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The true significance of bizarre coincidences may be understood more fully with what is called the law of truly large numbers. This widely accepted law of statistics states that with a large enough sample size, even the extremely unlikely becomes likely, and therefore, any outrageous event may occur. When enough people are involved, "unusual" occurrences become highly probable.

Human memory is not like a tape recorder, faithfully recording everything experienced. Dramatic experiences tend to be remembered more than others. This leads to a phenomenon called subjective validation, more commonly known as selective memory. Therefore, it is only natural to remember unusual experiences. Returning to our friend who calls soon after you think about him, this event becomes much less extraordinary if we consider how many times we have thought of friends who did not call.

A common ploy used by psychics is to make dozens of predictions knowing that the more that are made, the better the odds are that one will be correct. When one comes true, the psychic counts on us to forget conveniently the 99 percent that were incorrect. This makes the correct predictions seem much more compelling than they really are.

Our coincidence-detection abilities have been finely honed through the ages by evolution and natural selection. Being able to spot significant correlations between events would present an important survival advantage to our ancestors, which would then be passed through the generations. We may therefore speculate that man is hardwired to look everywhere for patterns and connections. Modem culture, however, with its myriad connections between events and people, activates these abilities at every turn, causing us to continually suggest explanations and invoke strange forces, such as psychic powers, that do not exist.

Not all coincidences are meaningless and should be ignored. Truly unlikely events may have some underlying significance. However, the vast majority of coincidences that we experience turn out to be much more probable than they appear.

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