Apophenia
Overview
Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness".
"While observations of relevant work environments and human behaviors in these environments is a very important first step in coming to understand any new domain, this activity is in and of its self not sufficient to constitute scientific research. It is fraught with problems of subjective bias in the observer. We (like the experts we study) often see what we expect to see, we interpret the world through our own personal lens. Thus we are extraordinarily open to the trap of apophenia."[1]
In statistics, apophenia would be classed as a Type I error (false positive, false alarm, caused by an excess in sensitivity). Apophenia is often used as an explanation of some paranormal and religious claims, and can also be used to explain the tendency of humans to believe pseudoscience such as Intelligent design[2]. Apophenia may be linked to psychosis and creativity.
Origins
Conrad originally described this phenomenon in relation to the distortion of reality present in psychosis, but it has become more widely used to describe this tendency in healthy individuals without necessarily implying the presence of neurological or mental illness.
Examples
Pareidolia
Pareidolia is a type of apophenia involving the finding of images or sounds in random stimuli.
Discordianism
The Principia Discordia refers to the act of seeing order which does not really exist as the Aneristic Illusion, and avoiding this illusion is a major tenet of the Discordian religion. The Principia illustrates this with a drawing of five pebbles, and gives several possibilities for the shape (a pentagon, or a star, or disorder). It goes on to state that "an Illuminated Mind can see all of these, yet he does not insist that any one is really true, or that none at all is true".
Dark Side of the Rainbow
When the album Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd is played simultaneously with the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, numerous images from the film appear to synchronise with the music and lyrics. All band members (save Roger Waters), and engineer Alan Parsons, have firmly stated that the phenomenon is a coincidence.[2] This effect has often been called Dark Side of the Rainbow. Arguably, playing any two media together will produce an impression of a striking amount of coincidence, which is an example of apophenia.
Fiction
Postmodern novelists and film-makers have reflected on apophenia-related phenomena, such as paranoid narrativization or fuzzy plotting (e.g., Vladimir Nabokov's "Signs and Symbols", Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and V., Alan Moore's Watchmen, 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 and The Number 23). As narrative is one of our 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.
The Question, who is portrayed as a conspiracy theorist in the animated television series Justice League Unlimited, was mentioned to have apophenia. He claimed to see connections between the Girl Scouts and the crop circle phenomenon as well as spy satellites and fluoridated toothpaste.
See also
- 23 (numerology)
- Clustering illusion
- Confirmation bias
- Conspiracy theory
- Forer effect
- Synchronicity
- Hindsight bias
- Interpretation
- Religion
Notes and 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 0754641988.
- Klaus Conrad, 1958, Die beginnende Schizophrenie. Versuch einer Gestaltanalyse des Wahns. Stuttgart: Thieme.
- Sherlock, P. "On roulette wheels and monkies randomly inspired by Shakespeare", truth.gooberbear, April 1, 2008. Accessed April 1, 2008.
- William Gibson, 2003, Pattern Recognition. New York: G. P. Putnam's, 2003.
External links
- Skeptic's Dictionary: Robert Todd Carroll's article on apophenia
- DBSkeptic: Sandra Hubscher's analysis of apophenia