I’ve discovered an excellent new word, apophenia, described here:
Apophenia is the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena. The term was coined by K. Conrad in 1958 (Brugger)…
According to Brugger, “The propensity to see connections between seemingly unrelated objects or ideas most closely links psychosis to creativity … apophenia and creativity may even be seen as two sides of the same coin.”…
In statistics, apophenia is called a Type I error, seeing patterns where none, in fact, exist. It is highly probable that the apparent significance of many unusual experiences and phenomena are due to apophenia, e.g., ghosts and hauntings, EVP, numerology, the Bible code, anomalous cognition, ganzfeld “hits”, most forms of divination, the prophecies of Nostradamus, remote viewing, and a host of other paranormal and supernatural experiences and phenomena.
I presume the word (which has not yet made it into the OED) is based on Greek apophaino ‘show forth, display’ and thus represents a hypothetical *apophainia (the actual Greek derived nouns are apophansis and apophasis), so that the proper UK spelling would be “apophaenia” (though googling that form turns up only a page from a Russian medical dictionary giving it as the etymon of Russian apofeniya; a nice question is whether that can be considered a correct etymology).
Anyone curious about why this word should appeal so to me may consult my entries on Coincidence and More coincidence. Probability theory is extremely unintuitive for us poor Homo sapiens, doomed to see meaning in every damn thing.
I don’t believe in numerology at all, but sometimes when I’m tired or slightly drunk I will find patterns in lists of phone numbers or relationships between phone numbers and addresses, or between the letters in the names of different people who have something in common. I usually stop myself before I say anything, but every once in awhile I’ll throw one of these non-existent patterns into conversation and get a weird look.
Danah Boyd, a PhD student at UC Berkeley who is a well-known “social technologies” researcher, has a blog titled Apophenia, with a secondary title of (as you might expect) “Making Connections Where None Previously Existed”).
The word comes up several times in William Gibson’s latest, “Pattern Recognition.”
i came across your website looking for a translation for the Romany word “patrin” (forgetting that there is a glossary on the Patrin Webjournal which i frequent). My mother is a Romni and i’ve tried to stay active in learning about the culture. Have you checked out Voice of Roma? They’re an organization from Sebastopol California. Is there background information about you on your site? are there several people who run languagehat? Also, do you know why the patrin webjournal hasn’t been updated in 5 years? thanks!
here’s my email address just in case it doesn’t save it: vsafarov@berkeley.edu
Coming across this entry tonight was a bit of meta-apophenia for me. I went online to email a friend about two coincidences that I had experienced tonight relating to pieces of music I recognize but do not know the real titles to. The first I call the “Lizard Music” because every time I’ve heard it, I’ve had an encounter shortly afterwards with some kind of small lizard. Tonight, while not seeing an actual lizard, I saw a sign with a lizard logo. The second has to do with an unknown bit of incidental mucis that I liked and taught myself to play back in 1987 because it appeared on the Minnesota Twins World Series video. Because I didn’t know its title, I invented a name for it. Tonight I made the spontaneous decision to type the made up title into Google. The first hit was on a box score of one of the hockey playoff games between the Minnesota Wild and Anaheim Mighty Ducks. Not exactly the same, but still relating to a Minnesota sports team in playoff competition. When I went to email both of these coincidences, I found that the person I was emailing them to had just sent me a link to this entry. How apophenic.
What a great word. Thanks!
A very nice formulation I read once, can’t remember the writer, was that you have to avoid both paranoia and denial, the first defined as seeing patterns where there are none, the second defined as “not seeing” patterns that do in fact exist.
Hat, I think I’ve seen apophenia recently in the context of the grilled-cheese sandwich with an image of the Blessed Virgin on it.
John Emerson, have you seen A Beautiful Mind? There’s a spooky depiction of what it might feel like to have this kind of “insight”.
Grishnash, I bet you haven’t googled for “Lizard Music” yet. It’s the name of a young-adult novel by Daniel Pinkwater, and it’s brilliant; give it a try.
Everybody: don’t you think there must be a neurological basis for that feeling of insight or connection? It’s certainly triggered when we have real insights or make real connections, but it can also be triggered inappropriately. I’ve heard reports from users that under the influence of LSD they experienced profound insights which they couldn’t remember when the trip was over; isn’t it more likely that the LSD triggered the neural mechanism that accompanies true insight, causing the feeling of enlightenment but with no actual content?
Semi-coincidentally, I turned on the computer this morning intending to look up apophantic, which I’d come across in Husserl, and also comes from apo and phaino.
Didn’t wind up looking it up, because I remembered it meant assertoric or judgmental, I think, and I must have looked it up a dozen times.
ACW, the emotion of insight or connection unaccompanied by cognitive evidence is almost the definition of deja vu, and in fact there’s a contrary condition where an injury to the brain can leave someone in a state where they “recognise” “familiar” people and objects cognitively, the words in quotes because the cognitive recognition is unaccompanied by any emotion of familiarity, which is rather confusing and lonely for the person affected.
interesting indeed!
awesome word!
Hat, thanks for clarifying that this is a somewhat new term. I always look at danah’s blog (already mentioned above) and feel shameful for forgetting what the word means, even though I look it up, like, every time I go to her blog (which I recommend) and see it again. Now I don’t feel so bad.
