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Tuesday, July 21, 2020

Petrified wood

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Polished slice of a petrified tree from the Late Triassic Epoch (approximately 230 million years ago) found in Arizona. The remains of insects can be detected in an enlarged image.
 
Petrified log at the Petrified Forest National Park

Petrified wood (from the Latin root petro meaning "rock" or "stone"; literally "wood turned into stone") is the name given to a special type of fossilized remains of terrestrial vegetation. Petrifaction is the result of a tree or tree-like plants having been replaced by stone via a mineralization process that often includes permineralization and replacement. The organic materials making up cell walls have been replicated with minerals (mostly a silicate, such as opal, chalcedony, or quartz). In some instances, the original structure of the stem tissue may be partially retained. Unlike other plant fossils, which are typically impressions or compressions, petrified wood is a three-dimensional representation of the original organic material. 

The petrifaction process occurs underground, when wood becomes buried in water-saturated sediment or volcanic ash. The presence of water reduces the availability of oxygen which inhibits aerobic decomposition by bacteria and fungi. Mineral-laden water flowing through the sediments may lead to permineralization, which occurs when minerals precipitate out of solution filling the interiors of cells and other empty spaces. During replacement, the plant's cell walls act as a template for mineralization. There needs to be a balance between the decay of cellulose and lignin and mineral templating for cellular detail to be preserved with fidelity. Most of the organic matter often decomposes, however some of the lignin may remain. Silica in the form of Opal-A, can encrust and permeate wood relatively quickly in hot spring environments. However, petrified wood is most commonly associated with trees that were buried in fine grained sediments of deltas and floodplains or volcanic lahars and ash beds. A forest where such material has petrified becomes known as a petrified forest.

Elements

The outline of cells visible in a segment of petrified wood

Elements such as manganese, iron, and copper in the water/mud during the petrification process give petrified wood a variety of color ranges. Pure quartz crystals are colorless, but when contaminants are added to the process the crystals take on a yellow, red, or another tint.

Following is a list of contaminating elements and related color hues:
Petrified wood can preserve the original structure of the stem in all its detail, down to the microscopic level. Structures such as tree rings and the various tissues are often observed features.

Petrified wood is a fossil in which the organic remains have been replaced by minerals in the slow process of being replaced with stone. This petrification process generally results in a quartz chalcedony mineralization. Special rare conditions must be met in order for the fallen stem to be transformed into fossil wood or petrified wood. In general, the fallen plants get buried in an environment free of oxygen (anaerobic environment), which preserves the original plant structure and general appearance. The other conditions include regular access to mineral-rich water in contact with the tissues, replacing the organic plant structure with inorganic minerals. The end result is petrified wood, a plant, with its original basic structure in place, replaced by stone.

Uses

Following the Great Depression in the 1930s, people began flocking to the mountains and deserts hoping to discover any sort of rock, stone or gem that could be turned into jewelry as a source of income. An assortment of rock was discovered which included petrified woods. "Rockhounding", as hobbyists would call it, became very popular. Many rock clubs began to establish throughout the United States. Soon after collectors started setting up rock shops where they were able to sell their merchandise to the public. As years went by rockhounders would perfect their craft at making jewelry using all sorts of different techniques, equipment, and molds. Having experience with their craft, first-generation rockhounders would soon teach fellow amateurs their skills.

Locations

Areas with a large number of petrified trees include:

Africa

Chunk of petrified wood near El Kurru (Northern Sudan)
 
Petrified log and Welwitschia at Namibia Petrified forest
  • Egypt – petrified forest in Cairo-Suez road, declared a national protectorate by the ministry of environment, also in the area of New Cairo at the Extension of Nasr City, El Qattamiyya, near El Maadi district, and Al Farafra oasis.
  • Libya – Great Sand Sea – Hundreds of square miles of petrified trunks, branches and other debris mixed with Stone Age artifacts
  • Madagascar – Northwest Coast
  • Namibia – petrified forest of Damaraland
  • Sudan – petrified forest north of El-Kurru

Asia

Australasia

Europe

North America

Petrified logs at Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona, USA

South America

Petrified log in Paleorrota geopark, Brazil
 
Puyango petrified forest, Ecuador

Gallery

  • Petrified wood jewelry
  • Polished petrified wood
  • Polished slice of petrified wood
  • Petrified Acacia wood
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Man in the Moon

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_in_the_Moon 

The Man in the Moon is struck by a spacecraft in the 1902 fantasy film Le Voyage dans la Lune

The Man in the Moon refers to any of several pareidolic images of a human face, head or body that certain traditions recognize in the disc of the full moon. The images are composed of the dark areas of the lunar maria, or "seas" and the lighter highlands of the lunar surface.

