This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanthan.

Have you ever had the experience of going to a party or office get together and meeting

someone with the same name?

The same birthday?

Maybe you've gone on vacation to some far-flung locale and met someone who lives down the

street from you.

Many of us are drawn to coincidences like this.

They make us wonder, how would the world that that happened?

What does it mean?

Today we explore our deep fascination with these moments of serendipity.

New research suggests they reveal important things about how our minds work and they have

a far more powerful effect on our lives than most of us imagine.

A couple of months ago we asked Hidden Brain listeners to share coincidences that they

experienced.

Lots of people called in with amazing stories.

Within those stories we found two that themselves formed a coincidence.

So I was a student at the University of Rhode Island and we were in this writing class.

This is Amanda Birch.

She was talking to the teacher of her writing class and the teacher mentioned that she lived

in a small town in Vermont.

The same small town it turned out were Amanda's mother had grown up.

The teacher asked Amanda what her mother's maiden name was and Amanda told her.

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