More than half of Americans believe in ”anomalous phenomena” like clairvoyance, unexplained coincidence, prayer healing and psychokinesis. Yet mainstream science remains unconvinced. After all, these anomalies appear to fly in the face of everything we know about how mind and matter interact. But that may be about to change. This year, Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, introduced a conceptual model to explain seemingly inexplicable events scientifically.

In 1991, Mayer had her own brush with the anomalous. She was searching for a stolen family possession and, on a dare, turned for help to a man 800 miles away who claimed to be psychic. To her astonishment, he was able to tell her precisely where to find the missing object. Mayer wanted a scientific explanation, and she embarked on a decade of research…

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Coincidence Theory – NYTimes.com.