Origin

Germanic woodcutter

There are various explanations for how the Man in the Moon came to be.

A longstanding European tradition holds that the man was banished to the Moon for some crime. Christian lore commonly held that he is the man caught gathering sticks on the Sabbath and sentenced by God to death by stoning in the book of Numbers XV.32–36. Some Germanic cultures thought he was a woodcutter found working on the Sabbath. There is a Roman legend that he is a sheep-thief.

One medieval Christian tradition claims him to be Cain, the Wanderer, forever doomed to circle the Earth. Dante's Inferno alludes to this:
For now doth Cain with fork of thorns confine
On either hemisphere, touching the wave
Beneath the towers of Seville. Yesternight
The moon was round.
Possible interpretations of the Man in the Moon
This is mentioned again in his Paradise:
But tell, I pray thee, whence the gloomy spots
Upon this body, which below on earth
Give rise to talk of Cain in fabling quaint?
There is also a Mediaeval Jewish tradition that the image of Jacob is engraved on the Moon.

John Lyly says in the prologue to his Endymion (1591), "There liveth none under the sunne, that knows what to make of the man in the moone." 

In Norse mythology, Máni is the male personification of the Moon who crosses the sky in a horse-drawn carriage. He is continually pursued by the Great Wolf Hati who catches him at Ragnarök. Máni simply means "Moon".

In Chinese mythology, the goddess Chang'e is stranded upon the Moon after foolishly consuming a double dose of an immortality potion. In some versions of the myth she is accompanied by Yu Tu, a Moon rabbit.

In Haida mythology, the figure represents a boy gathering sticks. The boy's father had told him the Moon's light would brighten the night, allowing the chore to be completed. Not wanting to gather sticks, the boy complained and ridiculed the Moon. As punishment for his disrespect, the boy was taken from Earth and trapped on the Moon.

In Japanese mythology, it is said that a tribe of human-like spiritual beings live on the Moon. This is especially explored in The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter.

Traditions

There is a traditional European belief that the Man in the Moon enjoyed drinking, especially claret. An old ballad runs (original spelling):
Our man in the moon drinks clarret,
With powder-beef, turnep, and carret.
If he doth so, why should not you
Drink until the sky looks blew?
In the English Middle Ages and renaissance, the Moon was held to be the god of drunkards, and at least three London taverns were named "The Man in the Moone". The man in the Moon is named in an early dated English nursery rhyme:
The man in the moon came tumbling down
And asked his way to Norwich;
He went by the south and burnt his mouth
With supping cold pease porridge.

Examples and occurrence globally

One tradition sees a figure of a man carrying a wide burden on his back. He is sometimes seen as accompanied by a small dog. Various cultures recognise other examples of lunar pareidolia, such as the Moon rabbit.

In the Northern Hemisphere, a common Western perception of the face has it that the figure's eyes are Mare Imbrium and Mare Serenitatis, its nose is Sinus Aestuum, and its open mouth is Mare Nubium and Mare Cognitum. This particular human face can also be seen in tropical regions on both sides of the equator. However, the Moon orientation associated with the face is observed less frequently—and eventually not at all—as one moves toward the South Pole. 

Conventionalized illustrations of the Man in the Moon seen in Western art often show a very simple face in the full moon, or a human profile in the crescent moon, corresponding to no actual markings. Some depict a man with a face turned away from the viewer on the ground, for example when viewed from North America, with Jesus Christ's crown shown as the lighter ring around Mare Imbrium. Another common one is a cowled Death's head looking down at Earth, with the black lava rock 'hood' around the white dust bone of the skull, and also forming the eye sockets.

"The Man in the Moon" can also refer to a mythological character said to live on or in the Moon, but who is not necessarily represented by the markings on the face of the Moon. An example is Yue-Laou, from Chinese tradition; another is Aiken Drum from Scotland.

The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin, published in 1638, is one of the earliest novels thought of as containing several traits prototypical of science fiction.

Scientific explanation

The Man in the Moon is made up of various lunar maria (which ones depend on the pareidolic image seen). These vast, flat spots on the Moon are called "maria" or "seas" because, for a long time, astronomers believed they were large bodies of water. They are large areas formed by lava that covered up old craters and then cooled, becoming smooth, basalt rock.

