Synchronicity

Carl Jung first explained the concept of synchronicity in the 1920’s as the “coming together of inner and outer events in a way that cannot be explained by cause and effect and that is meaningful to the observer.” He studied this phenomenon and felt he had given conclusive evidence for the collective unconscious. Whatever the explanation, the events cannot be explained by normal cause and effect. 

Jung often quoted Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” I like to think that there is truth to this and hope that someday we may unlock the secret. 

A week ago someone asked what my favorite word was and I replied that it was “synchronicity.” I do have a fondness for the word and over the years have collected some of my most memorable synchronistic events.

On January 29, 2002, I recorded a dream in my journal. In the dream, I was in a basement when dozens of silky shoots dropped from the ceiling. At the end of each were these pods that opened. What emerged, I realized, were little pigs. Someone nearby flung them outside, saying, “Goodbye Pigs.”

In April of that same year, I visited a friend in New York who gave me a tour of their house. When I got to the kitchen I gasped. Hanging from the window sill was a string with a ceramic pig with wings suspended in the air. I took a picture and then ran downstairs to pull my dream journal out of my suitcase to show them both the dream and my drawing of the string with the flying pig. My friend looked at me as if I were a witch. I had never been to their house and the flying pig was something they had received only that year. 

Nine years later, I started writing dreams down again and wrote of a disturbing dream where someone had both legs amputated at the knee and was hopping around on the floor. The next day at work, Simon, one of my coworkers, stopped by for one of our usual afternoon chats. We would often discuss everything from the mundane to philosophy or psychology. That day he showed me a video of his son goofing around with his legs locked in a lotus position and hopping around from the couch to the floor and back up onto a chair. I nearly fell off my chair. The similarities were far too much for coincidence. Yet, I had never even met his son.

Two weeks later, I tried to write down other images as I drifted off to sleep. I only managed to write down two words: black dog. The next day at work, my coffee grew cold as I stared at a notice on the bulletin board where someone advertised a black dog to give away.

Believing I had found the black dog’s synchronistic partner, I told my friend Simon. This time he nearly spit his coffee out. When he and his family would go for a bike ride they often made a game of calling out ‘dibs’ on something they liked. “I dibs the Porsche,” the first one to see it would call out. That weekend, they passed a black dog and his youngest son called out, “I dibs the black dog.”

After that, Simon told me not to tell him any more of my dreams. It was just getting too spooky.

I am not one who sees hidden messages in these things, or believes that the universe is trying to tell me something. I do, however, believe that life is fascinating and mysterious. Whether you find answers in these moments of connected events or just find them amusing, I do know that we don’t notice them unless we pay attention.

It’s not just me that has a knack for calling forth these synchronistic events. This past weekend after my husband and I spent much of the morning talking about the movie about Neil Armstrong and him being the first man on the moon, my husband went off to the gym and was greeted by a young man who gives out random quotes to people like fortune cookies. To David he gave this greeting: “The Eagle has Landed.”  

 One final story. When my husband was traveling in China, we would text each other all the time. Before he went to a big meeting one day, I texted him to ask how one said “Good luck” in Mandarin. Immediately I saw that he was typing a reply, which finally appeared on my screen. After phonetically working the message out, I laughed: “Ho u fin ur mon-ke.” Of all the possible random answers, this topped the list as both surprising and bizarre. That night, he sent me a picture from his hotel room. On the bed was a cute, stuffed monkey left by the hotel staff as a welcome gift.

Explain that one away.

Staying In the Zone—the Holy Grail of Consciousness

Despite the numerous articles on why multitasking is bad for us, I’ve continued to engage in this ill-advised habit—all the while feeling guilty for sacrificing productivity, something I’ve valued greatly all my life. In fact, I used to think I must have been an “efficiency expert” in the early sixties, in some past life. 

This feeling is called cognitive dissonance—the state of having two conflicting ideas or emotions simultaneously. While I know switching focus from one thing to another and then back again costs me valuable time, I also know I often feel the happiest and most productive when I multitask. So, what's going on? 

To get to the bottom of this internal conflict, I decided to do more research. How could multitasking feel so good while at other times it was a source of great frustration and even anxiety?

