Why Are People Fascinated with the Number 23?

telegraph by Samuel Morris back in eighteen forty three. If you add up the four digits of the year that Nirvana's Kurt Cobain was born in nineteen sixty seven, they come to twenty three, which is also the sum of the four digits for four, the year in which he died. We humans largely have twenty three pairs of chromosomes in our genetic makeup, and the medieval Catholic military order, the Knights of Templar, had twenty three grand masters during its existence.

Now a skeptic might ascribe all this two mere chance, but some people will think there's more than that. If you poke around the Internet, you'll discover thousands of web pages devoted to something called the twenty three enigma, essentially a belief that the number has some sort of magical or mystical significance or power because of all the instances in which it occurs. There's even a Facebook page for as people who are fascinated with the numbers sometimes call themselves.

It's filled with posts containing the number, ranging from a picture of a restaurant check number twenty three that was issued to table twenty three due to the music video for the hip hop song twenty three by Mike will

Made It So how did all this get started? According to Barnaby Rogerson's compendium Rogerson's Book of Numbers, The Culture of Numbers from one thousand and one Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World, the twenty three obsessions started with William Burrows, famous for his strange flights of disturbing,

hallucinogenic fantasy and novels such as Naked Lunch. While in Tangier in nineteen sixty, Burrows claimed to have met a sea captain named Clark, who boasted that had never had an accident in twenty three years Later that day, his ship sank, killing him. That night, Burrows supposedly heard a radio news story about a flight twenty three that had

crashed in Florida, also piloted by Captain Clark. Aircraft records for nineteen sixty, however, don't show any such crash, though perhaps Burrows was thinking of the flight twenty three that was destroyed by a bomb in nineteen thirty three. Whatever the case. From then on, Burrows started keeping track of events that included the number twenty three, and years later

published a short story entitled twenty three Scado. Burrows passed along his fascination with twenty three to his friend Robert Anton Wilson, and figures prominently in The Illuminatous Trilogy, a series of novels that Wilson wrote with his friend Robert Shay.

The novels contain an assortment of twenty three occurrences, take a seventeenth century Irish archbishop's belief that the world started on October four, thousand and four b c E. Or the fact that Harpo Marx's birthday was November any There's also a mention of the EA Ching's hexagram twenty three and Bonnie and Clyde's death on May twenty thirty four, but these authors weren't the only ones with the three fixation.

Take the Nobel Prize winning mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. Who struggled to overcome mental illness, is portrayed in A Beautiful Mind. He once told a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that twenty three was his favorite prime number, and insisted that he had appeared on the cover of Life magazine disguised as Pope John the twenty three. Nash

would die in a car accident on May. The twenty three enigma was even the subject of a two thousand seven movie called The Number twenty three, in which a troubled man named Walter Sparrow portrayed by Jim Carey, becomes obsessed with a book entitled The Number twenty three, a Novel of Obsession, and is convinced that it contains the

key to his own past. And then there's Michael Jordan, who started wearing the number twenty three in high school because it was as close as he could get to half of the number four five worn by his older brother Larry Lebron. James also has worn twenty three as an homage to Jordan's. So what does this all really mean. It's hard to say, though. Out of all of the days in a year, three point nine percent of them

have the number twenty three in the date. So there's a lot of opportunity for births, deaths, accidents, and other memorable events to occur on those days. And there are plenty of others so called magic numbers. It could all be mere happenstance. But what if it's more. Some coincidences,

after all, can be meaningful. We spoke via email with Dr Bernard Bateman, a psychiatrist who's the founder of the field of coincidence studies an author of the book Connecting with Coincidence, the New Science for using synchronosity and serendipity in your life. According to him, coincidences are important exactly because people interpret them as signals to look for hidden causes. He said. A baby cries and the mother comes, coincidence,

Maybe there's a connection. The baby learns that crying brings her mother to her. Some people overdo the search for explanation of coincidences, and others underdo. I think you have to overdo and then analyze, since somewhere among those pebbles might be a gold nugget. He also said when it comes to numbers like twenty three, I don't know, but even Dr Bateman, as it turns out, has a twenty

three connection. He said, twenty three was my football number and seemed to follow along with me for many years. It served as a comforter and supporter, and then disappeared. Dr Bateman notes that it's possible for two things to be meaningfully related without a common cause. He explained that is a statistician's favorite approach to coincidences. The two elements come together randomly, and people then make up meaning. This black and white approach to explanation misses the gray in between.

Sometimes low probability coincidences do have a common cause. Today's episode was written by Patrick J. Kiger and produced by Tyler Clang for iHeart Media and How Stuff Works. For more illness and lots of other topics that may or may not be coincidental, visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com