it sounds like ‘I wish to kill president’ to some extent. Similarly the sentence said by Neil Armstrong ‘a small step for man’, sounds like ‘man will spacewalk’ when heard in reverse.
Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy. Few years earlier to that he had addressed a speech defending ‘the fair play for cuba committee’, of which he was a member. After he killed the president, some investigators reversed his speech. Turns out that when he says, ’and the fair play for cuba’ becomes, ‘I wish to kill president’. Some people call it, his subconscious confession of the crime he was going to commit. Well, it’s not that. If anybody says ‘and the fair play for cuba’ and reverses it, it sounds like ‘I wish to kill president’ to some extent. Similarly the sentence said by Neil Armstrong ‘a small step for man’, sounds like ‘man will spacewalk’ when heard in reverse.
These are mere coincidences. There are many sentences which make literal sense when spoken forwards and also reversing the sound of it. One of that is, ‘Ooh! you sniff turkey fat’, which on reversing sounds like, ’happy birthday to you’. Words or sentences that sound the same when pronounced forwards and reversing its sound are called phonetic palindrome, e.g. ‘say yes’.
There’s a poem by Karsten Johansson which in itself is a palindrome.
It goes like:
When I wonder why
What’s never been’s never been so
We would lie when we say,
“Yes you know we all love you”
What’s never been’s never been so
Hell we are nowhere now.
One of the daily life coincidence things is hearing your name being called when it actually is not. Like hearing it in the sound of tap water, or phone’s ringtone, or hearing English words in songs that actually aren’t there. This is called ‘paridolia’. Check out this Bollywood song which sounds so ’english’ to someone knowing only English- May he poop(Bollywood song)
Paridolia is also seeing human faces when actually there aren’t any.
Our brain understands patterns so well that it makes everything relatable. That’s the reason that we differentiate people’s faces even though all have same number of eyes, nose, etc. just by seeing once, whereas it becomes quite hard for us to do that for dogs, cats and other animals.
Our pattern loving mind finds patterns even in actual random things. When ‘Apple’ launched their shuffle feature in iPod, users often complained that the songs are not that random. So what apple did, they created a mathematical algorithm using pattern to recreate randomness. As Steve Jobs said, ”We are making it less random to make it feel it more random”.
This dancing spiderman image will sync up with any song you play simply because your brain wants it to sync up.
The reason behind our brain’s such behavior to make things comes because of ‘selection bias’ and ‘confirmation bias’.We select those things which we like. In dancing Spiderman’s case, we tend to neglect its moves where it doesn’t sync up and tend to get excited where it syncs. Also, two things seem linked when we want them to be linked often neglecting things against it.
These can be used to explain the coincident relations between famous movies and famous albums have. Like the one, syncing of ‘the wizard of oz ’ and ‘the dark side of moon’. Coincidences between famous people can also be explained by this. One famous coincidence is between President John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln. It is pretty cool in itself but it you are given large information about any two people, you can quite easily find 15-20 coincidences between them.
There are things that are rare in average but may not be rare on individuals considering their large number. One such thing is the fact that Walter Summerford was struck by lightning three times in his life and four years after his death, his gravestone was also struck by lightning. Well, chances of lightning striking humans is very low but the fact that lightning strikes earth 40-50 times every second, having an event like Summerford’s in 1000 years, among billions of people is not that unusual. Rather, it would be unusual to not have such an event (mathematically speaking).
Well, coincidences are our perception. They are an important feature of our pattern loving minds. So don’t get spooked out next time you hit a coincidence, because you reading this article is also a coincidence.
Thanks
ReplyDeleteGood one bro..😊
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