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".

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 explain a belief in pseudoscience.

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

The identification of a face on the surface of Mars is an example of pareidoliac apophenia.

Fiction

Postmodern novelists and film-makers have reflected on apophenia-related phenomena, such as paranoid narration 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 ?, A Beautiful Mind, The Number 23 and The Nines). 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.

See also

• Clustering illusion
• Confirmation bias
• Conspiracy theory
• Forer effect
• Synchronicity
• Hindsight bias

Notes and references

• 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

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