The doctor who fulfilled his predictions
According to a story mentioned by behavioral scientist Robin M. Hogarth, there was a physician in the early twentieth-century New York, who became famous for his ability to predict if the patient would get typhoid fever. He did it by observing the patient's tongue, which was a pretty common procedure for medicine those days.
During the ward rounds, he was moving from one patient to another, palpating the tongue with his fingers and checking its structure, before moving to the next patient to repeat the manipulations. The doctor predicted the disease over and over again, and his forecasts were amazingly accurate even days before the patient had any symptoms.
Indeed, the predictions could hardly be wrong because he was actually transferring typhoid with his fingers.
Bottom line:
The ability to notice the connections is a powerful tool, but it doesn't guarantee that these connections interpreted correctly.
Photo: Wellcome Library