The Brain in Chance Encounters: What Neuroscience Teaches us about Serendipity
Every Easter morning, Donna Lee makes pierogis. The polish pastry, made from frying a special dough, has become a beloved part of the family tradition. But Easter 2005 brought something very unexpected. While turning over the last pierogi, there was something eerily familiar about it. Then it hit her, "Oh my God, it's Jesus!".
That final pierogi had a distinct coloration that bore an uncanny resemblance to the face of Jesus Christ. And on Easter Sunday, too?
For Donna, this was a special moment of serendipity. This wasn't just any pierogi she was staring at; this was THE pierogi. How could her family gobble it down like all the other Easter pastries?
So she did what any reasonable person would do: she listed it on eBay. The Jesus pierogis sold for $1775.
For Donna, The Jesus Perogi was a wonderful Easter surprise, and, ultimately, a nice little payday. At the same time, her story provides a window into a mysterious aspect of human nature: the feeling of serendipity. Why are we so prone to see meaningful things (like faces) in everyday objects (like pierogies and clouds), and why do we assume that chance encounters carry greater meaning? Why do our brains react in this way?
Let's dive into the neuroscience of serendipity.
The Neuroscience of Seeing Faces in The Clouds
The first thing to understand about serendipity is the influence of ambiguity. What's driving this strange tendency to see faces in pierogis in the first place?
On this account, Donna is far from alone. Every year, 1000s of people claim to be sure they have "found Jesus" in their morning toast, on an orange peel, or in a potato chip. And many more than that see faces when they look up into the clouds.
This phenomenon is known as face pareidolia: the overwhelming tendency to see faces in ambiguous settings.
Face pareidolia is driven by the fact that humans are pattern-seeking creatures. The brain is a meaning-seeking organ. We automatically and unconsciously see the "bigger picture," leading us to extrapolate meaning amidst apparent incoherence.
Meaningful concepts, such as faces, pop out everywhere we look. The best analogy here is the images from Magic Eye books. These are books filled with pictures like this.
“Magic Eye” is an analogy for how our brain searches for meaning
At first glance, it appears to be a random assortment of imagery and pixels—nothing to see here. But in fact, a coherent image is statistically embedded within the picture through a stereoscopic technique.
However, if you stare at it for more than a few moments, your visual system quietly begins its unconscious search. And sure enough, within a minute or two, the meaningful percept will suddenly come to the foreground*. It seems like magic, but it's our brain's natural, meaning-seeking drive unfolding in real time.
But here's the thing: We have SUCH a drive to find meaning, that we often see things that aren't there. When a scene is ambiguous, devoid of clear and obvious meaning, we bring the meaning.
Faces are an easy go-to. We've seen millions of faces in our lifetime, and we're incredibly adept at telling them apart, and discerning what their expressions mean. We have a robust template in the brain for faces, fine-tuned over countless encounters. We even have a specialized region in the brain - the fusiform gyrus, which is highly specialized just for analyzing faces.
And so when anything looks remotely like a pair of eyes and a mouth, our brain can jump to an easy conclusion and "see" a face staring back at us.
This is why, when you look up into the clouds, you come to see a face staring back at you despite your knowledge that it's just dust particles and water vapor. And why every year people find Jesus in their morning pastries.
Randomness is ultimately unsatisfying – we find a meaningful explanation for what we see, even when it's a stretch.
The Neuroscience of Chance Encounters
So how do we go from faces in pierogies to feelings of serendipity?
As we've seen, the brain is a meaning-seeking organ, so much so that it will attempt to extrapolate meaning even amid randomness and coherence. But here's the thing: how the brain treats simple imagery is also how it treats events and encounters. When things come together just the right way, the event becomes infused with greater meaning. It becomes not just any event, but a serendipitous encounter.
This is what Donna felt that Easter morning. Not only did the pierogi bear a resemblance to Jesus, but it also happened, of all days, on Easter. It's too perfect to be random. From Donna's perspective, it happened for a reason; it's serendipity.
Put simply, feelings of serendipity arise when the brain's meaning-seeking orientation turns to chance encounters.
Let's unpack this.