The near side of the Moon, containing these maria that make up the man, is always facing Earth. This is due to a tidal locking or synchronous orbit. Thought to have occurred because of the gravitational forces partially caused by the Moon's oblong shape, its rotation has slowed to the point where it rotates exactly once on each trip around the Earth. This causes the near side of the Moon to always turn its face toward Earth.

Gallery

  • Near full moon over Berlin, Germany, in December 2015, approximately 30 minutes after moonrise
  • Common interpretation of the Man in the Moon as seen from the Northern Hemisphere
  • Modeled appearance for same longitude 30 minutes after moonrise
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    Synchronicity

    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    Astral configurations in astrology represent for Jung an example of synchronicity, that is, of a parallel, non-causal relationship between the development of celestial phenomena and those marked by terrestrial time.
     
    Synchronicity (German: Synchronizität) is a concept, first introduced by analytical psychologist Carl Jung, which holds that events are "meaningful coincidences" if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related.

    During his career, Jung furnished several different definitions of the term, defining synchronicity as an "acausal connecting (togetherness) principle;" "meaningful coincidence;" "acausal parallelism;" and as a "meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved."

    Jung's belief was that, just as events may be connected by causality, they may also be connected by meaning. Events connected by meaning need not have an explanation in terms of causality, which does not generally contradict the Axiom of Causality but in specific cases can lead to prematurely giving up causal explanation.

    Carl Gustav Jung

    Though introducing the concept as early as the 1920s, Jung gave a full statement of it only in 1951 in an Eranos lecture. In 1952, Jung published a paper titled "Synchronizität als ein Prinzip akausaler Zusammenhänge" ('Synchronicity – An Acausal Connecting Principle') in a volume which also contained a related study by the physicist and Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli, who was sometimes critical of Jung's ideas.

    Jung used the concept in arguing for the existence of the paranormal. Also a believer in the paranormal, Arthur Koestler wrote extensively on synchronicity in his 1972 book The Roots of Coincidence. Moreover, considering that multiple synchronic experiences contribute to the early formation of schizophrenic delusions, distinguishing which of these synchronicities are morbid, according to Jung, is a matter of interpretation.

    As it is neither testable or falsifiable, synchronicity is considered pseudoscience. Mainstream science explains synchronicities as mere coincidences or spurious correlations which can be described by laws of statistics (e.g. by the law of truly large numbers) and confirmation biases.

    Description

    Diagram illustrating Carl Jung's concept of synchronicity

    Jung coined the term synchronicity to describe "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events." In his book Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, Jung wrote:
    How are we to recognize acausal combinations of events, since it is obviously impossible to examine all chance happenings for their causality? The answer to this is that acausal events may be expected most readily where, on closer reflection, a causal connection appears to be inconceivable.… It is impossible, with our present resources, to explain ESP [extrasensory perception], or the fact of meaningful coincidence, as a phenomenon of energy. This makes an end of the causal explanation as well, for "effect" cannot be understood as anything except a phenomenon of energy. Therefore it cannot be a question of cause and effect, but of a falling together in time, a kind of simultaneity. Because of this quality of simultaneity, I have picked on the term "synchronicity" to designate a hypothetical factor equal in rank to causality as a principle of explanation.
    Roderick Main, in the introduction to his 1997 book Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal, wrote:
    The culmination of Jung's lifelong engagement with the paranormal is his theory of synchronicity, the view that the structure of reality includes a principle of acausal connection which manifests itself most conspicuously in the form of meaningful coincidences. Difficult, flawed, prone to misrepresentation, this theory none the less remains one of the most suggestive attempts yet made to bring the paranormal within the bounds of intelligibility. It has been found relevant by psychotherapists, parapsychologists, researchers of spiritual experience and a growing number of non-specialists. Indeed, Jung's writings in this area form an excellent general introduction to the whole field of the paranormal.
    Jung felt synchronicity to be a principle that had explanatory power towards his concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious. It described a governing dynamic which underlies the whole of human experience and history—social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. The emergence of the synchronistic paradigm was a significant move away from Cartesian dualism towards an underlying philosophy of double-aspect theory. Some argue this shift was essential in bringing theoretical coherence to Jung's earlier work.

