# data[].attributes.body
When one does not have any logical explanation to the causality of that event. Something unknown to us, but when we try to explain it through theoretical reasoning)
The link shows lots of unexplained phenomena, anomalies and mysteries.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Science continues to give us a deeper and more convincing knowledge of the universe we live in. But we still only partially understand the mysterious world we inhabit, and many mysteries remain unsolved. Here are ten of the most fascinating of these anomalies:

There are the usual cryptid mysteries that we all wish to resolve, but the implications of some of these are so disturbing that we might rather not know the real answer.

In an unknown year-but likely some time in the early 1900s-land surveyors dropped rope down a cave in Boone County, Arkansas. After the rope had descended two hundred feet into the cave pipes, a horrendous hissing and roaring sound was heard, suggesting that a bizarre and enormous beast had been disturbed. Some believe that the roaring belonged to a cave-dwelling cryptid, or an apparently-extinct or so-far-undiscovered species.

The exact site of the eerie report has not been found, but the explorers of a second Arkansas cave heard a case of a landowner who had apparently gone insane with terror after entering a similar subterranean system and encountering something.

Precognition -including the vague sense of impending doom-is an unexplained phenomenon whereby events are seen before their time. Eerily, Abraham Lincoln reported a dream in which he had seen his own dead body. Only days later, he was fatally shot.

Quantum theorists studying the fourth dimension propose that time can bend, allowing us to glimpse the future. Limiting ourselves to American Presidents alone, we find that John Garfield and William McKinley also "previewed" their own deaths. In a related-albeit slightly different-case of extrasensory perception, John Adams' last words the moment before he died were simply "Thomas Jefferson." It was unknown to him, but hours before, his great political rival had indeed passed away...

Hatley Castle was built on Vancouver Island, off Canada's West Coast, by the Scottish Coal Baron Robert Dunsmuir. He was a famous but controversial figure in his day, known for his swift-handed approach to decisions concerning the use of land.

The castle, which now forms part of the campus of Royal Roads University, has begun to fall prey to a series of unexplained events, which send chills down the spine of those who venture too close. Terrified observers have reported seeing a white figure drifting around the windows, and they've also made reference to hearing the clash of pots and pans.

It is rumored that the maid of Robert Dunsmuir-rejected by her lover-leapt from the window and died. SPIRITS, a charity dedicated to investigating the paranormal, claims that one of its staff members actually saw a female figure clothed in white slipping through the castle corridors. Unfortunately, few sources have less credibility in such cases than a charity dedicated to investigating the paranormal.

European culture is extremely diverse; distinct customs and peoples live there side-by-side in relatively small but clearly-defined regions. One would imagine that the development of Europe consisted of historically understandable transitions-but according to research at the Australian Center for Ancient DNA, genetic markers in skeletons sampled for DNA suggest a sudden, drastic change around 4,500 years ago.

According to paleo-anthropologist Dr. Alan Cooper, "Something major happened, and the hunt is now on to find out what that was." The mysterious event or cataclysm may never be determined, but it's possible that an unknown plague, or else a mysterious conflict or agreement between ancient tribes, may hold the key to Europe's anomalous past.

"Alien Abductions" have become fairly widely reported, to the point that most researchers have grown somewhat tired of the subject. However, some accounts are much more difficult to disregard than others.

In 1993, Kelly Cahill and her husband were driving at night in Victoria, Australia, when a bizarre form appeared in front of them, apparently in the process of abducting something. The occupants of a second car behind the Cahills also observed the phenomenon. When the Cahills tracked this second group down, they were able to confirm the fact that they too had witnessed the event. Spooky.

While the previous entry dealt with an event that some might attribute to aliens, other Australian dangers may originate from a primitive source. Since the arrival of early settlers, Aboriginal Australians-many of whom possess an almost instinctive knowledge of the outback-have warned of the existence of giant, primitive ape-like creatures known as Yowies.

Their descriptions are eerily similar to the "Sasquatch" accounts of North American native tribes, and also the notorious Yeti of the Himalayan foothills. The creatures are said to be foul-smelling and elusive, which matches other reports worldwide. Explorer Tony Healy notes in his book "In Search of Australia's Bigfoot" that the sightings may in fact be real, and represent part of a global occurrence of the supposedly extinct Gigantopethacus ape-whose existence would also explain the Yeti and Bigfoot mysteries.

Spontaneous human combustion ranks near the top of the most bizarre and terrifying mysterious events. While accounts of SHC tend to be historical, evidence suggest that the phenomenon has been seen to occur in recent times.

In February 2013, for instance, authorities in Muldrow, Oklahoma, were perplexed to find the incinerated body of sixty-five-year-old Danny Vanzandt-seemingly burned alive in his nearly undamaged home. The Sheriff was able to determine that foul play was not to blame, but refused to rule out spontaneous human combustion. Coroners found that the body seemed to have burned at a low temperature for more than six hours. The victim was a heavy drinker, which some speculate may literally fuel such episodes of combustion. The human body produces methane-related compounds during metabolism, which some believe could fuel a fire when combined with alcohol.

