I watched a pretty good movie today called "Puccini for Beginners." It was an independent film and called itself a "screwball comedy." When I think of screwball comedies, I think of slapstick, Laurel and Hardy and The Three Stooges. Puccini for Beginners was nothing like that. One line I liked from the movie, which I would have appreciated before I watched the movie if only I studied Freudian psychology a little more than I have, is a line along the lines of something like, "Freud said there are no such things as coincidences. Our minds create coincidences."
Real-Life Application, Coincidence #1:
I was thinking back to that once coincidence I had a few months ago, when I went to Ann Arbor, and I heard from my friend who I hardly ever hear from while there. A few years before that, I was in Ann Arbor and the same friend who hardly ever contacts me called me while I was there then. I thought to myself, "how is that not a natural coincidence?" Then I turned it around on myself and realized there have been more times than just two Ann Arbor trips that my friend has contacted me out of the blue, after not having heard from him in awhile. Does that make it any less of a coincidence? Why did I even remember that he contacted me twice while I was in Ann Arbor? What difference does it make? How many times have I been to Ann Arbor? Three? It's not a coincidence at all. He didn't contact me the first time I went. Or did he?
Real-Life Application, Coincidence #2:
What about running into the same people all the time, strangers or not? What if I run into almost all the same people all the time, but only the people I see as interesting are the ones I keep noticing, which makes it feel like a coincidence? Help me, Freud! What if I could keep track of everyone I've ever seen at the grocery store and the park and at work and in the neighborhood and at parties and restaurants and schools and bike riding and whitewater rafting and at stores and at the beach and ... ? Maybe my brain has the capacity to track such coincidences, and I'm not using it to its capacity. Which brings me to my next set of questions, why do scientists say we use only a small portion of our brains? If it's true, why don't we use the rest of our brains? How do we do we expand? What else can my brain do?
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2 comments:
Terrific post! It is interesting how, once we identify and lable something, we tend to notice it again and again.
And I barely use my brain! I barely tap about 3% of it!
So that's an interesting way to define coincidence. I have more to think about now. I wonder why no one's invented a machine we can use at home that tells us what percentage of our brains we're using at any given time. You know, you could blow into an electronic contraption or something, like a breathalizer.
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