Apophenia

Apophenia /æpɵˈfiːniə/ is the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.

The term is a misnomer incorrectly attributed to Klaus Conrad by Peter Brugger, who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness", but it has come to represent the human tendency to seek patterns in random information in general (such as with gambling), paranormal phenomena, and religion.

Meanings and forms

In 1958, Klaus Conrad published a monograph entitled Die beginnende Schizophrenie. Versuch einer Gestaltanalyse des Wahns, in which he described in groundbreaking detail the prodromal mood and earliest stages of schizophrenia. He coined the word "Apophänie" to characterize the onset of delusional thinking in psychosis. This neologism is translated as "apophany," from the Greek apo [away from] + phaenein [to show], to reflect the fact that the schizophrenic initially experiences delusion as revelation. In contrast to epiphany, however, apophany does not provide insight into the true nature of reality or its interconnectedness, but is a "process of repetitively and monotonously experiencing abnormal meanings in the entire surrounding experiential field" which are entirely self-referential, solipsistic and paranoid: "being observed, spoken about, the object of eavesdropping, followed by strangers". In short, "apophenia" is a misnomer that has taken on a bastardized meaning never intended by Conrad when he coined the neologism "apophany."

In 2008, Michael Shermer coined the word 'patternicity', defining it as "the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise". In The Believing Brain (2011), Shermer defines patternicity as "the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise". The Believing Brain thesis also says that we have "the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency", which Shermer calls 'agenticity'.

Statistics

In statistics, apophenia is known as a Type I error — the identification of false patterns in data. It may be compared with a so-called false positive in other test situations.

Paranormal phenomena

A common example of perceived but non-existent patterns are paranormal sightings, including sightings of ghosts, Unidentified Flying Objects, cryptozoology, etc.

Conspiracy theories

Main article: Conspiracy theory

Likewise, conspiracy theorists are famously prone to identify a (perhaps coincidental) pattern, and conclude that it must have great significance, although things that are important, life-changing, and even catastrophic, can occur simply out of random chance.

Divination

The attempt to foretell the future, present, or past by finding patterns in animal entrails, tossed sticks, or by picking random passages from a holy text are further examples of apophenia.

Religious Manifestations

A more extreme example is the pareidolia associated with finding the faces of religious figures in pieces of toast, the grain of cut wood, or other such patterns. Recent real-world examples include the finding of a cross inside a halved potato; the appearance of Jesus and Mary inside a halved orange; and the appearance of Jesus' face on a piece of toast, in the frost on a car window, and inside the lid of a jar of Marmite.

Gambling

Apophenia is heavily documented as a source of rationale behind gambling, with gamblers imagining they see patterns in the occurrence of numbers in lotteries, roulette wheels, and even cards. One variation of this is known as the Gambler's Fallacy.

Synchronicity

Main article: Synchronicity

Carl Jung coined the term synchronicity for the "simultaneous occurrence of two meaningful but not causally connected events" creating a significant realm of philosophical exploration. This attempt at finding patterns within a world where coincidence does not exist possibly involves apophenia if a person's perspective attributes their own causation to a series of events. "Synchronicity therefore means the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to a momentary subjective state". (C. Jung, 1960)

Examples

This figure consisting of three circles and a line is automatically and subconsciously recognized as a "face", despite having only a few basic features of an actual face. This is an example of the mechanisms the brain uses for facial recognition.

Pareidolia

Main article: Pareidolia

Pareidolia is a type of apophenia involving the perception of images or sounds in random stimuli, for example, hearing a ringing phone while taking a shower. The noise produced by the running water gives a background from which the brain perceives there to be patterned sound of a ringing phone. A more common human experience is perceiving faces in inanimate objects; this phenomenon is not surprising in light of how much processing the brain does in order to memorize and recall the faces of hundreds or thousands of different individuals. In one respect, the brain is a facial recognition, storage, and recall machine - and it is very good at it. A byproduct of this acumen at recognizing faces is that people see faces even where there is no face: the headlights & grill of an automobile can appear to be "grinning", individuals around the world can see the "Man in the Moon", and a drawing consisting of only three circles and a line which even children will identify as a face are everyday examples of this.

Fiction

Postmodern novelists and film-makers have reflected on apophenia-related phenomena, such as:

• Use of apophenia in text/plot
  • Peter Watts's Blindsight
• paranoid narration or fuzzy plotting
  • Vladimir Nabokov's "Signs and Symbols";
  • Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and V.;
  • Alan Moore's Watchmen; From Hell (specifically Appendix II of From Hell titled "Dance of the Gull Catchers")
  • Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum;
  • William Gibson's Pattern Recognition;
  • James Curcio's Join My Cult;
  • Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Club Dumas;
  • The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson;
• and the films
  • Conspiracy Theory,
  • Darren Aronofsky's π,
  • A Beautiful Mind,
  • The Number 23
  • The Nines
• The conspiracy-obsessed superhero The Question is accused of suffering from apophenia in the episode "Double Date," of the animated TV series Justice League Unlimited.
• In the final issue of Batman R.I.P., the Joker explains to an organization trying to destroy Batman that there is no use trying because Batman is always so far ahead in figuring out every scheme against him. Joker attributes this to apophenia.

As narrative is one of humanity's major cognitive instruments for structuring reality, there is some common ground between apophenia and narrative fallacies such as hindsight bias. Since pattern recognition may be related to plans, goals, and ideology, and may be a matter of group ideology rather than a matter of solitary delusion, the interpreter attempting to diagnose or identify apophenia may have to face a conflict of interpretations.^{[citation needed]}

• Dark Side of the Rainbow – also known as Dark Side of Oz or The Wizard of Floyd – refers to the pairing of the 1973 Pink Floyd album The Dark Side of the Moon with the visual portion of the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. This produces moments where the film and the album appear to correspond with each other. Band members and others involved in the making of the album state that any relationship between the two works of art is merely a coincidence.

See also

• 23 enigma
• Agent detection
• Clustering illusion
• Confirmation bias
• Conspiracy theory
• Delusions of reference
• Evolutionary psychology of religion (HADD hypothesis)
• Forer effect
• Hindsight bias
• Paranoiac-critical method
• Pareidolia
• Perceptions of religious imagery in natural phenomena
• Ramsey theory
• Reality tunnel
• Synchronicity
• Texas sharpshooter fallacy

References

• Endslay, Mica R. (2004). Simon Banbury, Sébastien Tremblay, ed. A Cognitive Approach To Situation Awareness: Theory and Application (1st ed.). USA: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. ISBN 0-7546-4198-8. 
• Conrad, Klaus (1958). Die beginnende Schizophrenie; Versuch einer Gestaltanalyse des Wahns (in German). Stuttgart: Thieme. OCLC 14620263. 
• Sherlock, P. (1 April 2008). "On roulette wheels and monkies randomly inspired by Shakespeare". truth.gooberbear. Retrieved 2008-04-01. 
• Gibson, William (2003). Pattern Recognition. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. ISBN 978-0-3991-4986-3. OCLC 49894062. 

External links

• Skeptic's Dictionary: Robert Todd Carroll's article on apophenia
• DBSkeptic: Sandra Hubscher's analysis of apophenia
• YouTube
• [1]: Klaus Conrad (1905-1961): Delusional Mood, Psychosis and Beginning Schizophrenia