Reports of long-necked, plesiosaur-like animals have proliferated worldwide, often involving independent reports with a remarkable level of uniformity. The possible explanation is strange and chilling-yet scientifically grounded. According to cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans, many serpent sightings in history actually align with the presence of mysterious, long-necked pinnipeds, measuring up to fifty feet in length.

As dolphins have replaced ichthyosaurs, convergent evolution would allow for a pinniped to take on the form of the extinct plesiosaurs, but avoid being affected by cold waters. The southern elephant seal is currently the world's largest carnivore at a length of twenty-two feet, lending credibility to such theories. Also adding weight to reports of giant, long-necked seals, is the actual existence of the aptly-named Weddell long-necked seal, which has a somewhat serpentine neck. Clearly, the mystery of cryptid pinnipeds warrants some attention.

The Mary Celeste has gained a somewhat eerie notoriety following its discovery, apparently having been abandoned by its crew, with nobody remaining on board. This ghost vessel phenomenon seems to repeat itself, remarkably, in the modern case of the Kaz II.

In April 2007, the Kaz II was traveling with its three-man crew along the northwest Australian coast, when air surveillance noticed it drifting oddly. Upon boarding, no trace of the crew members could be found. However, no sign of trouble was discovered either. A laptop computer was still running, and the engine was on. Eating utensils were laid out on the table, while life jackets remained in their cases. The bizarre and disturbing mystery of the Kaz II essentially remains unsolved.

According to Jon Hall of the Queensland Emergency Management Office, "What they found was a bit strange in that everything was normal; there was just no sign of the crew."

The state coroner eventually ruled that "the brothers fell overboard while attending to mechanical problems-however, the ruling is still only speculation."

On the island of Andros in the Bahamas, descriptions of a mysterious creature known as the " chickcharney " have become embedded in local culture. Described as around one meter tall, the bizarre flightless bird-like creature is described in historic accounts, and also in modern-day sightings around the island.

Reputed to have red eyes and to be capable of turning its head in any direction, the entity seems to border on implausibility. But ornithologists have identified a bizarre, extinct species of giant flightless barn owl, whose continued existence would explain legends of a large predatory bird walking around the island at night (owls are capable of turning their heads one hundred and eighty degrees in order to scan for prey). The owl is thought to be extinct, but the continuing sightings suggest that the bizarre and awesome creature may still stalk the backcountry of Andros, waiting to be rediscovered as more than the mere stuff of folk tales.

Ron Harlan investigates the mysteries of nature, human experience, and the bizarre findings that often crop up on this planet. He is a freelance writer and student of science.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Science continues to give us a deeper and more convincing knowledge of the universe we live in. But we still only partially understand the mysterious world we inhabit, and many mysteries remain unsolved.

# data[].attributes.body
When one thinks that a weird coincidence or a dream becoming real is a special ability of perceiving future events, while its authentic explanation is the law of large numbers with deals with the commonness of these coincidental outcomes.
The link describes why, what, when and where this "This Co incidents" occur.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The surprising chances of our lives can seem like they're hinting at hidden truths, but they're really revealing the human mind at work.

Hein Nouwens / Shutterstock / Kara Gordon / The Atlantic

Towards the end of seventh grade, my middle-school band took a trip to Cedar Point, which was pretty much the theme park to which Midwestern middle school bands traveled. (I imagine it still is.) They had this indoor rollercoaster there, called the Disaster Transport. My friends and I were standing in line for this rollercoaster, winding up the dimly lit cement steps, when we turned a corner and came across a huge pile of money.

We picked it up and counted it; it was a very specific amount of money. I don't remember now exactly how much, but for the purposes of this retelling, let's say it was $134. That sounds close.

We had barely had time to whiplash from marveling at our good fortune to guiltily suggesting we should find somewhere to turn it in before a group of older kids ahead of us snatched the cash wad out of our hands. They claimed it was theirs; it was not theirs-they counted it in front of us and exchanged "Whoa"s and high fives. We were hapless, gangly middle schoolers (I was growing out my bangs; it was a rough year). They were confident we would do nothing to stop them, and they were right. So that was the end of that.

Until, Part Two:

A little more than a year later, I went to a summer program at Michigan State University, a nerd camp where you take classes like genetics for fun. One evening, as we were sitting around in the common area, chatting and doing homework, I overheard a kid telling his friends how he'd lost a bunch of money last year at Cedar Point.

With very little attempt at chill I interrupted their conversation and grilled him on the particulars.

Was he there on May whatever date I was also there? He was.

Did he lose the money in line for the Disaster Transport? In fact, he did.

How much money did he lose? $134, exactly.

* * *

Though "What are the odds?" is pretty much the catchphrase of coincidences, a coincidence is not just something that was unlikely to happen. The overstuffed crate labeled "coincidences" is packed with an amazing variety of experiences, and yet something more than rarity compels us to group them together. They have a similar texture, a feeling that the fabric of life has rippled. The question is where this feeling comes from, why we notice certain ways the threads of our lives collide, and ignore others.

