Part of the Casswiki article series Psychology
This term was introduced by Carl Gustav Jung to denote “meaningful coincidence”.
In Jungian thought, there exists a collective unconscious populated with a species memory of archetypal forms. Different people may tap into this same psychic reservoir and synchroneously, i.e. at the same time and without apparent causal link, come to the same idea, thought or feeling. This process may take the form of meaningful ‘chance’ encounters, accidents, sudden changes of perception, losing and finding objects, essentially anything that may carry a symbolic meaning. This is also sometimes called “acausal connecting principle”.
Sheldrake’s concept of morphic resonance is similar to synchronicity. This too posits a semantic universe of forms that is independent of physical medium and which acts as an ordering principle and can carry information without physical link. For example, what one population of animals learns in one place, another population of the same species will learn on the other side of the world. Findings are contested, as usual.
There is a whole culture about meanings of synchronicity in the New Age field. For example, people seeing 11:11 in digital clocks with uncanny frequency is a widely reported phenomenon. Such observations may be a way for the personal or global unconscious to signal something. We cannot say anything definite about synchronicity. It appears in many accounts of ‘high strangeness’ and unusual psychic effects. There is little doubt that external forces are fully capable of setting up the most convincing looking synchronicities for manipulation purposes. On the other hand, synchronicity is not always a sign of danger. It could be seen to be a wake-up call but becoming obsessed with finding meanings for all things which look like synchronicities is generally not a fruitful pursuit.
There are observations in physics about so-called quantum teleportation where the states of two particles seem instantaneously coupled across a distance, evidencing some sort of instantaneous connection. Such effects in themselves cannot however be used for faster than light information transfer. . Their existence may reflect the existence of some ordering principle from which synchronicity or effects attributed to some “morphogenetic field” could be special cases. Various hypotheses exist but physics cannot say anything definite of synchronicity.