Synchronicity

 

Synchronicity

According to the internet, synchronicity refers to the experience of seemingly meaningful events that appear to be connected, but lack a clear causal relationship. It is to be distinguished from coincidence, which refers to the occurrence of two or more events that happen at the same time or place but are not causally related. To be as clear as possible, synchronicity and coincidence both describe events occurring at the same time, but synchronicity adds the element of meaningful connection or interpretation by the individual experiencing them, while coincidence simply notes the occurrence of unrelated events. Got that?

Consider the following account from a gentleman in the Midwest:

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My wife passed away on January of 2023.

She had a jean jacket she loved. It was filled with patches from her travels and those of our daughter. They spent many an hour arranging those patches and sewing them onto the jacket. Weather permitting, my wife would wear that jacket everywhere. Strangers would comment on how sharp she looked in that jacket. She loved the attention.

In the year following my wife’s death, I never once saw a jean jacket with patches on it.

Exactly one year later, on the first anniversary of her death, four of us went to a local restaurant to trade reminiscences. Our party consisted of me, our daughter, my wife’s brother, and her best friend.

Imagine my surprise when I glanced out the restaurant window and saw a person walking across my field of vision from left to right wearing a jean jacket with patches all over the back. I was stunned, but I managed to recover in time to point out this person to my daughter. She had also seen the person but, unlike me, had the presence of mind to rush over to the window and take a couple of pictures of this person on her phone.

Good thing too because otherwise I might have convinced myself I had imagined the whole thing. I didn’t imagine it. It happened.

Perhaps you might like to examine the evidence. My wife’s jacket is on the left. The mysterious stranger is on the right.

Let’s confront the obvious question. What are the odds? There might be some small odds of seeing someone wearing a jean jacket with patches. I suppose it had to happen eventually. But what is the likelihood of it happening exactly one year to the day after my wife died?

I have raised this question with all sorts of people, including some highly educated and intelligent people. Some people are immediately ready to see this as a sign from the Great Beyond, presumably sent to comfort me. The approach from intellectuals is more nuanced: If it comforts me, then I should embrace it.

Look closely at the image on the right, and you might make out that there is a word across the jacket just below shoulder level. The word appears to be “UNITY.” Does that mean anything?

All I can say is that if this was just a strange coincidence, then it was a very very strange coincidence. I don’t know what to make of it. I may never know.

But I think the intellectuals have a point.

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This is a clear-cut case of synchronicity. It seems to UT that the obvious question is as follows: Is synchronicity a form of self-delusion? Is it just an extremely rare form of coincidence, blown out of proportion by the perceiver? Or is there perhaps a causal connection between the events, but a nonobvious one? You be the judge. But remember Arthur C. Clarke’s famous dictum: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Question: Have you had an experience of synchronicity like the one above? Would you care to share it? This is your chance.

 

 

Conservation of Attention

 

The Conservation of Attention

The following article on an important and timely topic is reprinted with permission of the author and publication. The original article contained a hyperlink, but it no longer works, so we have omitted it. If you would like to explore the topic further, some useful references follow the article.

Attention! That's a precious resource

Connecting with nature sustains our effectiveness and fosters reasonableness and clear-headedness

 

    Rachel Kaplan

Emerita Professor of Environment and Behavior, University of Michigan

There was no need to implore our forebears to get outdoors and be in nature. Presumably these ancestors also rarely experienced any gap between what was interesting in their environment and what was important to attend. But the times are ever-changing. Today these two vectors – the important and the interesting – are often at odds as inordinate amounts of information, and the ease of accessing it, dominate our swirling world.

We depend on the information, and often crave and cherish it. At the same time, however, much of it is irrelevant or even misleading. Sometimes it is terrifying and too often it renders us helpless. Its constancy and intensity come at a substantial cost to us both personally and interpersonally. In subtle yet persistent ways, it affects our health, our effectiveness, and our capacity for reasonableness.

Herbert Simon, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, portrayed that cost in 1971 with his insight that: "In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."