Some might say it's just because people don't understand probability. In their 1989 paper, Methods for Studying Coincidences, the mathematicians Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller considered defining a coincidence as "a rare event," but decided "this includes too much to permit careful study." Instead, they settled on, "A coincidence is a surprising concurrence of events, perceived as meaningfully related, with no apparent causal connection."

From a purely statistical point of view, these events are random, not meaningfully related, and they shouldn't be that surprising because they happen all the time. "Extremely improbable events are commonplace," as the statistician David Hand says in his book The Improbability Principle. But humans generally aren't great at reasoning objectively about probability as they go about their everyday lives.

For one thing, people can be pretty liberal with what they consider coincidences. If you meet someone who shares your birthday, that seems like a fun coincidence, but you might feel the same way if you met someone who shared your mother's birthday, or your best friend's. Or if it was the day right before or after yours. So there are several birthdays that person could have that would feel coincidental.

And there are lots of people on this planet-more than 7 billion, in fact. According to the Law of Truly Large Numbers, "with a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen," Diaconis and Mosteller write. If enough people buy tickets, there will be a Powerball winner. To the person who wins, it's surprising and miraculous, but the fact that someone won doesn't surprise the rest of us.

Even within the relatively limited sample of your own life, there are all kinds of opportunities for coincidences to happen. When you consider all the people you know and all the places you go and all the places they go, chances are good that you'll run into someone you know, somewhere, at some point. But it'll still seem like a coincidence when you do. When something surprising happens, we don't think about all the times it could have happened, but didn't. And when we include near-misses as coincidences (you and your friend were in the same place on the same day, just not at the same time), the number of possible coincidences is suddenly way greater.
"A coincidence is in the eye of the beholder."
To demonstrate how common unlikely-seeming events can be, mathematicians like to trot out what is called the birthday problem. The question is how many people need to be in a room before there's a 50/50 chance that two of them will share the same birthday. The answer is 23.

"Oh, those guys and their birthdays really get me mad," says Bernard Beitman, a psychiatrist and visiting professor at the University of Virginia, and author of the forthcoming book Connecting With Coincidence. That's not the way the average person would frame that question, he says. When someone asks "What are the odds?" odds are they aren't asking "What are the odds that a coincidence of this nature would have happened to anyone in the room?" but more like "What are the odds that this specific thing would happen to me, here and now?" And with anything more complicated than a birthday match, that becomes almost impossible to calculate.

It's true that people are fairly egocentric about their coincidences. The psychologist Ruma Falk found in a study that people rate their own coincidences as more surprising than other people's. They're like dreams-mine is more interesting than yours.

"A coincidence itself is in the eye of the beholder," says David Spiegelhalter, the Winton professor for the public understanding of risk at the University of Cambridge. If a rare event happens in a forest and no one notices and no one cares, it's not really a coincidence.

* * *

I told Spiegelhalter my Cedar Point story on the phone-I couldn't help it. He collects coincidences, see. (A thriller novel called The Coincidence Authority has a professor character based on him.) He has a website where people can submit them, and says he's gotten about 4,000 or 5,000 stories since 2011. Unfortunately, he and his colleagues haven't done much with this treasure trove of information, mostly because a pile of freeform stories is a pretty hard dataset to measure. They're looking for someone to do text-mining on it, but so far all they've been able to analyze is how many coincidences fall into the different categories you can check off when you submit your story:

Common Types of Coincidences

David Spiegelhalter

He says he'd categorize mine as "finding a link with someone you meet." "But it's a very different sort of connection," he says, "not like having lived in the same house or something like that. And it's a very strong one, it's not just like you were both at the theme park. I love that. And you remember it after all this time."

And the craziest thing is not that I found someone's money and then that I was in a room with him a year later, but that I found out about it at all. What if he hadn't brought it up? Or "you might not have heard him if you'd been somewhere slightly away," Spiegelhalter says. "And yet the coincidence would have been there. You would have been six feet away from someone who lost their money. The coincidence in a sense would have physically occurred. It was only because you were listening that you noticed it. And so that's why the amazing thing is not that these things occur, it's that we notice them."

"This is my big theory about coincidences," he continues, "that's why they happen to certain kinds of people."

Beitman in his research has found that certain personality traits are linked to experiencing more coincidences-people who describe themselves as religious or spiritual, people who are self-referential (or likely to relate information from the external world back to themselves), and people who are high in meaning-seeking are all coincidence-prone. People are also likely to see coincidences when they are extremely sad, angry, or anxious.

"Coincidences never happen to me at all, because I never notice anything," Spiegelhalter says. "I never talk to anybody on trains. If I'm with a stranger, I don't try to find a connection with them, because I'm English."

