A colleague recently mentioned something unusual—when she checks the time, it often seems to be exactly 7:11. That struck a chord with me because I’ve long wondered why it’s so often 1:11 or 11:11 when I check the time. When we posted this oddity on Facebook we heard from other people who had their own chronic clock-checking times. For one woman it was 3:03, for another 6:34. An Internet search revealed that some see mystical significance in “magic times” that seem to appear more often than chance would dictate. But it turns out there are potential scientific explanations as well.

One possibility is that we’re not really seeing these times more often than we see other times—but because these times have somehow acquired a special meaning for us we remember them when we encounter them, while we quickly forget the other times we see on clocks. My colleague might be primed to remember 7:11 because seven pounds 11 ounces was the birth weight of several members of her immediate family…the woman who sees 3:03 noted that this was her house number in high school…and 1:11 and 11:11 might draw my attention because these numbers have a distinctive appearance on a digital clock. (An Internet search suggests that 1:11 and 11:11 are especially widely held special times.)

Once a time—or any number—starts to seem special to us, we are likely to take note of it whenever we encounter it, making it seem as though the number is occurring with unusual frequency. “I have found many examples of people running into ‘their numbers’,” says Bernard Beitman, PhD, author of Connecting with Coincidence: The New Science for Using Synchronicity and Serendipity in Your Life. “They begin to appear on clocks and on license plates.”

Or perhaps we truly do look at clocks more often at our special times, due to something known as “ocular saccades.” Our line of vision chronically shifts around very rapidly without our realizing it. If we catch sight of a clock showing a time that is significant to us during one of these rapid eye movements, or “saccades,” Beitman speculates that we might feel a pull to take a longer look at that clock without realizing why.

But if people prefer to find spiritual meaning in their special times and numbers Beitman, former Chair of the department of psychiatry at the University of Missouri-Columbia, won’t argue. “I don’t say that coincidence is always God or that it is always probability,” he says. “A lot of this is mysterious.”