Mark Gagnon

Evolutionarily, it was far better to see a pattern that wasn't there than to miss a pattern that is there.

So you're better off looking at bushes and seeing a face in the bushes that turns out to be nothing than looking at bushes and being like, oh, that's probably nothing.

And it's actually a lion.

So our brains are actually sensitive pattern detecting machines and we see faces and clouds or a message in a fortune cookie or tea leaves and divine plans and a random, you know, for like some random medical outcome, all in an attempt to find answers for both surviving and thriving and also dealing with the stress of everyday life.

Confirmation bias compounds on top of this.

Once you believe something meaningful has happened, you unconsciously seek evidence that supports that belief and you just ignore evidence that contradicts it.

So if you pray for healing and you feel better, you remember the prayer.

And if you pray and don't feel better, you attribute it to God's plan or you just forget about it.

So here's what's important.

None of this disproves miracles or synchronicities either.

It simply shows that the existence of extraordinary events doesn't require a supernatural explanation.

The math can and oftentimes does account for many of these things.

But, and this is very crucial, the math can't tell you whether the supernatural explanation is also true or not.

Probability explains why and statistically how remarkable things might happen, but it doesn't explain why they happen to you at this moment in this way.

And that's the gap that a lot of people are searching for and trying to understand the greater meaning.

So we've talked about personal events, books on benches, twins with the same name, a novelist who gets lucky.

But what happens when the coincidence is something a lot bigger?

Well, let's look at some of these cases that genuinely push the boundaries and even events that just basically force skeptics to really sit there and think like, this is weird.

So, near-death experiences, shortened to NDEs, are basically reported across every culture, every religion, you know, even atheists.

People who are clinically dead or close to it describe remarkably consistent experiences, moving through...