Can coincidences be meaningful?

In a much read essay written in 1952, the Swiss psychotherapist Carl Gustav Jung outlined his thinking about the significance of chance events. He noted a series of anecdotal coincidences, then abruptly moved to refer to research on paranormal powers. I would move in a different direction.

What is a coincidence? It is the observed juxtaposition of apparently related events. In the examples cited by Jung, and by others fond of dwelling on such matters, coincidences are observed by one individual. There is little chance to verify the coincidences as they occur only in the mind: very few can be proven through written records. And the coincidence involves not a repetition, but a variation: an event is seen mirrored, slightly changed, in a different event.

These coincidences are not everyday things and they never appear to have any special significance. In other words, coincidences are no more likely to take place in the context of important events than in the context of trivial events; in the examples given by Jung, any given element of a coincidence is in itself unremarkable.

It is the observation of them that renders them remarkable. Once the brain notes a coincidence, it clings to it and interrogates the world for other, related events, which duly occur.

The human brain makes connections; that is its task. Should we be surprised that among the countless insignificant details of urban life the brain notes intersections and juxtapositions? Of course not: without such observations, we would be lost. But the question that needs to be asked, which Jung never asked, is whether the coincidences he identified are statistically significant. If we number every single datum, then pluck out those that our observant minds have called coincidences, do they occur with a frequency that suggests an unseen hand at work?

Only by answering that scientific question can the rational observer begin to understand the significance of coincidence.

What is so remarkable about coincidences, and what Jung utterly failed to appreciate, is that they attest to the extraordinary tenacity not of events, but of the human brain and its often perverse tendency to find connections.