Extraordinary ClaimsAnswer
What does research say about people who report memories of past lives?
What past-life memory research investigates, what reported matches can show, and why case studies do not by themselves establish reincarnation.
THE QUESTION LIBRARY EXTRAORDINARY CLAIMS
Why do coincidences sometimes feel like they were meant to be?
Striking coincidences happen far more often than they feel, and our minds are quick to notice them; what one means to you is a different question.
THE SHORT ANSWER
Mostly because striking coincidences are far more common than they feel, and our minds are quick to notice them. In a room of just 23 people, the odds are about even that two share a birthday. In a country of 250 million, a one-in-a-million daily event happens to about 250 people every day. We also remember hits and forget misses. Whether a coincidence carries a message is beyond science. What it means to you is yours to weigh.
- With 23 people, it is about even odds that two share a birthday; with just 14, it is even odds that two birthdays fall within a day of each other.
- Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller described a “law of truly large numbers”: with a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen.
- In studies by Ruma Falk and her colleagues, people found coincidences more surprising when they happened to themselves than when the same stories happened to others.
- A 2017 test found that the numerology birth numbers of 806 Nobel Prize winners did not differ from what chance would give.
- The psychiatrist Carl Jung coined the word synchronicity for coincidences he saw as linked by meaning rather than by cause.
About this picture
Seven photos of one rose chafer (Cetonia aurata) taking off, combined into one image; the flight path was shifted so the beetles would not overlap. In perhaps Carl Jung’s best-known story of synchronicity, a rose chafer knocked at his window as a patient told him her dream of gold scarab jewelry.
WHERE THE EVIDENCE STANDS
How sure are we?
- Striking coincidences are expected when enough people and events are involved.Diaconis and Mosteller, Journal of the American Statistical Association (1989): 23 people give even odds of a shared birthday; a one-in-a-million daily event strikes about 250 people a day in a population of 250 million; a double lottery winner somewhere in the U.S. within seven years is better than even odds.
- Meaningful coincidences happen far more often than chance allows, as Jung argued.Diaconis and Mosteller (1989) argued that four ordinary sources (hidden causes, memory and perception, counting near misses as matches, and truly large numbers) account for much of the force of synchronicity, and wrote that where rates can be checked with solid control, coincidences occur about as often as expected. They also noted how little data exists.
- People who see more patterns in random events tend to hold more paranormal beliefs.van Prooijen, Douglas and De Inocencio (2018): seeing patterns in random coin tosses went with supernatural beliefs. Riekki and colleagues (2013, 47 people) and Bressan (2002, 214 people) found related links; a 2023 study of 723 people confirmed a link with paranormal belief but found it small. Which comes first is still debated.
- Numerology birth numbers reveal a person’s talents or life path.Genovese (2017): birth numbers of 806 Nobel Prize winners matched chance and did not differ across prize fields. He found no earlier published test and notes birth numbers might track some other trait, so the evidence is thin: one test, and it found nothing.
- A coincidence can be a sign or message from God, angels or the universe.Science can count how often coincidences happen, but it cannot test whether a particular one was sent or meant. Jungian analysts describe synchronicity as a link of meaning, not of cause.
WHAT WE DON’T KNOW YET
In 1989, Diaconis and Mosteller noted that there was little data on how often coincidences happen in daily life, or on how that rate differs from person to person. Believers in the paranormal report more coincidences, but nobody knows yet exactly why.
WHAT WOULD CHANGE THIS ANSWER
Careful records showing that meaningful coincidences happen far more often than chance allows, in studies that count misses as carefully as hits, would change this answer. So would repeated, independent tests in which numerology readings or angel numbers matched people’s lives better than chance.
Mostly because striking coincidences are far more common than they feel, and because human minds are quick to notice them. That answer does not make your experience smaller. It helps explain why a coincidence can feel so personal, and so charged with meaning.
Start with a simple puzzle. In a room of 23 people, what are the odds that two share a birthday? The answer is about even, 50-50. With just 14 people, it is even odds that two birthdays fall within a day of each other. These numbers appear in a 1989 paper on coincidences by two Harvard researchers, the mathematician Persi Diaconis and the statistician Frederick Mosteller.
They also describe a bigger idea, which they call the law of truly large numbers: with a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen. Suppose a coincidence strikes one person in a million each day. In a country of 250 million people, that is about 250 people a day. When a New Jersey woman won the state lottery twice, a front-page newspaper story called it a 1-in-17-trillion long shot. Two statisticians calculated that it was better than even odds that someone in the United States would win twice within seven years.
Our minds add to the effect. Once you notice something new, like a word or a car model, you start seeing it everywhere. This is called the frequency illusion. We also remember the hits and forget the misses. And a coincidence that happens to us feels more surprising than the same story about someone else.
