You can practice speaking backwards, so when your words are reversed

their intelligible. But here's something else that is weird.

The digits in the speed of light are exactly the same

as the latitude of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

And, as the anagram genius has revealed, all the world's

a stage but if you rearrange the letters in the meaning of life

it becomes be engine of a film

or, more pessimistically, the fine game of nil.

What does all of this mean?

Are these just coincidences?

Or are greater powers at work?

Why is it so easy for us to find

hidden messages? Why can a mere coincidence give us chills

and why is it so fun?

When you reverse Neil Armstrong saying 'small step for man'

you can hear what sounds like man will space walk

Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F Kennedy

and this interview he defends the Fair Play for Cuba committee

of which he was a member.

Now listen to what it sounds like when we reverse him saying

'and the Fair Play for Cuba'.

is that a coincidence or a subconscious confession hidden within his own words?

It's a coincidence.

For crying out loud, if anybody says 'and the Fair Play for Cuba',

and then reverses it, it sounds the same.

This app, by the way, is called Virtual Recorder.

It's a really easy way to quickly reverse your own speech.

Matthew Hutson in 'The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking' points out that if you record

yourself saying

and then reverse it

it sounds a bit like happy birthday to you

Kind of.

If a word can be spelt the same forward

and backward, it's a palindrome.

But if a word or phrase

sounds the same, whether spoken forward or rewound,

it is a phonetic palindrome.

For example,

say yes. Reversed

Pretty cool. But check out this poem by Karsten Johansson

By the way, some people can speak in reverse on the fly

It is really cool to see them in action.

Watch Guy's lean back

after this video. It's linked down in the description and it's full of pretty cool coincidence videos.

Apophenia is the perception of connections or patterns

in information.

One type of Apophenia is Pareidolia -

the scene or hearing of things that weren't meant to be there.

For instance, hearing your name being called or your phone ringing

in the sound of running water, or hearing English words

in a non-English song or seeing faces

that weren't purposely placed there. Our brains are good at this kind of work,

probably because being hyper attentive to patterns and faces

can save your life. If there's ambiguity as to whether that

thing hiding in the shadows is a threat, or just a shadow,

it's advantageous to air on the side

of threat. Organisms with a healthy sense of Apophenia

live longer, long enough to have kids and raise them

and naturally become the norm. We connect with

faces so well Hutson relates a story of a friend who draws

faces on things she doesn't wanna lose, like her bags.

She says the faces make her less likely to forget about them.

If you like it, you should have put a ring on it, if you like not losing it,

you should have drawn a face on it.

We are so good at

teasing out patterns and faces from random noise

actual random sequences don't always

feel random to us.

Originally, Apple's iTunes shuffle feature generated complaints from users.

They said that similar songs, or songs from the same artist,

appeared in a string, which, of course, is to be expected

from randomness but it didn't feel random enough.

So Apple introduced a smart shuffle

that avoided totally random sequences that nonetheless

didn't seem random to our pattern loving brains.

As Steve Jobs explained, "we're making it less random

to make it feel more random".

Our impressive ability to imagine patterns also expresses itself when it

comes to connecting songs

and moving images. This dancing Spider-Man animation will

famously sync up with any music you play.

Try it. What kind of black magic is going on here?

Well, as it turns out, most of it is in our heads.

Radiolab reported that Michigan State University explains that the major movements

of dancing animations like this one, or this one,

move at typical song tempos but also contain, like most

dance, various other different related rhythms of movement allowing them to seemingly

fit many different tempos.

Selection bias helps a lot too.

We fall prey to this when we reject all the times the animation

doesn't really sync up, focusing instead on the more surprising times

when it does.

The bizarre pyramid coincidence mentioned earlier

is a lot less bizarre when you consider the fact that we got to control where

we placed the decimal point,

and that a number of degrees this precise isn't necessary to locate the pyramid.

By the fourth decimal we're only talking about a matter of a few meters,

so it's easy to make the rest fit the speed of light exactly

and have still picked a point on the pyramid.

Confirmation bias also comes into play here.

If you really want two things to sync up,

they will.

We often look for evidence that supports what we already believe,

while marginalising things against it.

As Marshall McLuhan said "I wouldn't have seen it, if I hadn't believed it".

These biases also help explain the seemingly mind-blowing coincidence that

famous movies and famous albums can line up.

One the most popular states that if you start playing Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon

at the same time as The Wizard of Oz, they will eerily

line up. Entire communities have sprouted around the syncing

of movies and albums. Some of my favorites are the Yellow Submarine soundtrack

and the Little Mermaid, Lorde's Pure Heroine and Twilight Saga - Breaking Dawn 2,

and the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey

with Pink Floyd's Echoes.

