Michigan's Otherside Paranormal Forums

digitalstooge · Joined: 14 Dec 2007 Posts: 48 Location: Lowell

john's not the only one who can post useful tid-bits

you've all heard of matrixing before and John has gone into it (in great detail ;p ) within this forum category.
I'd like to spend the readers precious moments on some other useful insights into the human brain.
The word of the day is synchronicity. I discovered this in a moment of geek-dom when I came up with the brilliant/insane
urge to watch all 6 Star Wars DVDs in succession. In planning for this movie binge, I reasoned that many a Star Wars fan usually tends to be a computer geek, and somewhere, in some forum, someone would have answered the question of how many hours it would take to pull off such a feat.* long story short I stumbled upon a link for an intrepid soul who watched all 6 simultaneously. again, BRILLIANT!! He then documented various things that each movie shared and coincidences that happened between them at the same time.

This is more or less the idea behind synchronicity, a term he had used. In doing a googling on it, I found this excerpt from a wikipedia entry on the Wizard of Oz and Pink Floyd urban legend A.K.A. Dark Side of the Rainbow

"...This synergy effect has been described as an example of synchronicity, defined by the psychologist Carl Jung as a phenomenon in which coincidental events "seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality."[5] Detractors[6] argue that the phenomenon is the result of the mind's tendency to think it recognizes patterns amid disorder by discarding data that does not fit. Psychologists refer to this tendency as apophenia. Under this theory, a Dark Side of the Rainbow enthusiast will focus on matching moments while ignoring the greater number of instances where the film and the album do not correspond."

Now I have no real authority in the world of the paranormal. The closest I had been to it before meeting John was that my ex-wife claimed to be sensitive to such things and had said that on a few separate occasions she had seen apparitions of family members. But I digress. I do think that as humans the first thing we do to anything is try to see how it relates to us. Scott Mcloud's Guide to Understanding Comics went into a little detail about this fact. It is only natural to take another step with synchronicity and not only relate things to ourselves but to explain how/why/IF they are there. And since the world of ghost hunters are full of things we can't explain I think that these two human subconscious functions are relied on. But perhaps they take up too much room in our filling of the gaps. I suppose an interesting debate would be when is it that reality matches up to them?

Did I really see that, or did I want to see it?
or
I know it happened because at the same time, such and such also happened.

*17 hours
minus an hour phone conversation with mom
a box of 6 packages of popcorn
and a can of jolt
and random pictures of me guest staring in the movies

**lostzac** · Joined: 18 Nov 2007 Posts: 529 Location: Lowell

I agree with a lot of experiences being that, and how a lot of experiences get tied to one legend, instead of being separate and totally different occurrences.

The question is if you take a person who has never had a experience, are they more likely not to ever see anything because there brain has been trained to throw out such patterns, or in the same manner a person who has what seems to be like a massive amount of experience, would they tend to see it more, because there brain is trained to look for those patterns....
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