None of this means a coincidence cannot matter to you. The psychiatrist Carl Jung called meaningful coincidences synchronicity, and numerologists read repeating numbers as messages. Whether a coincidence is a sign is beyond science. But noticing, wondering and making meaning are deeply human. You are welcome here, whatever you believe.
THE LONG ANSWER
THE LONG ANSWER · ABOUT 9 MINUTES
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God Plays Dice answers big questions in plain words, with sources and one of six honest labels.
Words worth knowing (6)
- Coincidence
- A surprising coming-together of events that seem meaningfully related, with no apparent cause linking them. This is the working definition of Diaconis and Mosteller, who say it is close to Jung’s.
- Law of truly large numbers
- The idea that with a large enough sample of people and events, any outrageous thing is likely to happen somewhere.
- Frequency illusion
- The feeling that something you have just started noticing is suddenly everywhere. Also called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.
- Apophenia
- Also called patternicity: the spontaneous sense of connections and meaning in random events.
- Synchronicity
- Carl Jung’s word for meaningful coincidences, which he saw as linked by meaning rather than by cause.
- Birth number (life path number)
- In numerology, a single digit found by adding the digits of a birth date until one digit remains.
Sources & further reading
(9) · Checked Sep 30, 2026
- Methods for Studying Coincidences (Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller) ↗Journal of the American Statistical Association 84 (1989): 853–861Full text read (copy hosted by UC Berkeley Statistics: https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Papers/diaconis_mosteller.pdf); volume, pages and date confirmed via Crossref. Authors’ affiliations: Diaconis, Professor of Mathematics, and Mosteller, Professor of Mathematical Statistics Emeritus, Harvard University. Definition of coincidence, close to Jung’s; Jung argued meaningful coincidences occur far more frequently than chance allows; intuitive grasp of the odds often far off; birthday problem (23 for 50%, about 48 for 95%, N ≈ 1.2√c and 2.5√c, 14 within a day, 7 within a week, triple match on day of month among 18, three categories need 16 people); new-word and new-car examples; law of truly large numbers (“With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen”; one in a million per day, 250 a day and close to 100,000 a year among 250 million); New York Times front-page “1 in 17 trillion” double lottery winner in New Jersey, who bought multiple tickets repeatedly; Samuels and McCabe (Purdue statistics): better than even odds of a double winner in seven years; four principles, which “account for much of the force of synchronicity”; rare disease cases close together may mean a disaster is brewing; much of scientific discovery depends on finding the cause of a perplexing coincidence; forgetting failed predictions; “Where we have solid control and knowledge, the rates of occurrences seem about as expected”; little data on rates or differences among people; “the more we feel that Kammerer and Jung are right. We are swimming in an ocean of coincidences”; nature and we ourselves create them. The psychology review in the paper reports Falk (1982; in press) and Falk and MacGregor (1983) on surprise at one’s own coincidences and superfluous details, and Hintzman, Asher and Stern (1978) on selective memory, with a replication using events by Kallai (1985).
- Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (Joe Cambray) ↗International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP)Inside source, by a past IAAP president and Jungian analyst. Synchronicity defined by Jung as an acausal connecting principle, internal psychological events linked to external events by meaningful coincidences rather than causal chains; anecdotal clinical evidence served as the primary descriptive examples in Jung’s writing; the scarab dream, the knocking at the consulting room window, a scarabaeid beetle (a rose-chafer) seeking entry, Jung handed it to the patient and it broke through her defensive rationalism (Jung 1960); in December 1929 Jung told his seminar “I have invented the word synchronicity”; first public use 1930; collaboration with the Nobel laureate physicist Wolfgang Pauli; Cambray’s reading that Jung was ultimately arguing for a pattern-making tendency in the universe, a fundamental property of reality.
- Just between Dr. Language and I (Arnold Zwicky) ↗Language Log, 7 August 2005Names the Frequency Illusion: “once you’ve noticed a phenomenon, you think it happens a whole lot, even ‘all the time’,” a selective attention effect; estimates skewed by noticing nearly every occurrence. Also: Ben Zimmer, “‘Frequency illusion’ in the OED,” Language Log, 19 March 2019 (https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=42180): the OED’s March 2019 update added the term, first attested in Zwicky 2005, also called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.