    Even at Jung's presentation of his work on synchronicity in 1951 at an Eranos lecture, his ideas on synchronicity were evolving. On Feb. 25, 1953, in a letter to Swiss author and journalist Carl Seelig, who wrote a biography of Albert Einstein, Jung wrote:
    Professor Einstein was my guest on several occasions at dinner.… These were very early days when Einstein was developing his first theory of relativity [and] It was he who first started me on thinking about a possible relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality. More than 30 years later the stimulus led to my relation with the physicist professor W. Pauli and to my thesis of psychic synchronicity.
    Jung believed life was not a series of random events but rather an expression of a deeper order, which he and Pauli referred to as Unus mundus. This deeper order led to the insights that a person was both embedded in a universal wholeness and that the realisation of this was more than just an intellectual exercise, but also had elements of a spiritual awakening. From the religious perspective, synchronicity shares similar characteristics of an "intervention of grace." Jung also believed that in a person's life, synchronicity served a role similar to that of dreams, with the purpose of shifting a person's egocentric conscious thinking to greater wholeness.

    Forms

    The occurrence of a meaningful coincidence in time can take three forms:
    a) the coincidence of a certain psychic content with a corresponding objective process which is perceived to take place simultaneously.
    b) the coincidence of a subjective psychic state with a phantasm (dream or vision) which later turns out to be a more or less faithful reflection of a "synchronistic," objective event that took place more or less simultaneously, but at a distance.
    c) the same, except that the event perceived takes place in the future and is represented in the present only by a phantasm that corresponds to it.
    — Carl Jung, "Résumé", Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (1960)

    Examples

    Cetonia aurata

    Jung tells the following story as an example of a synchronistic event in his book Synchronicity:
    My example concerns a young woman patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably "geometrical" idea of reality. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself. Well, I was sitting opposite her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab — a costly piece of jewellery. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window-pane from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), whose gold-green colour most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, "Here is your scarab." This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.
    French writer Émile Deschamps claims in his memoirs that, in 1805, he was treated to some plum pudding by a stranger named Monsieur de Fontgibu. Ten years later, the writer encountered plum pudding on the menu of a Paris restaurant and wanted to order some, but the waiter told him that the last dish had already been served to another customer, who turned out to be de Fontgibu. Many years later, in 1832, Deschamps was at a dinner and once again ordered plum pudding. He recalled the earlier incident and told his friends that only de Fontgibu was missing to make the setting complete—and in the same instant, the now-senile de Fontgibu entered the room, having got the wrong address.

    Wolfgang Pauli

    After describing some examples, Jung wrote: "When coincidences pile up in this way, one cannot help being impressed by them – for the greater the number of terms in such a series, or the more unusual its character, the more improbable it becomes."

    In his book Thirty Years That Shook Physics – The Story of Quantum Theory (1966), George Gamow writes about Wolfgang Pauli, who was apparently considered a person particularly associated with synchronicity events. Gamow whimsically refers to the "Pauli effect," a mysterious phenomenon which is not understood on a purely materialistic basis, and probably never will be. The following anecdote is told:
    It is well known that theoretical physicists cannot handle experimental equipment; it breaks whenever they touch it. Pauli was such a good theoretical physicist that something usually broke in the lab whenever he merely stepped across the threshold. A mysterious event that did not seem at first to be connected with Pauli's presence once occurred in Professor J. Franck's laboratory in Göttingen. Early one afternoon, without apparent cause, a complicated apparatus for the study of atomic phenomena collapsed. Franck wrote humorously about this to Pauli at his Zürich address and, after some delay, received an answer in an envelope with a Danish stamp. Pauli wrote that he had gone to visit Bohr and at the time of the mishap in Franck's laboratory his train was stopped for a few minutes at the Göttingen railroad station. You may believe this anecdote or not, but there are many other observations concerning the reality of the Pauli Effect! 

    Relationship with causality

    Causality, when defined expansively (as, for instance, in the "mystic psychology" book The Kybalion, or in the platonic Kantian Axiom of Causality), states that "nothing can happen without being caused." Such an understanding of causality may be incompatible with synchronicity. In contrast, other definitions of causality (e.g., the neo-Humean definition) are concerned only with the relation of cause to effect, and are thus compatible with synchronicity. There are also opinions that hold cause to be internal when there is no external observable cause.

    It is also pointed out that, since Jung took into consideration only the narrow definition of causality—only the efficient cause—his notion of acausality is also narrow and so is not applicable to final and formal causes as understood in Aristotelian or Thomist systems. Either the final causality is inherent in synchronicity, as it leads to individuation; or synchronicity can be a kind of replacement for final causality. However, such finalism or teleology is considered to be outside the domain of modern science.

    Explanations

    Jung's theory of synchronicity is nowadays regarded as pseudoscientific, as it is not based on experimental evidence, and its explananda are easily accounted for by our current understanding of probability theory and human psychology.