Beitman, on the other hand, says, "My life is littered with coincidences." He tells me a story of how he lost his dog when he was 8 or 9 years old. He went to the police station to ask if they had seen it; they hadn't. Then, "I was crying a lot and took the wrong way home, and there was the dog ... I got into [studying coincidences] just because, hey, look Bernie, what's going on here?"

For Beitman, probability is not enough when it comes to studying coincidences. Because statistics can describe what happens, but can't explain it any further than chance. "I know there's something more going on than we pay attention to," he says. "Random is not enough of an explanation for me."

Random wasn't enough for the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung either. So he came up with an alternative explanation. Coincidences were, to him, meaningful events that couldn't be explained by cause and effect, which, so far so good, but he also thought that there was another force, outside of causality, which could explain them. This he called "synchronicity," which in his 1952 book, he called an "acausal connecting principle."

Meaningful coincidences were produced by the force of synchronicity, and could be considered glimpses into another of Jung's ideas-the unus mundus, or one world. Unus mundus is the theory that there is an underlying order and structure to reality, a network that connects everything and everyone.

For Jung, synchronicity didn't just account for coincidences, but also ESP, telepathy, and ghosts. And to this day, research shows that people who experience more coincidences tend to be more likely to believe in the occult as well.

This is the trouble with trying to find a deeper explanation for coincidences than randomness-it can quickly veer into the paranormal.

* * *

* * *

Beitman, like Spiegelhalter, is interested in sorting and labeling different kinds of coincidences, to develop categories "like an early botanist," he says, though his categories are more expansive and include not only things that happen in the world but people's thoughts and feelings as well. In our conversation, he divides coincidences into three broad categories-environment-environment interactions, mind-environment interactions, and mind-mind interactions.

Environment-environment are the most obvious, and easiest to understand. These coincidences are objectively observable. Something, or a series of things, happens in the physical world. You're at a gin joint in Morocco and your long-lost love from Paris shows up. I found some money and a year later I met the person who lost it.

A nurse named Violet Jessop was a stewardess for White Star Line and lived through three crashes of its ill-fated fleet of ocean liners. She was on the Olympic when it collided with the HMS Hawke in 1911. In 1912, she was there for the big one: the Titanic. And four years later, when White Star's Britannic, reportedly improved after its sister ship's disaster, also sank, Jessop was there. And she survived. That one, I guess, is an environment-environment-environment.

Mind-environment coincidences are premonition-esque-you're thinking of a friend and then they call you, for example. But unless you happen to write down "I am thinking of so-and-so [timestamp]" before the call happens, these are cool for the person they happen to, but not really measurable. "We banned premonitions from our site," Spiegelhalter says. "Because, where's the proof? Anybody could say anything."
The things on our minds seem to bleed out into the world around us.
Another sort of mind-environment interaction is learning a new word and then suddenly seeing it everywhere. Or getting a song stuck in your head and hearing it everywhere you go, or wondering about something and then stumbling onto an article about it. The things on our minds seem to bleed out into the world around us. But, though it makes them no less magical, life's motifs are created not by the world around us, but by humans, by our attention.

This is an effect that the Stanford linguistics professor Arnold Zwicky calls " the frequency illusion," and it's not the same as a premonition. It's just that once you've noticed something, your brain is primed to notice it again the next time you encounter it. A word or a concept you've just learned feels relevant to you-you may have seen it hundreds of times before and just never noticed. But now that you're paying attention, it's more likely to pop out at you the next time it whizzes by.

And then the final category, mind-mind, of course, is straight-up mystical. One example of this is simulpathity, a term Beitman coined to describe feeling the pain or emotion of someone else at a distance. His interest in this particular type of coincidence is deeply personal.

"In San Francisco, in 1973, February 26, I stood at a sink uncontrollably choking," he says, clarifying, "There was nothing in my throat that I knew [of]."

"It was around 11 o'clock in San Francisco. The next day my brother called, and told me my father had died at 2 a.m. in Wilmington, Delaware, which was 11 in San Francisco, and he had died by choking on blood in his throat. That was a dramatic experience for me, and I began to look to see if other people had experiences like this. And many people have."

* * *

This is where we start to leave the realm of science and enter the realm of belief. Coincidences are remarkable in how they straddle these worlds. People have surprising, connective experiences, and they either create meaning out of them, or they don't.

Leaving a coincidence as nothing more than a curiosity may be a more evidence-based mindset, but it's not fair to say that the people who make meaning from coincidences are irrational. The process by which we notice coincidences is "part of a general cognitive architecture which is designed to make sense of the world," says Magda Osman, an associate professor in experimental psychology at Queen Mary University of London. It's the same rational process we use to learn cause and effect. This is one way to scientifically explain how coincidences happen- as byproducts of the brain's meaning-making system.

People like patterns. We look for them everywhere, and by noticing and analyzing them we can understand our world and, to some small degree, control it. If every time you flick a switch, a lamp across the room turns on, you come to understand that that switch controls that lamp.

