Many of us tend to pay attention to strange coincidences and try to find hidden meaning in them - some more, some less.
The degree of this tendency can depend on a variety of neurophysiological and psychological factors. Apophenia, for example, is the ability to see a system or find meaningful relationships in a meaningless set of elements.
Bruce Grayson, PhD in Psychiatric and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia, is convinced that people who tend to process incoming information in a more intuitive way and people with spiritual interests also tend to notice coincidences more often and assign them a certain meaning.
In his book, Meaningful Coincidences and NDEs, he refers to the work of Stephanie Coleman and Bernard Bitman, who developed the Strange Coincidence Scale to assess their frequency and categorization.
Grayson used this scale to assess the frequency of coincidences in the lives of people who have experienced clinical death.
He found that significant coincidences occurred with people who made the "journey to the next world" significantly more often than with others.
As a result of his research, he concluded that “the tendency to recognize coincidences, the tendency to analyze and interpret them, do not increase the likelihood of near-death experiences.
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Rather, such experiences as near-death experiences and a surge of interest in spiritual life, which, as a rule, arises later, leads to the fact that a person begins to see coincidences "with meaning" everywhere, to analyze and interpret them."