For most of us it is probably not obvious that what is being consumed by our wondrous, buzzing world is our attention. Nor are the consequences of that theft readily recognized. Heeding Simon’s advice to allocate our attentional resources “efficiently” requires that we are aware of them as assets and that we know when they are depleted. If we knew all that, could we be more selective in how we spend this limited and precious resource? Could we perhaps even defend against the depletion? Attention Restoration Theory (ART), a framework originally developed by my colleague, and husband, Stephen Kaplan sheds light on these issues.

Connecting with nature offers many ideal ways to replenish fatigued attentional capacity.

ART draws on the distinction made by William James, the nineteenth century philosopher and psychologist, between two kinds of attention in terms of the effort they require. The first, Directed Attention, entails information that obliges us to direct our focus or to “pay” attention. James contrasted that with what we might call Effortless Attention, information that is so compelling that it is difficult to ignore. Much of what has been important throughout the vast majority of human evolution – wild animals, danger, caves, blood – was innately interesting, and thus required little reliance on Directed Attention.

The distinction between Directed and Effortless Attention turns out to have dramatic consequences for issues at the heart of World Environment Day – and especially for this year’s theme of “connecting people with nature.” Connecting with nature – and appreciating our dependence on it – provides a path to sustaining our effectiveness and fostering reasonableness. ART explains the role of attention in bringing these seemingly unrelated concepts together.

Directed Attention is essential for pursuing all that demands our attention. We use it to focus on the task at hand. It is also critical to ignoring or suppressing the ever-present distractions of our contemporary information-rich world. Our lives require us to juggle multiple demands, monitor what we do or say, check on diverse sources, and manage the wealth of information we are dealing with. This all requires ceaseless mental effort.

ART posits that Directed Attention is a finite resource and that it fatigues. We commonly call the resulting decline “mental fatigue,” but it is not the mind or the brain that is fatigued. Even while experiencing mental fatigue, we can, and do, pursue many activities – for instance: go for a walk or ride, hang out with friends, read a novel, watch television, or play games. Pursuing some of them, however, may be counterproductive in terms of restoring attention.

How then can we humans recover the attentional resource we so readily deplete? ART points to the second attentional system – the effortless kind – as critical for reducing mental fatigue by freeing us from directing our attention and thereby allowing it to replenish. Many environments, situations, and activities that call on Effortless Attention have an intrinsic fascination that makes us feel in tune with our surroundings and leaves room for the mind to wander. They allow for reflection and enable clear-headedness. Stephen Kaplan referred to such places as having ‘soft fascination’ and conjectured that this is particularly conducive to restoring attention. Incorporating opportunities for soft fascination in our lives can reduce the mental clutter that results from the constant information that draws on our Directed Attention.

Soft fascination can be found in many contexts. The press and many publications offer numerous stories documenting the wide array of benefits offered by one category of them: connecting with nature. Breathtaking, pristine places and long-lasting encounters in faraway places may offer needed tranquility, but an abundance of research has demonstrated that “everyday nature” can also provide restorative benefits and permit recovery from attentional fatigue. Such restorative opportunities can be achieved even in mini-doses, as in a view of trees from the window. Nurturing a garden or taking a nature walk near home can also provide the needed connection.

ART thus provides a framework for understanding some of the benefits that engaging with nature can play in our lives. Mental fatigue is rampant; we all experience it frequently. Unbeknownst to us, however, we readily undermine our efforts to recover from what we call stress. Spending hours engaged with the virtual world or watching television may be entertaining, but may also add to our internal noise rather than permitting it to dissipate. It is easy to confuse restoration with the seduction and excitement that screen time provides. By contrast, nature allows the mind to wander. It allows space to process lingering thoughts. Such reflection contributes to clear-headedness. It may bring what is interesting and what is important into better balance.

Humans depend on information, but its constancy entails a severe cost to our finite attentional capacity. The consequences of such depletion – irritability, distractibility, impulsivity, and reduced effectiveness – manifest themselves in loss of civility and reasonableness. Even if we are not aware of it, connecting with nature offers many ideal ways to replenish fatigued attentional capacity and facilitate clear-headedness. Consequently, it is in our self-interest not only to engage with nature, but to assure that opportunities for such engagement will continue to sustain the human community.

Our Planet magazine, June 2017, p.28.

References

Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15, 169-182.

Kaplan, S. (2001). Meditation, restoration, and the management of mental fatigue. Environment and Behavior, 33, 480-506.