Apophenia /æpo?'fi:ni?/ is the human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns within random data.
The term apparently dates back to 1958, when Klaus Conrad described in groundbreaking detail the prodromal mood and earliest stages of schizophrenia. He coined the word "Apophänie" to characterize the onset of delusional thinking associated with psychosis. Conrad's neologism was a translation or calque into English as "apophenia" (from the Greek apo [away from] + phaenein [to show]) to reflect the fact that a person with schizophrenia initially experiences delusion as revelation.
In 2001 neuroscientist Peter Brugger referenced Conrad's terminology and defined the term as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness".
Apophenia has come to imply a universal human tendency to seek patterns in random information, such as gambling.
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Examples
Pareidolia
Pareidolia is a type of apophenia involving the perception of images or sounds in random stimuli.
A common example is the perception of a face 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". People sometimes see the face of a religious figure in a piece of toast or in the grain of a piece of wood.
Overfitting
In statistics and machine learning, apophenia is an example of what is known as overfitting. Overfitting occurs when a statistical model fits the noise rather than the signal. The model overfits the particular data or observations rather than fitting a generalizable pattern in a general population.
Gambler's fallacy
Apophenia is well documented as a rationalization for gambling. Gamblers may imagine that they see patterns in the numbers that appear in lotteries, card games, or roulette wheels. One variation of this is known as the "gambler's fallacy".
Hidden meanings
Fortune-telling and divination often are based upon discerning patterns seen in what most people would consider to be meaningless chance events. The concept of a Freudian slip is based upon what had previously been dismissed as meaningless errors of speech or memory. Sigmund Freud believed that such "slips" held meaning for the unconscious mind (see The Interpretation of Dreams).
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Related terms
In contrast to an epiphany, an apophany (i.e., an instance of apophenia) does not provide insight into the nature of reality 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". Thus the English term "apophenia" has a somewhat different meaning than that which Conrad defined when he coined the term "Apophänie".
"Patternicity"
In 2008, Michael Shermer coined the word "patternicity", defining it as "the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise".
"Agenticity"
In The Believing Brain (2011), Shermer wrote that humans have "the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency", which he called "agenticity".
"Randomania"
In 2011, parapsychologist David Luke proposed that apophenia is one end of a spectrum and that the opposite behaviour (attributing to chance what are apparently patterned or related data) should be called "randomania". He asserted that dream precognition is real, and that randomania is the reason why some people dismiss it.
In literature
- William Gibson's Pattern Recognition
- Jorge Luis Borges's Library of Babel
- Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum
- Stanislaw Lem's His Master's Voice
- Peter Watts's Blindsight
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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