Apophenia

Apophenia (from Greek ἀπό, apo, from, 'and φαίνειν, phainein, show ' ) refers to the experience of perceiving apparent patterns and relationships in random, meaningless details of the environment. The term was coined by the psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in 1958, the apophenia defined as " baseless seeing of connections accompanied by the special feeling of abnormal meaningfulness ".

Conrad originally described the phenomenon in terms of perceptual distortions that occur in psychosis; but his term is now applied to similar tendencies in healthy subjects, in which there are no neurological or psychological disorders.

Science

The Zurich neuropsychologist Peter Brugger suspects a neurological mechanism that forces us in random data, such as cloud shapes or acoustic noise to see meaningful meanings. Specifically, the right hemisphere of the brain producing at each observation semantic associations. This is a major source of human creativity. Alfred Wegener's continental drift theory is, for example, arose because Wegener was irritated by the matching coastlines of Africa and South America.

Especially temporal coincidences produce almost inescapable "Connections". Brugger's view, it is difficult, if not impossible, to perceive true random as such. For the strength of the effect the personality of the subjects plays a major role; especially people who believe strongly by self-assessment in paranormal phenomena, described in more matches between random composite image pairs ( Brugger 2001).

Paranoid psychosis leave this mechanism out of control. Brugger describes the psychosis of the Swedish author August Strindberg, in the fallen branches saw Greek letters, for example, the notifications it made ​​( Occult Diary, 1888).

Apophänien at the cognitive level, which serve as judgment heuristics to reduce the complexity, also called Illusory correlations.

Art

Postmodern writers and directors have with apophänen operations - paranoid altered memories, vague conspiracies - worked, such as Vladimir Nabokov's characters and symbols ( 1948), Thomas Pynchon's The auctioning of No. 49 (1966 ), Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (1980) and Foucault's Pendulum (1988 ), William Gibson's Pattern Recognition ( 2003), Arturo Pérez- Revertes The Club Dumas (1993) and the movies Conspiracy Theory (1997) π, ( 1998) and A Beautiful Mind ( 2001). As the retelling of one of the most important tools of our mind is to capture the reality, there is overlap between apophenia and memory errors such as the hindsight bias. Since the pattern recognition by means of diagrams, goals and ideologies influenced, and is rather a subject of common belief as a solitary self-deception, the observer is advised in interpretation conflicts when trying to make a diagnosis and to detect Apophänien.