Multitasking is generally defined as dealing with more than one task at the same time. Studies have been done to show how it is impossible for the brain to focus on more than one task at a time. The studies seemed to prove that if the brain is forced into multitasking, then the time required to complete both tasks will take longer and is more error prone than if the tasks were done sequentially. 

So then why did my favorite multi-tasking combo platter (running on a treadmill, reading a novel on my iPad and listening to music with wireless earbuds) feel so good?

Perhaps, I decided, this was not true multitasking.

I found that this type of multitasking is really called layering. Layering is when we strategically engage in different tasks that require different “channels” of mental functioning. With that new knowledge, I was delighted. I was off the hook.  

There is, however, a real problem with other types of multitasking. Texting while watching a musical at the theater (Yep, seen it), talking on a cell phone while eating alone at a restaurant (Annoying), texting while sitting in a meeting (Please!), or the worst, texting while driving (Bye, bye Girlfriend!). These are the kinds of multitasking behaviors I advise against and are either rude or downright dangerous.

Coincidentally, this has been a time when the focus everywhere seems to be on mindfulness, which highlights yet another area of cognitive dissonance for me. How can I be fully in the moment if I multitask, or even layer activities? Yet, I realized that when I layer activities successfully, all of me is engaged. There is zero mind-, body-, or auditory-wandering. I am 100% engage in the whole of these activities. I am “in the zone,” as the say. It is when I attempt to listen to a meeting while reading a complex email that my mind shuts down and neither activity is accomplished successfully.

My final take-away is that accepting our limitations, knowing what is socially acceptable and what is not, choosing the right combinations of activities that do work together, and most importantly, sharpening our ability to focus singularly on one thing when we need to will ensure that we stay both happy and productive, stay in the good graces of others, and, with luck we stay alive. That is the Holy Grail of Consciousness. 

Suspended Curiosity

I thought I would share some of the odd questions that I ponder during a typical day. Here is a collection of the things I’ve wondered about this week:

1.  When we lose weight, where does it go? Maybe you’ve wondered about this, and then again, maybe you haven’t. I had some guesses, but those all proved to be wrong. And nothing really prepared me for the truth, which was almost too simple to be believed. 
2.  I still wonder how tadpoles get into isolated pools of water with no frogs anywhere around. Even if a frog had laid the eggs there and then leapt off to find his princess, how did the frog survive the hard-freeze of our mid-western winters? 
3.  Where do fruit flies come from? Everyone asks this question. You bring a banana home and even inspect it, but don’t see any fruit flies. But, leave it out on the counter for a short while and there they are.

The odd thing about curiosity is that the more available information is, the less likely it seems that people seek answers. Today, nearly any question one might pose can be answered in record speed. No longer does it require a trip to the local library reference desk and subsequent searching through racks to find the needle in the haystack for something that no one even thought to put in a book. For example, if you want to know who the 34^th president of the United States was, just ask Siri. Or, if you’d like to understand the history of lawns, Siri can guide you.

Today, people are more likely to take information they read or hear from a single source as gospel. Adding to that, there are still those who are susceptible to substituting passionate assertions by others as a substitute for hard facts. When it is even the slightest bit difficult to find hard answers to questions on our own, we consume the emphatic dissertations from those we are told to regard highly as truth.

Even when contradictory evidence surrounds us, this contradictory information can even strengthen the wrongly-held belief. How does this even happen? Aren’t humans supposed to be rational beings?

Well, the reason is three-fold. Once we believe in something strongly, we are unlikely to let it go easily. We’re just built that way. Secondly, we avoid cognitive dissonance at all cost and will simply avoid that dissonance rather than reconcile the information. Finally, our belief systems assemble memory and information in a way that supports our beliefs, even if it means overlooking contrary evidence.

So, before I get too far off topic, here are the answers to my queries:

1)    We all likely guessed that our body converts those pounds into usable energy. But, remember, matter is neither created nor destroyed. The answer is that fat changes form and literally vanishes into thin air.