When someone sees a pattern in a coincidence, "there's no way I can say 'Yes, that was definitely a chance event,' or 'There was an actual causal mechanism for it,' because I'd have to know the world perfectly to be able to say that," Osman says.

Instead what we do is weigh whether it seems likelier that the event was caused by chance, or by something else. If chance is the winner, we dismiss it. If not, we've got a new hypothesis about how the world works.

Take the case of two twins, who were adopted by different families when they were four weeks old. When they were later reunited, their lives had ... a lot of similarities. They were both named James by their adoptive families, were both married to a Betty and had divorced a Linda. One twin's first son's name was James Alan, the other's was James Allan. They both had adoptive brothers named Larry and pet dogs named Toy. They both suffered from tension headaches, and both vacationed in Florida within three blocks of each other.
"To me, that's a key part of what makes something a coincidence-that it falls in that realm between being certain that something is false and being certain that something is true."
You could hypothesize from this that the power of genetics is so strong, that even when identical twins are separated, their lives play out the same way. In fact, the twins were part of a University of Minnesota study on twins reared apart that was asking just that question, though it didn't suggest that there was any gene that would make someone attracted to a Betty, or likely to name a dog Toy.

Drawing inferences from patterns like this is an advantageous thing to do, even when the pattern isn't 100 percent consistent. Take learning language as an example. There isn't going to be a dog, or even a picture of a dog, nearby every time a child hears the word "dog." But if dad points at the family Fido enough times while saying "dog," the kid will learn what the word means anyway.

"Small children are justified in being conspiracy theorists, since their world is run by an inscrutable and all-powerful organization possessing secret communications and mysterious powers-a world of adults, who act by a system of rules that children gradually master as they grow up," write the cognitive scientists Thomas Griffiths and Joshua Tenenbaum in a 2006 study on coincidences.

We retain this capability, even when we're older and have figured out most of these more obvious patterns. It can still be very useful, especially for scientists who are working on unsolved questions, but for most adults in their daily lives, any new coincidental connection is likely to be specious. From a scientific perspective, anyway. If we realize that, then we wave it off as "just a coincidence," or what Griffiths, a professor of psychology and cognitive science at the University of California, Berkeley, calls a "mere coincidence."

On the flip side, for someone who believes in ESP, thinking of a friend right before she calls may not be a coincidence to them at all, but just more evidence to support what they already believe. The same goes for someone who believes in divine intervention-a chance meeting with a long-lost lover may be, to them, a sign from God, not a coincidence at all.

"You really come across a question of just what belief system you have about how reality works," Beitman says. "Are you a person who believes the universe is random or are you a person who believes there's something going on here that maybe we gotta pay more attention to? On the continuum of explanation, on the left-hand side we've got random, on the right-hand side we've got God. In the middle we've got little Bernie Beitman did something here, I did it but I didn't know how I did it."

In the middle zone lie what Griffiths calls "suspicious coincidences."

Related Stories

"To me, that's a key part of what makes something a coincidence-that it falls in that realm between being certain that something is false and being certain that something is true," he says. If enough suspicious coincidences of a certain nature pile up, someone's uncertainty can cross over into belief. People can stumble into scientific discoveries this way-"Hmm, all these people with cholera seem to be getting their water from the same well -or into superstition-"Every time I wear mismatched socks, my meetings go well."

But you can stay in that in-between zone for a long time-suspicious, but unsure. And this is nowhere more obvious than in the coincidences that present as evidence for some kind of hidden but as-yet undiscovered ordering principle for reality, be that synchronicity or a sort of David Mitchell-esque "Everything Is Connected" web that ensnares us in its pattern. Meaningful connections can seem created by design-things are "meant to be," they're happening for a reason, even if the reason is elusive. Or as Beitman puts it, "Coincidences alert us to the mysterious hiding in plain sight."

I suppose no one can prove there isn't such a thing, but it's definitely impossible to prove that there is. So you're left with ... not much. Where you fall on the continuum of explanation probably says more about you than it does about reality.

* * *

In The Improbability Principle, Hand cites a 1988 U.S. National Academy of Sciences report which concluded that there was "no scientific justification from research conducted over a period of 130 years for the existence of parapsychological phenomena."

"One hundred thirty years!" Hand writes. The fact that people kept trying to find proof for the paranormal was "A testament to the power of hope over experience if there ever was one."

But I disagree. It may be that researching the paranormal is partly an act of hope that you'll find something where no one has found anything before. But it seems like often, experiences are the building blocks of belief in the paranormal, or in an underlying force that organizes reality. Even if they're not doing formal research, people are seeking explanations for their experiences. And structure is a much more appealing explanation than chance.

Where you fall on the chance-structure continuum may have a lot to do with what you think chance looks like in the first place. Research shows that while most people are pretty bad at generating a random string of numbers, people who believe in ESP are even worse. Even more so than skeptics, believers tend to think that repetitions in a sequence are less likely to be random-that a coin flip sequence that went "heads, heads, heads, heads, tails" would be less likely to come up randomly than one that went "heads, tails, heads, tails, heads," even though they're equally probable.

