So here’s an odd thing.
On Monday, I cycled home as normal, and coming round the corner onto our road I saw our car parked outside our house (about 20m away). Immediately I thought “I’d better check if that’s locked.”
Initially I had no idea where that thought came from. Now, looking back at it, here’s what I knew/inferred:
Here’s what actually happened, as I found out later:
However, before I went into the house, I checked the car and found all the doors were unlocked. I’ve never before, in many years, ever thought to check the car. Moreover, apart from when we first got it (and I didn’t know some intricacies of the locking system), neither Laura nor I have found it unlocked when going out to drive it. So the chances of it being unlocked and me thinking to check are astronomically small.
What must have happened is that Laura accidentally pressed the key twice, or pressed the wrong button. But that isn’t really related to any of my inferences above, since most of my inferences were wrong anyway.
Now, I wouldn’t necessarily think much of this, but it reminded me of an incident in my childhood. I was about 10, and some friends and I were playing “spies” in the street when for some reason a friend said “we need to break into an enemy car.” No malice or intention to break in, just playing. I said “I think it’s that one up there,” pointing to a car about 40m away. When we got to the car, it was unlocked. The only unlocked one in the street. We’d never previously, nor did again, play at breaking into cars.
Another time, on the same street, something caught my attention in that build-up of soil you get at the bottom of a wall. It was a key, old and dirty and had probably been there a while. The key had no markings or branding on it. On a whim, I tried it in my dad’s car. It opened it. My dad had never owned the key, and indeed I’d hardly ever used his car keys so I didn’t really know what shape his keys had. We never did work out the mystery key’s provenance. I’d never before, nor did again, find anything resembling a car key on the street.
So… do I have some kind of eerie affinity with car locking mechanisms? Am I car-lock psychic? Answers below! And don’t say “confirmation bias”: like most people I rarely have any opportunity to engage with car locks above the level of unlocking my own car, so it’s not like these are three memorable incidents out of hundreds of uneventful ones.
EDIT: I don’t for a second believe I’m psychic. But I do think that sceptics should practice arguing against anecdote, and learn from each others’ arguing skills. So get cracking in the comments… personally I don’t even know where to begin with this one.
8 Responses
adam
07|Jul|2010 1this is the kind of thing that I’d label intuition.
Oliver
07|Jul|2010 2I can’t remember who said this originally, but just calling something intuition doesn’t, unfortunately, explain anything: it’s just giving a phenomenon a name. If I’d actually been right about Laura being stressed and rushed I could understand it, but since she wasn’t, how come the car was still unlocked? Plus the other freaky occurrences.
adam
07|Jul|2010 3never said i was explaining it ;) , i’ve got various theories on this though, one being that the conscious mind can deal with about 15 pieces of info at a time, when there are something like 4 trillion coming in below the threshold of conscious awareness… much too much for the conscious mind, especially the left brain, to deal with, but a doddle for the right brain to work out, then present in the form of a hunch or prompt.
i think another thing to bear in mind is that i think instinct is a right brain phenomena, so may not readily drop into left brain concepts and be easily explainable… i think many people who act on instinct just do it, so to speak, worry less about a scientific or logical explanation, act spontaneously and just go with what works for them… works for animals much of the time after all… a connection to nature rather than anything supernatural in my opinion.
i tend to think of this as a very natural ability that is easily overidden by the left brain… “no i’m not going down that street on the spur of the moment, i’m going to the shop, thats this way”, is how my intellect tends to work, but quite often i find that if i follow that prompting i might meet a friend, find something i’ve been looking for or whatever, so increasingly now i listen out for those subtle cues and follow them when i can.
Oliver
07|Jul|2010 4Oh, I certainly rely on instinct and intuition a lot: you have to get your conscious brain out of the way to let the results of the serious processing get out into the open (it’s why when writing music, myself and most composers sometimes feel like the music’s writing itself). The interesting stuff happens when you stop thinking.
However, what’s pertinent here is if/how intuition or instinct apply: what information could there be that’d tell me a car is unlocked (both my own and someone else’s)? I did initially think the first story was explained like that, but it turned out my intuition was actually wrong!
I could vaguely explain the third story like that: that my subconscious had somehow remembered the shapes of all the notches in my dad’s car keys and realised that this new key matched, but I bet if you tested that (ask which of 10 keys match a key I’ve seen occasionally) I couldn’t do it any better than chance. So is that a valid theory?
adam
07|Jul|2010 5it’s possible your mind somehow registered the little lock things were up… perhaps the central locking system was making a subtle whine of some sort, doesn’t explain the other story of course, as that might well have been pre-central locking…
the other old chestnut is the quantum physics thing… i’m a layman, but as i understand it the theory is that the solidity of the world is an illusion, that as subatomic particles get ever smaller, eventually all thats left are waves of energy blipping in and out of existence really quickly, viewed from this perspective i think the world made up of lots of separate things starts looking like a big interconnected whatsit, to me anyway… unsure exactly how this would enable you to deduce that a car is unlocked, but then quantum physics would seem like a radically different view of the world… at that sort of level the boundaries between a car and a person observing it would be extremely blurred, if indeed there are any boundaries at all
Oliver
07|Jul|2010 6Ah, now, saying that the brain can pick up quantum energy from other objects is basically saying that people can be psychic, e.g. know what playing card is being held up. And there’s never been any proper, controlled experiment where that’s been proved, so I’m going to tentatively discount that one :) I know what you mean though, it is useful to think of the world like that sometimes, but only as a model.
I have good hearing, but I don’t think our central locking whines.
I think people are very good at picking up subconscious clues from other people (cf Desmond Morris, Derren Brown, etc), and I think when the conscious gets out of the way that’s a powerful tool. I also believe the “proper” tarot readers, astrologers, tea leaf readers, etc, use that to good effect: their chosen tool of the trade is a way to pull out their subconscious thoughts, much like a Rorschach pattern does. I’m not convinced that applies to inanimate objects like car locks though :)
adam
08|Jul|2010 7the subconscious can hear sounds at 40 decibels below normal earshot, basically inaudible to the conscious mind, theres also the possibility of an unlocked car emitting a slightly different electromagnetic frequency and that being sensed by the nervous system in the style of animals detecting storms etc.
Tarim
09|Jul|2010 8What are the odds that of all the skeptics who write blogs, one of them has had a series of coincidences, of any kind, happen to them in their lifetime?
How many times in your life have you thought, “I wonder if…” about something; checked it; found it to be untrue and not blogged about it (or even forgotten about it)?
I think these are the sort of questions you need to be asking in order to understand this effect.
If you can reproduce the effect, over a sufficiently large sample, then it becomes interesting for a whole heap of different reasons. You might want to notify the local police that you are conducting this experiment before you embark on it.
Just to clarify the datum: you said, “When we got to the car, it was unlocked. The only unlocked one in the street.” Are you saying you verified all the other cars in the street _were_ locked? How many cars was that?
When you say, “So the chances of it being unlocked and me thinking to check are astronomically small.” I don’t understand what this means. If an event happened in the past – the chances of it having happened in the past is 100%. The chance of it happening again in the future may be astronomically. Are you making a prediction here?
Obligatory Richard Feynman quote, “You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won’t believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!” .
Thanks for the practice :)
Tarim
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