Spooky Coincidences?

Hi, Vsauce. Michael here. You can practice speaking backwards, so when your words are reversed their intelligible.

But here's something else that is weird. The digits in the speed of light are exactly the same as the latitude of the Great Pyramid of Giza. And, as the anagram genius has revealed, all the world's a stage but if you rearrange the letters in the meaning of life it becomes be engine of a film or, more pessimistically, the fine game of nil.

What does all of this mean? Are these just coincidences? Or are greater powers at work?

Why is it so easy for us to find hidden messages? Why can a mere coincidence give us chills and why is it so fun? When you reverse Neil Armstrong saying 'small step for man' you can hear what sounds like man will space walk Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F Kennedy and this interview he defends the Fair Play for Cuba committee of which he was a member.

Now listen to what it sounds like when we reverse him saying 'and the Fair Play for Cuba'. is that a coincidence or a subconscious confession hidden within his own words? It's a coincidence.

For crying out loud, if anybody says 'and the Fair Play for Cuba', and then reverses it, it sounds the same. This app, by the way, is called Virtual Recorder. It's a really easy way to quickly reverse your own speech.

Matthew Hutson in 'The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking' points out that if you record yourself saying and then reverse it it sounds a bit like happy birthday to you Kind of. If a word can be spelt the same forward and backward, it's a palindrome. But if a word or phrase sounds the same, whether spoken forward or rewound, it is a phonetic palindrome.

For example, say yes. Reversed Pretty cool. But check out this poem by Karsten Johansson By the way, some people can speak in reverse on the fly It is really cool to see them in action.

Watch Guy's lean back after this video. It's linked down in the description and it's full of pretty cool coincidence videos. Apophenia is the perception of connections or patterns in information.

One type of Apophenia is Pareidolia - the scene or hearing of things that weren't meant to be there. For instance, hearing your name being called or your phone ringing in the sound of running water, or hearing English words in a non-English song or seeing faces that weren't purposely placed there. Our brains are good at this kind of work, probably because being hyper attentive to patterns and faces can save your life.

If there's ambiguity as to whether that thing hiding in the shadows is a threat, or just a shadow, it's advantageous to air on the side of threat. Organisms with a healthy sense of Apophenia live longer, long enough to have kids and raise them and naturally become the norm. We connect with faces so well Hutson relates a story of a friend who draws faces on things she doesn't wanna lose, like her bags.

She says the faces make her less likely to forget about them. If you like it, you should have put a ring on it, if you like not losing it, you should have drawn a face on it. We are so good at teasing out patterns and faces from random noise actual random sequences don't always feel random to us.

Originally, Apple's iTunes shuffle feature generated complaints from users. They said that similar songs, or songs from the same artist, appeared in a string, which, of course, is to be expected from randomness but it didn't feel random enough. So Apple introduced a smart shuffle that avoided totally random sequences that nonetheless didn't seem random to our pattern loving brains.

As Steve Jobs explained, "we're making it less random to make it feel more random". Our impressive ability to imagine patterns also expresses itself when it comes to connecting songs and moving images. This dancing Spider-Man animation will famously sync up with any music you play.

Try it. What kind of black magic is going on here? Well, as it turns out, most of it is in our heads.

Radiolab reported that Michigan State University explains that the major movements of dancing animations like this one, or this one, move at typical song tempos but also contain, like most dance, various other different related rhythms of movement allowing them to seemingly fit many different tempos. Selection bias helps a lot too. We fall prey to this when we reject all the times the animation doesn't really sync up, focusing instead on the more surprising times when it does.

The bizarre pyramid coincidence mentioned earlier is a lot less bizarre when you consider the fact that we got to control where we placed the decimal point, and that a number of degrees this precise isn't necessary to locate the pyramid. By the fourth decimal we're only talking about a matter of a few meters, so it's easy to make the rest fit the speed of light exactly and have still picked a point on the pyramid. Confirmation bias also comes into play here.

If you really want two things to sync up, they will. We often look for evidence that supports what we already believe, while marginalising things against it. As Marshall McLuhan said "I wouldn't have seen it, if I hadn't believed it".

These biases also help explain the seemingly mind-blowing coincidence that famous movies and famous albums can line up. One the most popular states that if you start playing Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon at the same time as The Wizard of Oz, they will eerily line up. Entire communities have sprouted around the syncing of movies and albums.

