Thread: Anyone else "Believe" they've shared/received a thought?

Humans aren't that complicated. We auto-pilot the hell out of our day. Remember the speculation that the vast majority of the thoughts/words we think/use each day are exactly the same. Plus, we have a lot of thoughts every single day.. It's bound to happen sometime that two people think the same thing at the same time.

Add to that they often are relatives or friends, i.e. people who are naturally alike anyhow, and who are constantly influencing each other through social interaction, and I'd say the chances of it happening is even more likely.

Add to that the fact that while we think we are terribly unique, humans generally are more identical to each other than we think (or like to think).

Add to that the inherently human logical flaw of confirmation bias, where you remember the times it does happen, but conveniently forget all those thousands upon thousands of times it didn't happen, and you're left with a feeling that there genuinely is something psychic going on inside of person x, when in actuality, the likelier hypothesis could just be a mix of basic probability theory, brain-laziness and memes.

So meh.. I'm not too convinced I'm psychic..


P.S. Case in point:
today I was caught up in the following topics: 1) fractals, 2) evolutionary theory, 3) meme theory. At least two of them (namely fractals and meme theory) are pretty obscure and not-so-daily topics to the general populace. However, just now I turned on the next episode of the Big Bang Theory and shebang! All three topics are there. Am I psychic? Am I somehow communicating with the writers of the show through the distance of time and space and braininess? Or was it a simple coincidence?

Originally Posted by TimB

P.S. Case in point:
today I was caught up in the following topics: 1) fractals, 2) evolutionary theory, 3) meme theory. At least two of them (namely fractals and meme theory) are pretty obscure and not-so-daily topics to the general populace. However, just now I turned on the next episode of the Big Bang Theory and shebang! All three topics are there. Am I psychic? Am I somehow communicating with the writers of the show through the distance of time and space and braininess? Or was it a simple coincidence?

THIS. This happens to me all the time. While I do agree that if you spend enough time with someone your thought patterns will naturally sync up a bit and linger on the same things, I just don't believe it can be a coincidence in all cases, especially cases like yours which are entirely out of your control and you have no physical influence upon.

Tim, you should check out the double-slit experiment. It isn't exactly related, but I think you'd be interested in it, if you haven't seen it already. Well, I guess it is related because the conclusion of the experiment showed that human thought does have an effect on our physical surroundings.
Double-slit experiment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia