Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things.[2]
The term (German:Apophänie from the Greek verb:ἀποφαίνειν,romanized: apophaínein) was coined by psychiatristKlaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on thebeginning stages of schizophrenia.[3] He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness".[4][5] He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed tohallucinations.[2][6]
Apophenia has also come to describe a human propensity to unreasonably seek definite patterns in random information, which can occur ingambling.[5]
Apophenia can be considered a commonplace effect of brain function. Taken to an extreme, however, it can be a symptom of psychiatric dysfunction, for example as a symptom in paranoidschizophrenia,[7] where a patient sees hostile patterns (for example a conspiracy to persecute them) in ordinary actions.
Apophenia is also typical ofconspiracy theories, where coincidences may be woven together into an apparent plot.[8]
Pareidolia is a type of apophenia involving theperception of images or sounds in random stimuli.
A common example is the perception of aface within an inanimate object—the headlights and grill of an automobile may appear to be "grinning". People around the world see the "Man in the Moon".[9] People sometimes see the face of areligious figure in a piece oftoast or in thegrain of a piece of wood. There is strong evidence thatpsychedelic drugs tend to induce or enhance pareidolia.[10]
Pareidolia usually occurs as a result of thefusiform face area—which is the part of the human brain responsible for seeing faces—mistakenly interpreting an object, shape or configuration with some kind of perceived "face-like" features as being a face.
Gamblers may imagine that they see patterns in the numbers that appear inlotteries,card games, orroulette wheels, where no such patterns exist.[11] A common example of this is thegambler's fallacy.[12]
In statistics, apophenia is an example of atype I error – the false identification of patterns in data.[2] It may be compared to a so-calledfalse positive in other test situations.
In contrast to anepiphany, an apophany (i.e. an instance of apophenia) does not provide insight into the nature ofreality nor its interconnectedness but is a "process of repetitively and monotonously experiencing abnormal meanings in the entire surrounding experiential field". Such meanings are entirely self-referential,solipsistic and paranoid—"being observed, spoken about, the object of eavesdropping, followed by strangers".[13]
Synchronicity can be considered synonymous with correlation, without any statement about the veracity of various causal inferences.[14]
In 2008Michael Shermer coined the wordpatternicity, defining it as "the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise".[15][16]
Aclustering illusion is a type of cognitive bias in which a person sees a pattern in a random sequence of numbers or events. Many theories have been disproved as a result of this bias being highlighted.[17]
One case, during the early 2000s, involved the occurrence of breast cancer among employees ofABC Studios inQueensland. A study found that the incidence of breast cancer at the studios was six times the rate in the rest of Queensland. An examination found nocorrelation between the heightened incidence and any factors related to the site nor any genetic or lifestyle factors of the employees.[18]
Although there is no confirmed reason for why apophenia occurs, there are some respected theories.
Pattern recognition is a cognitive process that involves retrieving information either from long-term, short-term, or working memory and matching it with information from stimuli. There are three different ways in which this may happen and go wrong, resulting in apophenia.[19]
The stimulus is compared to templates, which are abstracted or partial representations of previously seen stimuli. These templates are stored in long-term memory as a result of past learning or educational experiences. For example, D, d,D,d,D andd are all recognized as the same letter.
Template-matching detection processes, when applied to more complex data sets (such as, for example, a painting or clusters of data) can result in the wrong template being matched. A false positive detection will result in apophenia.[19]
This is similar to template matching, except for the fact that prototypes are complete representations of a stimulus. The prototype need not be something that has been previously seen—for example it might be an average or amalgam of previous stimuli. Crucially, an exact match is not needed.[19]
An example of prototype matching would be to look at an animal such as a tiger and instead of recognizing that it has features that match the definition of a tiger (template matching), recognizing that it's similar to a particular mental image one has of a tiger (prototype matching).
This type ofpattern recognition can result in apophenia based on the fact that since the brain is not looking for exact matches, it can pick up some characteristics of a match and assume it fits.[20]
The stimulus is first broken down into its features and then processed. This model ofpattern recognition says that the processing goes through four stages: detection, pattern dissection, feature comparison in memory, and recognition.[19]
One of the explanations put forth by evolutionary psychologists for apophenia is that it is not a flaw in the cognition of human brains but rather something that has come about through years of need. The study of this topic is referred to aserror management theory.[21]
One of the most accredited studies in this field isSkinner's box. This experiment involved taking a hungry pigeon, placing it in abox and releasing food pellets at random times. The pigeon received a food pellet while performing some action; and so, rather than attributing the arrival of the pellet to randomness, the pigeon repeats that action, and continues to do so until another pellet falls. As the pigeon increases the number of times it performs the action, it gains the impression that it also increased the times it was "rewarded" with a pellet, although the release in fact remained entirely random.[22]
The dictionary definition ofapophenia at Wiktionary