Some of my favorites are the Yellow Submarine soundtrack and the Little Mermaid, Lorde's Pure Heroine and Twilight Saga - Breaking Dawn 2, and the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey with Pink Floyd's Echoes. There are conspiracies that these were somehow secretly planned, though in reality they're just accidental music videos. The product of selection bias, confirmation bias and the law of near enough.

A behaviour of our pattern sensitive minds. Two things don't have to line up exactly, or literally, for us to see a connection. This is why vague predictions are a great way to look psychic.

These are also actually unsurprising when you consider the fact that the number of narrative paces and rhythms we enjoy, and typically use, are much smaller than the number possible. In 'The Improbability Principal', David J Hand calls this "the probability lever". What may be rare on average, or when considering all possible scenarios, can be less rare for specific scenarios, even if they are only marginally different.

Getting struck by lightning is a proverbially unlikely event, but Walter Summerford wasn't just struck by lightning once during his life, he was struck three times. It never killed him but four years after his death his gravestone was also struck by lightning. What are the chances?

I mean, clearly Summerford was some sort of robot built out of lightning rods or had somehow angered Zeus, right? Probably not. You see, while for the average person the chance have been struck by lightning is quite low, for an avid outdoor sportsman like Summerford, it's not as low.

The law of truly large numbers also comes into play here. With lightning striking Earth forty to fifty times a second, billions of people for it to strike and thousand of years of recorded history, it's actually not surprising at all that at least once a story like Summerford's would have happened. Given the truly large number of people who visit Disney World every day, and the fact that they take photos and lots of them, it's actually not surprising at all that at least one so far, a story like Alex and Donna Voutsinas' has happened.

While sorting through old photos before their wedding, Alex and Donna found a photo of Donna at Disney World, fourteen years before the couple met. But then Alex noticed something. He too had visited Disney World as a child, and there, in the background, was his father pushing him in a stroller.

Sometimes coincidences can be tragic. In 1864, Abraham Lincoln's son, Robert Lincoln, was saved from serious injury - or possibly even death - when a stranger grabbed him by the shirt collar moments before he plunged on the train tracks below. That stranger turned out to be Edwin Booth, one of the most famous Shakespearean actors of the time.

So famous in fact Robert recognized him and had a letter sent thanking him for saving his life. Less than a year later Edwin Booth's brother, John Wilkes Booth, undid the favor by assassinating Abraham Lincoln. Strange as they seem at first, math says that given enough time and psychology says that given enough interest in finding them, coincidences and connections will be found, even unlikely ones.

The coincidences between Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy are famous. Both were elected to the presidency in the year ending with sixty. Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre, Kennedy was shot in a 1961 Lincoln Continental four-door convertible, made by Ford.

Both presidents' last names have seven letters and both assassins had 15 letters in their names. The list goes on, as it should. If you look long enough, you can find coincidences between any two people or things or events.

They may seem strange at first but tend to wind up being in the end pretty expected. For just one example, name length isn't that wildly variable. Seven-letter names are pretty common.

Lincoln, Kennedy. Michael. Stevens In the famous spooky presidential coincidences contest, held by the Skeptical Inquirer in 1992, one contestant alone found similar lists of crazy coincidences between 21 pairs of former presidents.

Given the vast amount of details in any one of our lives, it's pretty easy. This court can be exploited to almost comedic heights when it comes to over-analysing. Of course, hidden messages and signs are often intentionally included in media for fun, or to reward attentive viewers.

But unintentional, extraordinary things happen all the time. It's not really that extraordinary. There's a famous calculation that is known as Littlewood's law.

Given the number of hours we are awake every day, and assuming an event only takes about a second to occur, if you calculate the odds of something happening to you are only one in a million. Well, you should expect that thing to happen to you about once every 35 days. David J Hand took this even further with seven billion people on Earth the chance that an event with a one in a million probability of happening to each of us won't happen today is 1 in 10 to 3040.

As Persi Diaconis put it, the truly unusual day would be a day where nothing unusual happens. And as always, thanks for watching. You may have noticed a lot of YouTube channels making videos about learning this week.

Well, that is not a coincidence. It is school of YouTube week. Many people are going back to school or college right now but across the world millions of children won't be either because they work to support their families or live without a home.

Or in areas where there is conflict. They may experience overcrowding at school or a lack of teaching and school supplies. But luckily, we can help.

Donations to Comic Relief's School of YouTube campaign can help disadvantaged young people all around the world get an education. It doesn't take much to change a life. You can learn more in the description below or donate right now.

And as always, thanks for helping and thanks for learning.