EP217, Wendy Ross & Juliet Trail: Serendipity vs. Synchronicity

Serendipity emerges when someone notices something unexpected AND the person acts to create usefulness. Creative people rely on the synchronicities that emerge during states of flow.

Coincidences include both serendipity and synchronicity types of phenomena. In this episode, we explore the differences between these concepts with our two guests who, respectively, work with the Serendipity Society and The Coincidence Project.

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Our guest Wendy Ross is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at London Metropolitan University (LMU). She is co-chair of the Serendipity Society and vice-president of the Possibility Studies Network. She is broadly interested in how our thinking is scaffolded by the objects around us and, moreover, is visible in the movement of those objects in the world. In this way, veiled cognition becomes visible. Wendy is coordinator of the Serendipity, Creativity & Innovation Lab based at LMU. Learn more at https://www.sci-lab.org/

Our guest, Juliet Trail, PhD, is Managing Director of The Coincidence Project which is dedicated to advancing the use and understanding of coincidence, synchronicity, serendipity, and simulpathity. She is founder of Courageous Compassion Connection, an initiative dedicated to teaching contemplative practices to aid healing for all peoples and all beings. She is also a poet and singer who performs with the band Unheard Sirens Inc.

Our host Dr. Bernard Beitman is the first psychiatrist since Carl Jung to attempt to systematize the study of coincidences. He is Founding Director of The Coincidence Project. His book, and his Psychology Today blog, are both titled Connecting with Coincidence. He has developed the first valid and reliable scale to measure coincidence sensitivity, and has written and edited coincidence articles for Psychiatric Annals. He is a visiting professor at the University of Virginia and former chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He attended Yale Medical School and completed a psychiatric residency at Stanford. Dr. Beitman has received two national awards for his psychotherapy training program and is internationally known for his research into the relationship between chest pain and panic disorder. Learn more at https://coincider.com.