The experience of coincidence: An integrated psychological and neurocognitive perspective

Abstract

In this chapter, we focus on psychological and brain perspectives on the experience of coincidence. We first introduce the topic of the experience of coincidence in general. In the second section, we outline several psychological mechanisms that underlie the experience of coincidence in humans, such as cognitive biases, the role of context and the role of individual differences. In the third and final section we formulate the phenomenon of coincidence in the light of the unifying brain account of predictive coding, while arguing that the notion of coincidence provides a wonderful example of a construct that connects the Bayesian brain to folk psychology and philosophy.