Monthly Archive for January, 2007

Mind Hacks has fol­lowed up on an inter­est­ing ques­tion about syn­chronic­ity (it’s not just an album by the Police you know), which is found in the movie Wak­ing Life (2001). As a side note, Wak­ing Life is a great philo­soph­i­cal movie and I highly rec­om­mend it. Any­ways, here is the direct quote:

In Richard Linklater’s Wak­ing Life two of the char­ac­ters dis­cuss the idea syn­chronic­ity. They men­tion an exper­i­ment where peo­ple were iso­lated and given daily cross­words. If the cross­word puz­zles were a day old, mean­ing that thou­sands of peo­ple had already com­pleted them, then peo­ple found it eas­ier to get the answers — because the answers were already ‘out there’ in the col­lec­tive mem­ory of course.

The ques­tion is: did any­one ever really do this exper­i­ment, or any­thing like it, and what are the ref­er­ences? I’m not expect­ing that it would really pro­duce a sig­nif­i­cant effect, but I’d still love to know if any­one has tried it.

Here is the actual quote from the movie that con­cerns this cross­word experiment:

I like that. It’s like there’s this whole tele­pathic thing going on that we’re all a part of, whether we’re con­scious of it or not. That would explain why there are all these seem­ingly spon­ta­neous world­wide inno­v­a­tive leaps in sci­ence and the arts, you know, like the same results pop­ping up every­where inde­pen­dent of each other. Some guy on a com­puter fig­ures some­thing out, and then almost simul­ta­ne­ously a bunch of other peo­ple all over the world fig­ure out the same thing. They did this study where they iso­lated a group of peo­ple over time, you know, and mon­i­tored their abil­i­ties at cross­word puz­zles in rela­tion to the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion, and they secretly gave them a day-old cross­word, one that had already been answered by thou­sands of other peo­ple, and their scores went up dra­mat­i­cally. Like 20%. So it’s like once the answers are out there, peo­ple can pick up on them. Like we’re all tele­path­i­cally shar­ing our experiences.

You can see what peo­ple have to say over at Mind Hacks: wak­ing life cross­word exper­i­ment, or read more on the sub­ject as well as the The Baader-Meinhof Phe­nom­e­non, over at Damn Inter­est­ing. For more on Richard Linklater’s films see this post.