So we have psychology to explain how and why we notice coincidences, and why we want to make meaning from them, and we have probability to explain why they seem to happen so often. But to explain why any individual coincidence happened involves a snarl of threads, of decisions and circumstances and chains of events that, even if one could untangle it, wouldn't tell you anything about any other coincidence.

Jung seems to have been annoyed by this. "To grasp these unique or rare events at all, we seem to be dependent on equally "unique" and individual descriptions," he writes, despairing of the lack of a unifying theory offered by science for these strange happenings. "This would result in a chaotic collection of curiosities, rather like those old natural-history cabinets where one finds, cheek by jowl with fossils and anatomical monsters in bottles, the horn of a unicorn, a mandragora manikin, and a dried mermaid."

This is supposed to be unappealing (surely these things should be put in order!), but I rather like the image of coincidences as a curio cabinet full of odds and ends we couldn't find anywhere else to put. It may not be what we're most comfortable with, but a "chaotic collection of curiosities" is what we've got.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The surprising chances of our lives can seem like they're hinting at hidden truths, but they're really revealing the human mind at work. Towards the end of seventh grade, my middle-school band took a trip to Cedar Point, which was pretty much the theme park to which Midwestern middle school bands traveled.

# data[].attributes.body
It is the mental instinct and habit of human nature to find patterns, faces, shapes, faces in stationary objects like stones and mountains or moving objects like clouds.
This link shows some really interesting photos, explains the reasons on patternicity.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On the last page, I explained that meanings, like clouds, are nebulous: intangible, non-separable, transient, amorphous, and ambiguous. Meanings are also more or less patterned: reliable, distinct, enduring, clear, and definite.

Nebulosity and pattern might seem to contradict each other, but almost always they come together. Meaning is usually nebulous to some extent, and patterned to some extent.

It can be hard to accept that meaningness is a matter of degree, not either/or. This book is about the confusions that come from assuming meaning must be either totally patterned, or entirely non-existent.

Seeing pattern

Pattern is what makes the world interpretable-what makes it make sense. Perceiving pattern is needed for all effective action-whether you are a person or a bug. Our brains and senses evolved largely to find the patterns that make survival and reproduction possible.

Patterns are everywhere in our experience. The material world is full of patterns: shapes, processes, connections, similarities and differences. Society, culture, thought, and concepts are also patterned.

Since this book is about meaningness, patterns of meaning are particularly relevant.

Being mistaken about pattern

Psychological research shows that people frequently perceive patterns that are not actually there. The brain automatically interprets even completely random events as meaningful. This tendency is called " patternicity" or " apophenia ".

Extreme apophenia is a symptom of psychosis, hallucinogenic drugs, and much of religious experience. But mild examples are universal. It is impossible not to see faces where there are none.

It is also possible, and common, to miss patterns that do exist. (Science, for instance, could be described as a search for non-obvious patterns.)

The brain, however, seems to be wired to give patterns the benefit of the doubt. It would rather make the mistake of seeing non-existent patterns than of rejecting real ones. (Maybe this is because, during evolution, missing real, dangerous patterns was worse than overreacting to imaginary ones.)

Patternicity, eternalism, and nihilism

The natural tendency to see meaningful patterns, even where there are none, makes humans vulnerable to eternalism. Eternalism is the stance that everything is meaningful. It is a cognitive form of apophenia (patternicity).

Eternalism is the core stance of most religions. Mistaken perceptions of meanings are a key to the psychology of religion. (A crude but amusing and particularly clear example is the veneration of supposed religious imagery miraculously arising in random shapes, such as the famous grilled cheese sandwich whose splotches looked like the Virgin Mary's face.)

The brain's unwillingness to overlook possible patterns is part of what makes nihilism less common than eternalism. Nihilism is the rejection of all meaning. Although nearly everyone sometimes adopts nihilism momentarily, it is difficult to maintain for long. Meaningful patterns are too obvious.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On the last page, I explained that meanings, like clouds, are nebulous: intangible, non-separable, transient, amorphous, and ambiguous. Meanings are also more or less patterned: reliable, distinct, enduring, clear, and definite. Nebulosity and pattern might seem to contradict each other, but almost always they come together.

# data[].attributes.body
A nonsensical ideology, wrongly understood and commonly used by lots of people.
Ones misconception of something being natural to it being healthy.
This false and hazardous understanding of natural product needs to be stopped as soon as possible as it can cause health damage to huge amount of population who are unaware of what the term natural means.
The link shows what kinds of "NATURAL" things written on dietary supplements leads to people buying them.

