Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things. The term (German: Apophänie) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia. He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness". He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential, over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations.
Apophenia has come to imply a human propensity to seek patterns in random information, such as gambling.
Examples
Pareidolia
"The Organ Player": an example of pareidolia in Neptune's Grotto, Sardinia
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. There is strong evidence that the use of psychedelic drugs tends to induce or enhance pareidolia.
Pareidolia usually occurs as a result of the fusiform 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.
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".
Statistics
In statistics, apophenia is an example of a type I error – the false identification of patterns in data. It may be compared with a so-called false positive in other test situations.
Finance
The problem of apophenia in finance has been addressed in academic journals.
More specifically, within the world of finance itself, the examples
most prone to apophenia are trading, structuring, sales and
compensation.
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".
Clustering illusion
A clustering 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 brought up.
In 1985, a study of the "hot-hand fallacy"
by Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallon and Amos Tversky found that the idea
of basketball players possessing a "hot hand" (tending to shoot better
in streaks) was false, their analysis providing "no evidence for a
positive correlation between the outcomes of successive shots."
Another case, during the early 2000s, involved the occurrence of
breast cancer amongst the female employees at ABC Studios in Queensland.
A study found that the incidence of breast cancer at the studios was
six times higher than the rate in the rest of Queensland. However, an
examination found no correlation between the heightened incidence and
any factors related to the site, genetic or lifestyle factors of the
employees.
Causes
Apophenia
is commonly referred to as an error in perception. Although there is no
confirmed reason as to why it occurs, there are some respected
theories.
Models of pattern recognition
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. However, there are three different ways in
which this may happen and go wrong, resulting in apophenia.
Template matching
The
stimulus is compared to templates or copies in the long-term memory.
These templates are often stored as a result of past learning or
educational experiences. For example, D, d, D and d are all recognized as the same letter.
These detection routines, when applied on 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.
Prototype matching
This is similar to template matching, except for the fact that an exact match is not needed.
An example of this would be to look at an animal such as a tiger and
instead of recognizing that it was a tiger (template matching) knowing
that it was a cat (prototype matching) based on the known information
about the characteristics of a cat.
This type of pattern 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. This is more common with pareidolia than data
collection.
Feature analysis
The stimulus is broken down into its features and allowed to process the information. This model of pattern recognition comes from the result of four stages, which are: detection, pattern dissection, feature comparison in memory, and recognition.
Evolution
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 as error management theory. One of the most accredited studies in this field is Skinner's box and superstition.
This experiment involved taking a hungry pigeon, placing it in a box
and releasing a food pellet at a random time. The pigeon received a
food pellet while performing some action; and so, rather than
attributing the arrival of the pellet to randomness, it repeated its
action, and continued to do so until another pellet fell. As the pigeon
increased the number of times it performed the action, it gained the
impression that it also increased the times it was "rewarded" with a
pellet, although the release in fact remained entirely random.