- Connecting the dots: Illusory pattern perception predicts belief in conspiracies and the supernatural (van Prooijen, Douglas and De Inocencio) ↗European Journal of Social Psychology 48 (2018): 320–335PubMed abstract (PMID 29695889) and full text (PMC5900972): five studies; Study 1 had 264 U.S. participants; perceiving patterns in random coin tosses related to supernatural and conspiracy beliefs; pattern-search instructions had an indirect effect; manipulated belief changed pattern perception. Also: Riekki and colleagues, “Paranormal and Religious Believers Are More Prone to Illusory Face Perception than Skeptics and Non-believers,” Applied Cognitive Psychology 27 (2013): 150–155, doi:10.1002/acp.2874 (Crossref abstract; N = 47; believers better at identifying face-like regions but prone to false alarms; more liberal answering criteria; detection sensitivity did not differ); Bressan, “The connection between random sequences, everyday coincidences, and belief in the paranormal,” Applied Cognitive Psychology 16 (2002): 17–34, doi:10.1002/acp.754 (Crossref abstract; 214 subjects; believers reported more coincidences; argues against the misunderstood-probability theory; some probability effects disappeared among university students; proposes a stronger propensity to connect separate events); Müller and Hartmann, “Linking paranormal and conspiracy beliefs to illusory pattern perception through signal detection theory,” Scientific Reports 13 (2023): 9739, doi:10.1038/s41598-023-36230-0 (full text PMC10275861; N = 723; paranormal belief went with a more liberal response bias and lower perceptual sensitivity; effects small next to other sources of variance); van Elk, “Paranormal believers are more prone to illusory agency detection than skeptics,” Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013): 1041–1046, doi:10.1016/j.concog.2013.07.004 (PubMed abstract, PMID 23933505; point-light human figures; illusory agency detection unrelated to traditional religious belief, strongly related to paranormal belief); Chris French, “The Psychology of Paranormal Beliefs,” Sydney Symposium of Social Psychology 2024 chapter (https://sydneysymposium.unsw.edu.au/2024/chapters/FrenchSSSP2024.pdf; patternicity, “sometimes referred to as apophenia,” the spontaneous perception of connections and meaning in randomness; such biases tied to rapid threat detection, with evolutionary psychology offering a plausible explanation).
- Experimental Manipulations of Personal Control do Not Increase Illusory Pattern Perception (van Elk and Lodder) ↗Collabra: Psychology 4 (2018): 19Crossref abstract: seven experiments; no evidence that control threat affects illusory pattern perception (magical thinking, conspiracy beliefs, paranormal beliefs, agent detection); Bayesian evidence for the null; re-running a recent meta-analysis of control-threat studies showed strong evidence for publication bias and a relatively small effect size. Original finding: Whitson and Galinsky, “Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception,” Science 322 (2008): 115–117, doi:10.1126/science.1159845 (PubMed abstract, PMID 18832647; six experiments).
- The effects of exposure to objective coherence on perceived meaning in life: a preregistered direct replication of Heintzelman, Trent & King (2013) (Ratner, Burrow and Thoemmes) ↗Royal Society Open Science 3 (2016): 160431PubMed abstract (PMID 28018623) and full text via Europe PMC (PMC5180121): registered report; direct replications of the original Studies 2 and 4 with 482 and 294 participants; all tests failed to replicate; the authors caution that a single unsuccessful replication does not invalidate the original findings. Original: Heintzelman, Trent and King, Psychological Science 24 (2013): 991–998, doi:10.1177/0956797612465878 (PubMed abstract, PMID 23620548; tree photos in seasonal patterns vs random order; higher reported meaning in life).
- Angel Numbers: What They Mean and Why You See Them (Hans Decoz) ↗World NumerologyInside source (page author meta: Hans Decoz). Repeating patterns such as 111, 222, 333 and 444 that “appear in your daily life to guide, encourage, and awaken your spiritual awareness”; seen on clocks, receipts or license plates; their message is personal; reading numerology books since 1970, the author cannot remember a mention of them until about the mid-nineties, which does not mean there is no validity to them; an offshoot of numerology with “no real basis in any of the algorithms or theories found in Pythagorean numerology”; master numbers 11, 22 and 33. Home page (https://www.worldnumerology.com/): numerology is “the study of the profound ways numbers impact our lives”; “not a form of fortune-telling” but a system of self-discovery; the Life Path Number, calculated from the full birth date, reflects natural talents and the overall direction a life is meant to follow.
- A Test of Numerology: Do Birth Numbers Predict Nobel Prize Winners? (Jeremy Genovese) ↗Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis 13, no. 2 (2017)Full text read. Birth number = digits of the birth date summed to a single digit, also called the life path number; Nobel Prize winners 1901–2010, sample of 806; distribution did not differ from chance (chi-square 4.92, df 8, p = 0.77) or between prize categories (p = .90); “no support for the claims of numerology”; no previously published tests found; limitation: birth number might predict some other human distinction; master numbers 11 and 22 and the order-of-addition problem. Note for the deep dive: the paper’s printed example date reads “May 1, 1999,” but its sums (5 + 5 + 1 + 9 + 9 + 9 = 38) fit May 5, 1999, so the page uses May 5, 1999 and shows the arithmetic in full.
- Meaning in life and physical health: systematic review and meta-analysis (Czekierda, Banik, Park and Luszczynska) ↗Health Psychology Review 11 (2017): 387–418PubMed abstract (PMID 28488471): 66 studies, total N = 73,546; weak-to-moderate associations between meaning in life and physical health; strongest for subjective health indicators; significant albeit weak associations with objective indices.
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