# data[].attributes.body
The most basic definition will be Quantity over quality.
When one is looking for a definite single sentence of reality, but their reach is cut short by introducing tons of false claims making that person accept that instead of what they wanted, because the data provided was complicated yet well organised enough to be accepted as true
This link shows a famous skeptic's article on how pharmaceutical companies use this Red flag for their drug approval.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A fallacy is the application of an incorrect argument in reasoning that employs various methods to create (by accident or design) a misconception or presumption. Exploiting emotional triggers or social relationships, using sweeping generalizations, affirming the consequent or denying the antecedent: all to provide proof to a point are classic examples. Most of these fallacies are decipherable by the majority of us. "If people have high cholesterol, they have heart attacks. Fred has high cholesterol. Therefore Fred will have a heart attack."

One of my personal favorites, in terms of logical fallacies is Proof by Verbosity. This technique is commonly employed by pharmaceutical companies presenting studies on drugs. They present the medication to health care providers with an irrelevant conclusion: "Our Company has shown this drug to be safe" (your company may be wrong...). They then make use of affirming the consequent as demonstrated above. At that point, they unearth Proof by Verbosity. This awe-inspiring sum of facts and data that is so overwhelming and tedious; it most certainly makes interpretation difficult for anyone, especially for us running room to room to care for our beloved patients. Sifting through the vast quantity is impossible.

This rhetorical technique persuades by overwhelming those considering an argument with such volume that the argument sounds plausible. It is so laborious to unravel and review supporting facts that it simply goes unchallenged. Something to think about when deciding between taking a pill or making some non-verbose lifestyle changes...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A fallacy is the application of an incorrect argument in reasoning that employs various methods to create (by accident or design) a misconception or presumption. Exploiting emotional triggers or social relationships, using sweeping generalizations, affirming the consequent or denying the antecedent: all to provide proof to a point are classic examples.

# data[].attributes.body
Delaying or preventing one from finding or discovering the truth by introducing a misleading or distracting information.
Red herrings, in reality are very common examples, like when a murderer tries to falsify his/her own appearance, leaves misleading clues and dead ends for detectives, psychics when caught on making wrong predictions to figure their way out provide false clues to the helpless victims.
The link shows, the positive and negative attributes of Red Herrings.
Strongly used in movies, dramas, anime etc..

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A clue that leads in the wrong direction. A red herring is a good red herring when it interweaves itself into the story's events. For example, the murder victim may have been a philanderer. His wife has no alibi. Aha! It was the wife! The wife's ...

# data[].attributes.body
It happens to people who are under stress, when they seek help from someone wrong like a psychic.
That's when it happens.
A habitual instinct in humans, to pay attention and accept one positive comment and to ignore the rest, often resulting into their financial, mental, psychological or physical damage.
The link shows how the innocence of human mind, leaning more toward positive and less towards negative is exploited fraud psychics.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
There are many times when one wishes for the ability to look beyond the here and now, whether into the future or delve into the distant past. Since this is an unlikely feat for most humans, psychics who claim to be able to do this are in great demand. And more often not the fraudulent ones among them use a series of devices of psychological manipulation to impress clients. One such method employed by psychics is confirmation bias and here is how they use it to defraud clients.

What is confirmation bias in the first place?

On January 5, 1860 Henry David Thoreau wrote in his Journals, "Man receives only what he is ready to receive, whether physically, or intellectually or morally... We hear and apprehend only what we already half know". The tendency to accept evidence that confirms our beliefs and to reject evidence that contradicts them is known as confirmation bias. This phenomenon is a consequence of the way perception works. Beliefs entrenched in human beings shape their expectations, which in turn shape perceptions. These perceptions for their part influence conclusions. Thus people see what they expect to see and conclude what they expect to conclude.

In modern times of logical reasoning and rational thinking, it may seem incredible that human beings are susceptible to confirmation bias. But the potent effect of expectations on perception was demonstrated in an experiment recounted in a book Evidence-Based Technical Analysis written by David R. Aronson ¹. According to the experiment, when subjects were given a drink that they thought contained alcohol, but in fact did not, they experienced reduced social anxiety. However, other subjects who were told they were being given nonalcoholic beverages when they were, in fact, alcoholic did not experience reduced anxiety in social situations.

Evidence of large-scale confirmation bias is quite frequent in popular culture. The common notion that Women are bad drivers or that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction because are all examples of confirmation bias. In these cases, people see and recall only evidence that supports your beliefs, thus they can recount examples of women driving 40mph in the fast lane but ignore those women drivers who are sticking to the appropriate speed limit. In the second instance, American invasion of Iraq is justified by the latter supposedly stocking up WMD though no such evidence is forthcoming even after seven years of U.S. forces crawling all over Iraq. Instances of confirmation bias thus exist in all parts of society and the phenomenon colors all aspects of human life, public, personal and social.

How do psychics use confirmation bias?

