Apophenia is our tendency to find meaningful connections between unrelated things. Otherwise known as patternicity, it is a common phenomenon that highlights our intrinsic need for meaning and order in our lives. Can we dismiss apophenia as a mere cognitive bias, an error of interpretation, or is there more to it than that?
Is Apophenia a Mental Illness?
Apophenia is not a mental illness, but can be a symptom of psychotic states and paranoia. In 1958, German psychiatrist Klaus Conrad coined the term ‘apophenia’ to describe the unusual patterns of meanings his patients attributed to unrelated objects and events. Although Conrad’s patients exhibited apophenia to the extent of delusional thinking, apophenia is a spectrum. According to Blain et al., “Apophenia, as understood today, can include any instance in which a pattern is falsely detected or labeled as meaningful when it is actually absent or attributable to chance”.
Perfectly healthy individuals can exhibit apophenia in mild to moderate degrees, witnessing patterns of meanings and connections between objectively unrelated things. A common example is how we may coincidentally meet a friend of whom we were just thinking and find the two events meaningfully connected rather than coincidental. Apophenia can occur in the most mundane and ordinary contexts as well as in the most unusual and destabilized mental states.
What Are Examples of Apophenia?
Examples of apophenia include any falsely detected meaningful connections or patterns. The most famous example of apophenia is pareidolia, which is an illusory visual perception where we detect a familiar pattern in random sensory stimuli. For instance, we may detect the shape of an animal in a cloud or mistake a shadow for a person. Alternatively, we may hear our name called in a crowd or falsely detect a word in noise.
The gambler’s fallacy, our assumption that because something happened before then it is unlikely to happen again, is also an example of apophenia. Researchers analysing large data samples may also draw inaccurate conclusions by detecting patterns in random information. In extreme cases, apophenia can manifest as conspiracy theories, paranoia, or large-scale delusory thinking patterns.
What Are the Main Causes of Apophenia?
Psychological and evolutionary factors are widely accepted as the main causes of apophenia. However it may occur, from the most extreme to the mildest cases, apophenia reveals a priceless insight into the human condition – our inability to cope with the meaningless and random aspects of our world. We are the creatures of evolution. We need certainty, order, and structure to feel safe. From an evolutionary perspective, pattern recognition allows us to perceive threats, identify resources, and navigate the environment.
Be it delusory or accurate, pattern detection undoubtedly gives us a sense of control and certainty over the wilderness that life can sometimes be. In moments of great uncertainty and chaos, studies have shown that people tend to exhibit higher degrees of apophenia as a compensatory mechanism, which has been linked to hyperactivity in the right cerebral hemisphere – the part of our brain responsible for making patterns and connections.
Apophenia can be considered an attempt to impose order over chaos, meaning over meaninglessness, and certainty over uncertainty.
