When one person is thinking about another person and that other person happens to be thinking about the first person. I have had instances where I have reached out to someone or called someone and they say, "that's so weird I was just thinking of you!" Is there a word for that phenomenon?
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Given the number of persons that the average human knows, at any one time, and in a reasonably familiar way, and given that we humans spend a lot of time thinking about one another, the 'phenomenon' is very common indeed and so unsuprisingly so, that we have no word for it. Or at least not a commonly known one.– Nigel JCommented Mar 15, 2018 at 16:01
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Probably not what you're looking for, but the example you give is a well known cognitive and unconscious bias, named variously frequency illusion, or Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Basically the problem is that you haven't counted the number of times you've thought of that person and 'have not' received a phone call from them. We tend to notice the positive hits and are oblivious of non-events, or at least they don't figure into our statistical reckoning. Related can be pareidolia, seeing symbols of meaning where there may be just noise. Clustering illusion is related to this.– ZebrafishCommented Sep 24, 2018 at 10:35
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Some people call it "synchronicity", referring to the theory by the psychologist Carl Jung, which states that things can be connected by meaning even if they have no direct causal connection.
answered Mar 15, 2018 at 15:40
