Persistent Stories

I was at a party recently where I overheard a man talking about his close connection with his mother. He told a story about how he had been away at college and had developed this overwhelming feeling that his mother was in trouble. He called his parents’ house, got his father on the phone, and told him of his sudden concern. His father said that his mother was upstairs, that he (the father) had spoken to her just ten minutes before, and that she was fine. The son insisted, the father went back upstairs, and (you guessed it) the mother had just been stricken with pain and needed her medicine. The people standing around this man at the party nodded and commented on this mysterious connection.

I could have told a similar story, but I didn’t want to be obnoxious. I’ll tell it to you now. A friend of mine, who grew up in Connecticut, went to away to college in California. About six weeks after she arrived, in the middle of the night, she had a sudden, overwhelming feeling that her parents were dying. She called her parents, got her mother on the phone, and told her about the premonition. “We’re fine,” said her mother, “Go back to sleep.” She did. And her parents were fine. They still are doing well, even now, 20 years later.

Boring, huh?

Imagine the millions of college students who separate from their families and hometowns for the first time every fall. Out of these millions, almost all feel some separation anxiety. For hundreds of thousands, it is intense. Some tens of thousands act on that anxiety and call home. Occasionally, something has actually just happened to their loved ones. Those stories persist, for obvious reasons of drama. The vast bulk of the stories are like my friend’s story and get quietly forgotten.

There are thousands of stories like this. A dog gets agitated and howls at (roughly) the same time that its owner dies hundreds of miles away. Ignore the fact that this dog has howled hundreds of times before, as have millions of other dogs, without any dying owners. The fact is, we as a species like patterns. Looking for patterns is an ingrained and useful technique for making sense out of our world. The problem is that we find patterns in disconnected occurrences.

I read about a classic study involving pigeons. The researcher, the famous B.F. Skinner, put pigeons in so-called Skinner boxes, where there is a lever for the animal to push and a hopper that dispenses food pellets. The researcher can put all sorts of conditions on the relationship between the lever and the hopper – a colored light being on, for instance – and find out about the animal’s learning ability or color blindness. In this case, Skinner removed the lever and had the hopper open on a fixed schedule. Soon afterward he found the pigeons doing surprising repetitive things. One bobbed its head to the side. Another spun in circles. Another made vague pecking movements. He had created superstitious pigeons. A particular pigeon, having randomly performed the same movement several times just before the hopper swung into place, decided in its little pea brain that the movement produced the hopper. It proceeded to repeat the movement over and over and, voila, eventually it “worked.” The food reappeared.

Apparently we are little better than pigeons in this respect. We wear “lucky” clothing, perform little rituals before trying to start the car on a cold morning, and pass on stories of miraculous coincidences that are just that – coincidences. I hope all who read this will look more skeptically at such things in the future…knock on wood.