Psychics are one of the groups to have taken the human tendency for confirmation bias and make it part of their professional arsenal. Before a reading, the psychic already knows that driven by this bias, his/her subjects will fit the psychic's statements to their own lives. Thus during the reading the psychic proceeds to make a large number of ambiguous statements with the help of which he/she gives the clients more opportunities to find a match to their own experience or personality. In other words the clients will selectively though unconsciously remember those statements made by the psychic that apply to their lives rather than those which don't apply. In an experiment Canadian-American magician and skeptic James Randi set out to prove this working of confirmation bias during psychic readings - he thus compared the transcript of a reading to the client's report of what the psychic had said, and found that the client showed a strong selective recall of the "hits" rather than the misses. For instance during a reading a psychic who claims to know about the client's deceased relative will give very general descriptions about the relative and their relationship with the client. He/she may say something like "why do I sense this distance" and the client may willingly respond by admitting that her father was the kind of man who didn't like to show love for the family. The client thus not only mistakenly believes that the psychic actually has "psychic" powers but has in fact volunteered valuable information to the psychic who will later use this very piece of family history to come up with other 'revelations'. Thus Confirmation bias is one reason why a so-called psychic may only average one accurate hit for every fourteen guesses, yet will be described as "totally accurate" by the client after the reading: it is due to the fact that people place a lot more importance on confirmatory evidence than on contradictory evidence. In this sense confirmation bias is one of the many cold reading techniques used by psychics to glean information about their clients, rephrase this information and feed it back to them as a proof of the authenticity of their psychic abilities.

Psychics also know that people interpret information about themselves in two main ways - first is self-verification and the second is self-enhancement. The former is the drive to reinforce the existing self-image while the latter is the drive to seek positive feedback but in the end both are served by confirmation biases. Thus experiments have found that where people are given feedback that conflicts with their self-image, they are less likely to believe it or remember it than when given self-verifying feedback. One way to lessen the impact of such information is to label it as unreliable. Likewise researchers studying processes of self-enhancement have found a similar preference for positive feedback, and the people who give it, over negative feedback. Psychics are well aware of such workings of confirmation bias which is why they are careful to tell their clients mostly what the latter wish to hear. During a reading, a psychic may throw in a few cautionary sentences or warnings to stay away from such and such people but on the whole they will make sure to pander to the client's real desires and expectations as then he/she will make a more positive impression on the client.

Reference:

1. David R. Aronson, Evidence-Based Technical Analysis, Wiley, 2007

2. Randi, James (1991), James Randi: psychic investigator, Boxtree

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Fraudulent Psychics Use 'Confirmation Bias' to Defraud Clients

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There are many times when one wishes for the ability to look beyond the here and now, whether into the future or delve into the distant past. Since this is an unlikely feat for most humans, psychics who claim to be able to do this are in great demand.

# data[].attributes.body
Use of professional equipment, like wearing a lab coat and instead of proving a false statement one tries to give it true meaning, in turn manipulating or deceiving anyone away from the reality.
The link shows scenarios of appeal to authority, and explains the real reason behind the cause.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
argumentum ad verecundiam

(also known as: argument from authority, ipse dixit)

Description: Insisting that a claim is true simply because a valid authority or expert on the issue said it was true, without any other supporting evidence offered. Also see the appeal to false authority.
Logical Form:
According to person 1, who is an expert on the issue of Y, Y is true.

Therefore, Y is true.
Example #1:
Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and perhaps the foremost expert in the field, says that evolution is true. Therefore, it's true.

Explanation: Richard Dawkins certainly knows about evolution, and he can confidently tell us that it is true, but that doesn't make it true. What makes it true is the preponderance of evidence for the theory.
Example #2:
How do I know the adult film industry is the third largest industry in the United States? Derek Shlongmiester, the adult film star of over 50 years, said it was. That's how I know.

Explanation: Shlongmiester may be an industry expert, as well as have a huge talent, but a claim such as the one made would require supporting evidence. For the record, the adult film industry may be large, but on a scale from 0 to 12 inches, it's only about a fraction of an inch.

Exception: Be very careful not to confuse "deferring to an authority on the issue" with the appeal to authority fallacy. Remember, a fallacy is an error in reasoning. Dismissing the council of legitimate experts and authorities turns good skepticism into denialism. The appeal to authority is a fallacy in argumentation, but deferring to an authority is a reliable heuristic that we all use virtually every day on issues of relatively little importance. There is always a chance that any authority can be wrong, that's why the critical thinker accepts facts provisionally. It is not at all unreasonable (or an error in reasoning) to accept information as provisionally true by credible authorities. Of course, the reasonableness is moderated by the claim being made (i.e., how extraordinary, how important) and the authority (how credible, how relevant to the claim).

The appeal to authority is more about claims that require evidence than about facts. For example, if your tour guide told you that Vatican City was founded February 11, 1929, and you accept that information as true, you are not committing a fallacy (because it is not in the context of argumentation) nor are you being unreasonable.

Tip: Question authority -- or become the authority that people look to for answers.

References:{apa}

Hume, D. (2004). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Courier Corporation.

{/apa}

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
argumentum ad verecundiam (also known as: argument from authority, ipse dixit) Description: Insisting that a claim is true simply because a valid authority or expert on the issue said it was true, without any other supporting evidence offered. Also see the appeal to false authority .