Stephen Burrell

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We are wired to look for coincidences

Illustration: Joanna Andreasson

I think that we human beings are storytelling machines, we notice things and we have to tell stories about them. For example, perhaps you thought of over 200 people yesterday and maybe one of them called you. I’m sure that in this case you would have paid attention to the coincidence and would not say to yourself that 199 people didn’t call me today. We are wired to look for coincidence, and as storytelling humans we are always looking for that correlation.