How apophenia makes us see connections that don't exist

What is apophenia

Apophenia is the tendency to see relationships in random or meaningless information. The word itself comes from the ancient Greek "I make a judgment, I make it explicit", its literal translation is "from representation."

The term was originally used to refer to the early stages of schizophrenia. It was first used by the German neurologist and psychiatrist Klaus Konrad in 1958. He called apophenia a situation when a patient with a mental disorder discovers unmotivated relationships and gives them inappropriate importance. This can be compared to the feeling that a person is in a movie or a play in which everything revolves around him.

Konrad described the case of a serviceman suffering from schizophrenia, who believed that everyone around: colleagues, bosses, loved ones - were watching him on orders from somewhere “from above” and knew in advance what he intended to do. Later, the patient began to feel that his movements were controlled by a certain wave apparatus.

Today, the term "apophenia" is applied not only to those who suffer from mental disorders, but also to all other people and denotes the tendency to look for relationships in any data, even when these relationships do not really exist.

What forms can apophenia take?

The Swiss neurologist Peter Brugger gives such examples of apophenia. One psychoanalyst considered the fact that after the test they were less likely than men to return the pencils given to them as proof of Freud's theory of envy of women for the penis. Another colleague devoted nine pages to describing how people’s tendency to avoid stepping on cracks in the pavement is due to the fact that they resemble a vagina.

Another illustration of apophenia is the theory that the 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon by the British band Pink Floyd was written as the soundtrack for the 1939 Hollywood film The Wizard of Oz. The fans found that the soundtrack of the record fits perfectly with the timing of the picture, and the lyrics and music resonate with the plot. The musicians themselves have refuted this theory.

But most often there is pareidolia - a type of apophenia that is associated with visual illusions, for example, when an indistinct silhouette in the dark seems to be a person, and an object resembles a face.

In 2002, about 20 thousand believers visited the Indian city of Bangalore to worship the "face of Christ" that appeared on chapatis - a wheat cake.

And the photo of a hill on Mars, similar to a human face, gave rise to theories about its artificial origin. Although in reality the "portrait" turned out to be just a play of light and shadow.

"Faces" on the surface of Mars - an example of apophenia

Seeing a ghost in a "haunted house", an animal in a cloud, a human figure in a rock or letters in cracks in the bark of a tree, discover a secret intent in snoring or sneezing, manifestations of higher intelligence in coincidences and signs of fate in traffic signals - all these are manifestations of apophenia. And, as can be seen from the examples above, completely different people are subject to it.

How apophenia occurs

From the point of view of statistics, apophenia can be described as an error of the first kind, that is, a situation where an initially correct assumption is rejected as incorrect.

The fact is that the very idea of chance is alien to the human mind. For example, experiments show that the sequence of numbers "00110" we perceive as more random than "01111" or "00001". We do not believe that "perfect" combinations of numbers like the last two can be accidental. In addition, in a large amount of data, regularities will be found in any case, since absolute chaos is impossible even mathematically.

American philosopher Daniel Dennett in his book Dennett D. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York. Penguin Group. 2006 Breaking the Curse: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon writes that the desire to find order in chaos is due to the evolutionary nature of man, as it helped our ancestors to survive.

He proposes to present such a picture. You walk through a dark forest and keep cautious, because you know that there have already been cases of attacks and robberies here. Ahead you see a silhouette, and first of all it will remind you of a bandit. If you mistake the shadow for a dangerous criminal, nothing terrible will happen - you will get off with a slight fright and then laugh at your fearfulness. But if you ignore your fear and the silhouette turns out to be a real thug, your life will be in danger. Therefore, such caution and suspiciousness are effective from the point of view of evolution.

The reason why we attach great importance to some events and ignore others may be due to fluctuations in the level of the hormone dopamine. Excessive saturation of the nervous system with it leads to the fact that a person attaches excessive importance to his experience, including delusional ideas. Drugs that cause the production of this hormone can enhance the feeling of unobvious connections in the outside world.

Also, apophenia can be associated with the features of the associative thinking of a person. The bottom line is that our brain prefers indirect rather than direct associations.

How apophenia affects our lives

Apophenia is often attributed to belief in mystical powers, conspiracy theories, superstitions, lucky and unlucky numbers, and winning strategies in gambling.

Quite a few Hubscher S. L. are based on unusual relationships. Apophenia: Definition and Analysis. Digital Bits Skeptic of controversial concepts, from the "Droznin code" according to which the Bible contains a prediction of the tragedy of September 11, to the idea that when playing back the song Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin, you can hear the words "My sweet Satan" (My sweet Satan).

Because of apophenia, we are deluded and form false cause-and-effect relationships. For example, we attribute psychosomatic causes to diseases. Such unreasonable diagnoses can be a sore throat "from unspoken resentment" or caries "from accumulated anger." In general, outright quackery.

Apophenia can also be one of the causes of erroneous first impressions. All the same Klaus Konrad wrote that patients can identify appearance with character traits. For example, consider a person with a scar on their face or crooked teeth to be rude. According to the psychiatrist, the patient, most likely, has once met a rude person with similar features, so he unconsciously draws a parallel between external and internal signs.

However, apophenia is not only negative. For example, neurologist Peter Brugger believes that without the ability to notice non-obvious connections, the creative process is impossible.

There is even a known case when, due to refusal to believe in the discovered pattern, a scientific discovery did not take place. The Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius discovered the coincidence of the coastlines of the American and African continents back in 1596. But the recognition of the hypothesis that South America and Africa were formerly parts of a single continent occurred only in the 20th century, when the theory of tectonic plate movement was confirmed.

So apophenia is a feature of not only paranormal and delusional, but also creative thinking. In the end, even science is an attempt to find patterns and order the chaos that surrounds a person, that is, in some way … apophenia.