For Shame

Ruth Levy Guyer, who styles herself a scientist, had an item on NPR on Sunday expressing a belief in synchronicity:

Synchronicities are more than coincidences. You think of a Brazilian friend you haven't talked to in years. You troll online through rosters of Brazilian law schools and law firms. When you give up, discouraged, the phone rings. There he is calling you. A woman felt a searing pain in her chest. Later she discovered that was the exact moment when her identical twin died of a heart attack. Why are people, even those separated by great distances, so in sync?

I suspect scientists will one day identify receptors in our brains for synchronicities. Prescients will be named 'sense number six,' not denounced as a spooky sixth sense.

Eww. She even thinks she's a "prescient". Gag me with a bent spoon.

Robert Todd Carroll has this to say about synchronicity in his Skeptic's Dictionary:

What reasons are there for accepting synchronicity as an explanation for anything in the real world? What it explains is more simply and elegantly explained by the ability of the human mind to find meaning and significance where there is none (apophenia).... [I]f you think of all the pairs of things that can happen in a person's lifetime, and add to that our very versatile ability of finding meaningful connections between things, it then seems likely that most of us will experience many meaningful coincidences. The coincidences are predictable but we are the ones who give them meaning.

Ruth Levy Guyer's support for synchronicity strikes me as painfully unscientific. (I wish Caroll would take this up. I believe he doesn't like unauthorized quotes, but he doesn't post a way to contact him that I can find.)