There are conspiracies

that these were somehow secretly planned, though in reality

they're just accidental music videos. The product of selection bias,

confirmation bias and

the law of near enough.

A behaviour of our pattern sensitive minds.

Two things don't have to line up exactly, or literally,

for us to see a connection. This is why vague predictions

are a great way to look psychic. These are also actually

unsurprising when you consider the fact that the number of narrative

paces and rhythms we enjoy, and typically use,

are much smaller than the number possible.

In 'The Improbability Principal', David J Hand calls this

"the probability lever".

What may be rare

on average, or when considering all possible scenarios,

can be less rare for specific scenarios,

even if they are only marginally different. Getting struck by lightning

is a proverbially unlikely event, but Walter Summerford

wasn't just struck by lightning once during his life,

he was struck three times. It never

killed him but four years after his death

his gravestone was also struck by lightning.

What are the chances? I mean, clearly Summerford was some sort of

robot built out of lightning rods or had somehow angered Zeus,

right?

Probably not. You see, while for the average person

the chance have been struck by lightning is quite low, for an avid outdoor

sportsman like Summerford,

it's not as low.

The law of truly large numbers

also comes into play here.

With lightning striking Earth forty to fifty times a second, billions of people

for it to strike and

thousand of years of recorded history, it's actually not surprising at all

that at least once a story like Summerford's

would have happened.

Given the truly large number of people

who visit Disney World every day, and the fact that they take photos and lots of them,

it's actually not surprising at all that at least one so far,

a story like Alex and Donna Voutsinas' has happened.

While sorting through old photos before their wedding, Alex and Donna found a photo

of Donna

at Disney World, fourteen years before the couple met.

But then Alex noticed something. He too had visited Disney World as a child, and there,

in the background, was his father pushing him in a stroller.

Sometimes coincidences can be tragic.

In 1864, Abraham Lincoln's son,

Robert Lincoln, was saved from serious injury - or possibly even

death - when a stranger grabbed him by the shirt collar

moments before he plunged on the train tracks below.

That stranger turned out to be Edwin Booth, one of the most famous

Shakespearean actors of the time. So famous in fact Robert recognized him

and had a letter sent thanking him for saving his life. Less than a year later

Edwin Booth's brother, John Wilkes Booth, undid the favor by

assassinating Abraham Lincoln.

Strange as they seem at first,

math says that given enough time and psychology says that given enough interest

in finding them,

coincidences and connections will be found,

even unlikely ones. The coincidences between

Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy are famous.

Both were elected to the presidency in the year ending with sixty.

Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre,

Kennedy was shot in a 1961 Lincoln Continental four-door convertible,

made by Ford.

Both presidents' last names have seven letters

and both assassins had 15 letters in their names.

The list goes on, as it should.

If you look long enough, you can find coincidences between any two people or

things or events.

They may seem strange at first but tend to wind up being in the end

pretty expected. For just one example,

name length isn't that wildly variable.

Seven-letter names are pretty common. Lincoln,

Kennedy. Michael. Stevens

In the famous spooky presidential coincidences contest,

held by the Skeptical Inquirer in 1992, one contestant alone

found similar lists of crazy coincidences

between 21 pairs of former presidents.

Given the vast amount of details in any one of our lives,

it's pretty easy. This court can be exploited to almost comedic heights

when it comes to over-analysing.

Of course, hidden messages and signs are often intentionally included in media

for fun, or to reward attentive viewers.

But unintentional, extraordinary things

happen all the time. It's not really that extraordinary.

There's a famous calculation

that is known as Littlewood's law. Given the number of hours

we are awake every day, and assuming an event only takes about a second to occur,

if you calculate the odds of something happening to you are only one in a million.

Well, you should expect that thing to happen to you about once every 35 days.

David J Hand took this even further with seven billion people on Earth

the chance that an event with a one in a million probability of happening

to each of us won't happen today is 1

in 10 to 3040. As Persi Diaconis put it,

the truly unusual day would be a day where

nothing unusual happens.

And as always,

thanks for watching.

You may have noticed a lot of YouTube channels making videos about learning this week.

Well, that is not a coincidence. It is school of YouTube week.

Many people are going back to school or college right now

but across the world millions of children won't be

either because they work to support their families

or live without a home. Or in areas where there is conflict.

They may experience overcrowding at school or a lack of teaching

and school supplies. But luckily, we can help.

Donations to Comic Relief's School of YouTube campaign

can help disadvantaged young people all around the world

get an education. It doesn't take much to change a life.

You can learn more in the description below or donate right now.

And as always, thanks for helping and thanks for learning.