Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

 

Personal Fiction

“Synchronicity: a simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connections.”

          When you Google the word “synchronicity” you get the definition above. Carl Jung attached another word to it: meaningful. A meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved. In other words, when we mentally/spiritually/emotionally connect events that may have happened randomly.

When you learn something new, and it’s fresh in your mind, you see it repeatedly. Your mind is playing with new information and because it’s fresh and vivid, you notice it in your environment more than you would otherwise. It’s called frequency illusion. Your creative brain starts to make up patterns of relatedness so that it can manage the new material.

Arnold Zwicky, a linguist at Stanford University, explained frequency illusion: there are two processes happening at the same time, selective attention, and confirmation bias. Selective attention comes about when you learn something new, and your acute awareness of that new information causes you to see it more often. Then it gets “amped up” by confirmation bias—that is, it agrees with something you already believe. Science Daily says that we “search for or interpret information in a way that confirms our preconceptions, leading to statistical errors.” In other words, we make connections that don’t exist because we want to create a rational pattern that pleases us.

All of this may, in fact, explain to some extent why conspiracy theories abound. We see something, then hear something else that seems to confirm what we saw, and because our brains are creative and love a good puzzle to untangle, we put things together in a way that appeals to us—or, if you love a good scary movie, in a way that scares us to death. There may be no real basis for such a connection, but we believe it because it confirms something we already think is true, or something that we want to be true.

Good fiction writers take this phenomenon to run with it. They create whole worlds out of thin air. They bring about events that are strictly fantasy and make them so real you feel you are in the scene. Films do this too. Because our brains are phenomenally creative, we can imagine ourselves there, and adapt our behavior accordingly. As Psalm 139 informs us, “For you created my inmost being, you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” Aren’t we though! Be grateful for that, but also be aware that you too can create fiction. And that does not make it real.

                                        In the Spirit,

                                        Jane