One day actor Anthony Hopkins traveled to London to buy a novel, The Girl from Petrovka. He got a leading role in the movie based on the book, so he wanted to read it. None of the London bookstores, however, had the copy. But he found the book on his way home, at the metro station, on the seat next to him. When he later told the story to George Feifer, the book’s author, George Feifer, explained that he had lent a friend a uniquely annotated copy of the book. This friend had lost the copy in Bayswater, London. It was the copy that Antony Hopkins found. An interesting coincidence. You might have had the experience when you dream of someone you haven’t seen for a very long time, and then you meet that person the next day. Or imagine that someone wins the lottery … and then again. These things happen. A resident in British Columbia won $1 million in the Surrey Memorial Hospital Lottery and then later $2.2 million in the BC Cancer Foundation Lifestyle Lottery. Maurice and Jeanette Garlepy of Alberta won the Canadian Lotto twice. Also, only 1 in 10,000 clovers have four leaves, and some “lucky” people still find them. Are these fantastic events the results of the working of karma, angels, stars, fate, divination, magic, demons, devils, or “synchronicity?” (The last, more scientifically sounding term was used by psychologist Carl G. Jung to explain these “mysteries.”)
Probably none of these. Instead, the law of truly large numbers is more likely at work here. The law says that any extremely improbable thing is likely to happen with a large enough number of opportunities. There are about 8 billion people in the world, and something is always happening—enough opportunities to happen even for the things with the chance to happen 1:8 billion. Statistics is typically the last thing people turn to when explaining these rarities. Our minds didn’t evolve to deal with probabilities. People, for instance, believe a string of heads at tossing a coin makes a tail due as if there were a causal connection between the random tosses. Yet we remember and talk about these strange things. And of various events, we remember especially the bad ones: Ten percent of heart attack patients die within ten years. Ninety percent of patients survive or live more than ten years – which information do you remember better? There is also confirmation bias – we notice more readily and remember better things that confirm our beliefs. This is how superstitions arise; note that most of them deal with adverse events. And if we believe in astrology, we will remember what an astrologer got right and be prone to forget what they didn’t.
Our statistical ineptitude has some significant practical benefits. But when combined with a bundle of cognitive and psychological mechanisms, of which I have mentioned only two here, it makes us prone to seeing the mysterious and supernatural there where natural events occur.
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