    Mathematics

    Jung and his followers (e.g., Marie-Louise von Franz) share in common the belief that numbers are the archetypes of order, and the major participants in synchronicity creation. This hypothesis has implications that are relevant to some of the “chaotic” phenomena in nonlinear dynamics. Dynamical systems theory has provided a new context from which to speculate about synchronicity because it gives predictions about the transitions between emergent states of order and nonlocality. This view, however, is not part of mainstream mathematical thought.

    Statistics and probability theory

    Mainstream mathematics argues that statistics and probability theory (exemplified in, e.g., Littlewood's law or the law of truly large numbers) suffice to explain any purported synchronistic events as mere coincidences. The law of truly large numbers, for instance, states that in large enough populations, any strange event is arbitrarily likely to happen by mere chance. However, some proponents of synchronicity question whether it is even sensible in principle to try to evaluate synchronicity statistically. Jung himself and von Franz argued that statistics work precisely by ignoring what is unique about the individual case, whereas synchronicity tries to investigate that uniqueness.

    Social and behavioural science

    In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions, and avoids information and interpretations that contradict prior beliefs. It is a type of cognitive bias and represents an error of inductive inference, or is a form of selection bias toward confirmation of the hypothesis under study, or disconfirmation of an alternative hypothesis. Confirmation bias is of interest in the teaching of critical thinking, as the skill is misused if rigorous critical scrutiny is applied only to evidence that challenges a preconceived idea, but not to evidence that supports it.

    Charles Tart sees danger in synchronistic thinking: "This danger is the temptation to mental laziness.… [I]t would be very tempting to say, 'Well, it's synchronistic, it's forever beyond my understanding,' and so (prematurely) give up trying to find a causal explanation."

    Upon initial publication, the work of Jung, such as The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, were received as problematic by his fellow psychologists. Fritz Levi, in his 1952 Neue Schweizer Rundschau (New Swiss Observations) review, critiqued Jung's theory of synchronicity as vague in determinability of synchronistic events, saying that Jung never specifically explained his rejection of "magic causality" to which such an acausal principle as synchronicity would be related. He also questioned the theory's usefulness.

    Apophenia

    In psychology and sociology, the term apophenia is used for the mistaken detection of a pattern or meaning in random or meaningless data. Skeptics, such as Robert Todd Carroll of the Skeptic's Dictionary, argue that the perception of synchronicity is better explained as apophenia. Primates use pattern detection in their form of intelligence, and this can lead to erroneous identification of non-existent patterns. 

    A famous example of this is the fact that human-face recognition is so robust, and based on such a basic archetype (i.e., two dots and a line contained in a circle), that human beings are very prone to identify faces in random data all through their environment, like the "man in the moon," or faces in wood grain, an example of the visual form of apophenia known as pareidolia.

    Religion

    Many people believe that the Universe, angels, other spirits, or God cause synchronicity. Among the general public, divine intervention is the most widely accepted explanation for these meaningful coincidences. Even some scientists see spiritual or mystical forces behind synchronicities and are asking if it has anything in common with pathology.

    Research

    Research on the processes and effects of synchronicity is a subfield of psychological study. Modern scientific techniques, such as mathematical modeling, were used to observe chance correlations of synchronicities with Fibonacci time patterns.

    As far as methodology is concerned, all empirical methods can be used to study synchronicity scientifically: quantitative, qualitative, and combination methods. Most studies of synchronicity, however, have been limited to qualitative approaches, which tend to collect data expressed in non-mathematical representations such as descriptions, placing less focus on estimating the strength and form of relationships.
    On the other hand, skeptics (e.g. most psychologists) tend to dismiss the psychological experience of coincidences as just yet one more demonstration of how irrational people can be. Irrationality in this context means an association between the experience of coincidences and biased cognition in terms of poor probabilistic reasoning and a propensity for paranormal beliefs.
    A 2016 survey (with 226 respondents) of the frequency of synchronicity in clinical settings found that 44% of therapists reported synchronicity experiences in the therapeutic setting; and 67% felt that synchronicity experiences could be useful for therapy.

    Publications

    Cultural references

    Philip K. Dick makes reference to, "Pauli's synchronicity," in his 1963 science-fiction novel, The Game-Players of Titan, in reference to pre-cognitive psionic abilities being interfered with by other psionic abilities such as psychokinesis: "an acausal connective event."
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    Apophenia

    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    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.

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    • Slum
      From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ...