What is apophenia?
Apophenia is the common human tendency to see meaningful patterns in random data. For example, gamblers claim to perceive patterns in the numbers that appear on lottery tickets, playing cards or roulette wheels. If the same series of numbers or a particular number repeats far too many times to be a coincidence (but it is in fact a random occurrence), this is taken as a winning pattern!
People believe that they have a ‘lucky number’ if a few positive events happen to fall on that date. They start seeing he number everywhere or other numbers which add up to it! So-called ‘cursed’ numbers like 13 or 666 may have arisen due to apophenia.
The term was coined by German psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in 1958 to describe a phase of schizophrenia in which patients have delusions of seeing and hearing things which are apparent to no one else.
However, today apophenia does not necessarily signify mental illness. Those who have a creative imagination such as artists or writers are also known to display aphophenia.
Pareidolia is another form of apophenia in which people infer shapes and sound patterns in meaningless data. The best known instance is seeing shapes in clouds or concluding that the static hiss of a radio has a message in it!
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