We naturally want to understand the reasons why things happen. When we have an occurrence and a reason for it, we can rest easy. When something happens, and there's an easy-to-find explanation for it, we can rest easy. Case closed. But when something happens, and no simple reason presents itself, it leaves a gap. There's ambiguity. And just like the face in the clouds, we need to fill it in; we bring the meaning.
This may sound very abstract, so let's flesh things out with a concrete example. Let's say you go grocery shopping, and while you're there, you bump into your next-door neighbor. You get along well, so it's a pleasant little surprise, but it's not all that unexpected given that you both live nearby to that store.
Event: Bumping into a neighbor at the local grocery store
Explanation: You live closeby to one another
Result: Case closed, no room for serendipity
But now, imagine traveling 6,000 miles to Paris for vacation. And while at a market near The Louvre, you bump into your next-door neighbor. This is much less expected! And in turn, much more challenging to explain.
Event: Bumping into a neighbor in Paris, 6,000 from where you both live
Explanation: ???
Result: Ambiguity! Opportunity for serendipity
Ambiguous experiences like this that don't admit to an easy explanation are fertile ground for feelings of serendipity. When there's a set of events that happen entirely by chance, we tend to infuse it with greater meaning. This is the essence of serendipity: We can't help but think, even unconsciously, that "this must have happened for a reason."
How Serendipity Influences Decision-Making
Serendipity is a rare and hallowed human emotion. When it arises, we can feel a deep connection with that pattern of events. In the example with the neighbor, a casual encounter at the local market doesn't mean a lot. But if you were to cross paths out in Paris? Provided you liked their company, you could hang out and explore the city together. Your friendship would be forever changed, even once you both returned home.
Serendipity can have a significant impact on our behavior and decision-making. In fact, it can change our lives.
Consider the following true story about a chance encounter between two people, Moumik and Shayak. Moumik is a business school student living in Chicago, and travels to Philadelphia for an event. While there, she runs into her high school crush, Shayak, a student in Philadelphia attending that very same event. Pretty eerie, right?
Now consider that Moumik, and Shayak, are from somewhere other than America. The last time they saw each other was back in their mutual hometown of Calcutta, India, halfway across the world. Now that's really inexplicable.
This incredible chance encounter produced strong feelings of serendipity. It couldn't have just happened randomly. It happened for a reason. Serendipity infuses the chance encounter with deep, meaningful texture. In fact, it was such an overwhelming feeling for Moumik and Shayak, that they got married just months after.
A little serendipity can go a long way.
Final Thoughts on The Neuroscience of Serendipity
When presented with such an inexplicable chain of events, the brain essentially says, “there's no way this could have happened by chance, I don't take randomness for an answer”. It’s human nature to search for an explanation.
And when no obvious explanation presents itself, we bend metaphysics – we think, that this random thing isn't random at all. It happened for a reason. It was meant to be; there’s greater meaning there. Just like the ambiguity of a face in the clouds, we bring the meaning, even if it's sometimes a stretch. It’s our natural, pattern-seeking lens applied to life’s events.
And in this way, even an Easter pierogi can become something special.
Photo by Eleanor Carter on Unsplash
Find yourself interested in the psychology and neuroscience of serendipity? Check out my TEDx talk:
About the author
Matt Johnson, PhD is a researcher, writer, and consumer neuroscientist focusing on the application of psychology to branding. He is the author of the best-selling consumer psychology book Blindsight, and Branding That Means Business (Economist Books, Fall 2022). Contact Matt for speaking engagements, opportunities to collaborate, or just to say hello
References for “What Neuroscience Teaches us About Serendipity”
Bandura, A. (1982). The psychology of chance encounters and life paths. American psychologist, 37(7), 747.
Liu, J., Li, J., Feng, L., Li, L., Tian, J., & Lee, K. (2014). Seeing Jesus in toast: neural and behavioral correlates of face pareidolia. Cortex, 53, 60-77.
Palmer, C. J., & Clifford, C. W. (2020). Face pareidolia recruits mechanisms for detecting human social attention. Psychological science, 31(8), 1001-1012.
Rujumba, K. (August, 2005) Toledoan savors sale of divine dumpling dished out on eBay, The Blade
