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Concept
Apophenia
Summary
Apophenia (æpoʊ-ˈfiːniə) is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. The term (German: Apophänie from the Greek verb ἀποφαίνειν (apophaínein)) 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 also come to describe a human propensity to unreasonably seek definite patterns in random information, such as can occur in gambling.
Apophenia can be considered a commonplace effect of brain function. Taken to an extreme, however, it can be a symptom of psychiatric dysfunction, for example, as a symptom in paranoid schizophrenia, where a patient sees hostile patterns (for example, a conspiracy to persecute them) in ordinary actions.
Apophenia is also typical of conspiracy theories, where coincidences may be woven together into an apparent plot.
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 in a piece of toast or in the grain of a piece of wood. There is strong evidence that psychedelic drugs tend 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.
Gamblers may imagine that they see patterns in the numbers that appear in lotteries, card games, or roulette wheels, where no such patterns exist. A common example of this is the gambler's fallacy.
Official source
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