Most of the weight we lose is EXHALED as carbon dioxide. The rest leaves our body as water. Yup, sweat, saliva, pee—you get the idea. And, sorry—hyperventilating won’t do the trick. Of course, now I have a new mystery to answer. If we have a record number of fat people who are all trying to lose weight, is all this extra air contributing to global warming?

2)    As far as the tadpoles go, nature has many ways of making sure the next generation has a good chance at life. Birds inadvertently carry eggs on their legs that get dropped into odd places. Frogs often climb all over things to find spots to lay their eggs. Many stay in deeper water to hibernate over the winter. Others dig deep into the soil. Some even have a sort of antifreeze in their organs that allow them to freeze and come back to life in the spring.

3)    So, what about fruit flies? Do they spontaneous generate, like magic? Well, I’m not going to give you the answer. You’ll have to take your own curiosity for a spin and find out for yourself. For me, I still believe they come out of the ether, materializing within our homes like magic.

https://www.thoughtco.com/where-do-fruit-flies-come-from-1968433

Resonance

I’ve recently become fascinated by the idea of resonance—not the idea of reverberating sound, but of the reinforcement of sound by the synchronous vibration of a neighboring object. I know, right. What on earth does that mean?

The best analogy I’ve heard to explain resonance is that of pushing a child on a swing. First, the size of the person in the swing doesn’t matter. The pace at which the swing completes a cycle (the time the swing moves forward and then returns to its starting position) is always the same. This cycle represents the natural frequency of the swing.

Secondly, when pushing a child on the swing, we know the best point to add our thrust. By adding force at the precise point in the cycle, the amplitude of the swing increases (i.e. the swing goes higher). If a second person stands at the front of the swing and does the same thing, this adds even more to the amplitude.

But resonance doesn’t apply only to swings. This link shows a wonderful example of resonance of sound waves. Resonance with metronomes

If you are not a patient person, feel free to skip ahead to about the 2:00 minute marker. At this point, the metronomes are almost all in sync, even though each was started at random. Even here, one rebellious metronome beats at its own rhythm. Then, by 2:37, even this hold-out marches to the same rhythm as the other 31 metronomes.

The first time I saw this, I thought it was nothing short of miraculous.

Watching this sent me on a journey to understand resonance. After pondering this idea for a while, I wondered if resonance ever had a destructive effect. It didn’t take long to discover the answer.

The best example of what can happen with out of control resonance is the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, nicknamed Galloping Gertie. When the wind blew long and steady, this drove the bridge to oscillate at its natural frequency, which ultimately caused it to collapse. Glad this wasn’t on my commute. Tacoma Narrows Bridge-Galloping Gertie

Today, engineers put in dampeners when designing bridges. The dampeners interrupt the resonant waves and prevent the waves from growing.

I then asked myself how else might resonance relate to our world today.

It occurred to me that ideas, especially those of a political or religious persuasion, can have a similar effect. People sometimes believe things so strongly that their collective beliefs reach a destructive amplitude. Fear can drive people to abandon logic. The added influence of other like-minded individuals acting out on these same beliefs exponentially adds energy to this fear. This fear can then cause even normally empathic people to suppress opposition at any cost. Violence becomes acceptable when people convince themselves that the end justifies the means. It doesn’t matter which side of the political aisle you are on, suppressing opposition at any cost is ultimately destructive.

What is an equivalent force that can serve as a dampener in society? The answer seemed obvious: a free press. The press is often considered the fourth branch of government. In our democracy, each of the branches of government provides a check and balance on the others, with no one branch of government becoming too powerful. The last fail-safe is a free press that always seeks to discover and report the truth, regardless of which side it finds in the wrong.

When the press abandons its responsibility, and reports only stories that give support to a single political leaning, the resulting effect is much like the destructive resonance that caused Galloping Gertie to collapse. When people believe that the only goal must be that everyone adopts the same belief system, the result is similarly destructive, ultimately leading to societal collapse, or even MAD—mutually assured destruction.

Instead, if we allow each other the right to hold differing beliefs, if we encourage the open exchange of ideas, and we ensure that the press seeks and presents the truth regardless of political leaning, the effect will be the opposite: Harmony.