About ten years ago, I was in the passenger seat of a friend's car driving down the 405 South on the way to see a movie. We were talking about Gregg Toland, the cinematographer who lensed Citizen Kane. I said that Toland's work on Kane was like painting the Mona Lisa with the tools used to make cave drawings. Moments later a van passed us with a mural of the Mona Lisa on the side of it. My friend and I had a good laugh at the serendipity of the moment. What are the odds?
Well, to the superstitious, there almost needs to be something other than coincidence involved. What are the freaking odds that I would reference the Mona Lisa and see the Mona Lisa on the side of a van seconds later?
The odds are pretty damn low. They're less low with me because I had said that about Toland several times. Of the possibly dozen times that I said that about Toland, the actual Mona Lisa image only popped up once. So, let's assume that I made the same basic comment about ten or eleven times without the world producing this really weird coincidence.
No matter how smart and educated you are, and I'm probably somewhere around the middle, you remember the hits and forget the misses. I vividly remember that moment when that van drove by. I only have a passive recollection of the times when I made the reference and nothing of the sort happened.
That's really how psychics, mediums, and faith healers work. It all comes back to P. T. Barnum: people want to be fooled. People remember the hits and forget the misses.
Artists are in the perpetual business of lying and exploiting this aspect of human nature. The difference between being an ethical liar and a charlatan is simply the difference between telling people that you're lying and trying to convince people that you're telling the truth.