According to that description, “apophenia” looks a lot like Salvador Dali’s “paranoïa-critique”.
Maybe it should be pointed out that there are actually two words spelled apophasis (same spirits and tones) in Greek: one that comes from the verb apophemi (later form apophasko) and means “negation”, “denial”, and the one you refer to, which comes from apophaino and means “opinion”, “ruling”, “decision” etc. (colloquial “apofasi”). Only the latter can also be spelled apophansis, though.
I hope it is clear that I am not trying to “correct” anything, but I thought there might be some confusion for readers who may have seen the words in other contexts (apophantikos is a basic term of aristotelician logics, while apophatikos is the “negative” in “negative theology”).
Excellent point, and I thank you for the clarification (on behalf of those of my readers familiar enough with Aristotelian logic and negative theology to be confused!).
ACW, interesting that you mention A Beautiful Mind. I thought of it too as I was reading the post and starting the thread of comments.
All in all, a very interesting thread, including the coincidence of Veronika’s coming across Hat’s blog as she was doing her Romany word search.
What a strange coincidence. I mean, nothing at all out of the ordinary occurred to me, or flickered across my screen, as I read this.
No lizards, no words derived from “apo”, nothing. I haven’t even thought of Aristotle in several weeks.
Weird.
Well, I have reviewed all this (including your old coincidence posts, LH), and it seems to me that paranoia has not yet been highlighted as much as it might have been. If we understand the notion of paranoia generally, and not exclusively as symptomatic of some psychotic or other mental disorder, we really have something tantamount to this so-called apophenia. I therefore question the need for the new term (much as I appreciate its engaging attributes).
Commenter a phan, above, mentioned a certain view: you have to avoid both paranoia and denial, the first defined as seeing patterns where there are none, the second defined as “not seeing” patterns that do in fact exist). I am in sympathy with that. We are great consumers and relishers of pattern, meaning, and order. If we are shown an array of pixels that are randomly either black or white, we cannot help but impose order on it by picking out features: small pockets of order jump out of the “ground” of dots; rivers of white or bands of black emerge out of the chaos with all the appearance of design. In fact, informal experiments I have conducted show that one has to alter many pixels “manually” in a random matrix to block such effects. When one shows two matrices, one generated by purely random means and the other so doctored, the doctored one is typically judged as more likely to be the random one than the truly random one is. Such is the inbuilt propensity we have to reject the hypothesis of mere coincidence in favour of the hypothesis of purposeful collocation.
Clinical paranoia is popularly seen as a matter of feelings of persecution and delusions of grandeur. A more sophisticated view would include ideas of reference as characteristic. And yes, these may all be present. But they are all secondary, and what is primary is an exaggeration of the normal tendency that we all have to perceive or impose order, purpose, design, and intentionality where these are not present.
The consequences of our apprehending and correcting for this pervasive bias in ourselves are momentous. They invite a reconsideration of design arguments for there being a guiding intelligence behind the universe, and of our understanding of how orderly the universe might be in the first place. The way we attribute motives or lack thereof to others, how we read a text, and indeed our appreciation of art in many modalities – and so on, up to and including our deepest understanding of our deepest selves as orderly entities, with rationally regimented intentions and projects.
For something clinically oriented but which ruminates usefully on such matters see this article, which is now unfortunately only available cached by Google. (Or am I just finding a link where there is none…?)
just playing the Glass Bead Game…
Interesting piece. Since it will eventually fall out of Google’s reach, I’ll quote the most relevant bit here (it’s from Reinsurance Notes, Vol.1, No.16, November, 1999, no author given):
Of course, there’s always the danger that a too-sympathetic therapist will come to share the patient’s delusion, as happened to Robert Lindner in the case described in “The Jet-Propelled Couch,” available in his collection of case studies The Fifty-Minute Hour… Good lord, I just did a search to see if I could find the piece online, and I discovered (here) that Lindner’s patient (anonymous, needless to say, in the case study) was actually Paul Linebarger, better known to science fiction fans as Cordwainer Smith! Excuse me, I have to go lie down and think about this.
Oh, but you’re wrong about the need for the word “apophenia.” While it may be true that the phenomenon so described is the “primary characteristic” of paranoia (though I don’t know how you’d prove that to anyone’s satisfaction), that doesn’t change the fact that in English as spoken by ordinary speakers, as opposed to psychologists who share your view of things, “paranoia” = “they’re all out to get me.” Nobody is going to describe their feelings of connection as paranoia. The eager acceptance of the word when people run across it speaks for itself.
LH, I don’t say that the term apophenia has no place or no role to play. I question (not deny, note) the need for it, but that’s when I think (as I tend to do) in terms of an idealised taxonomy of such features of the life of the mind. Yes, of course we need the newer and less laden term if paranoid is almost universally understood merely in terms of its typical symptomatic manifestations.
Jimmy Ho notes the connexion with Dalí (above), and that one is very close to the apophenic “reading” of paranoia. Jimmy may have come across this in OED, which he appears to frequent (to his credit):
D. Gascoyne Short Survey Surrealism v. 102 Dali claims that it is the paranoiac faculty that enables him to discover a head where there was, until he looked at it, only an African village.
But I acknowledge that the apophenic acceptation of paranoia is not common.
However we refer to the relevant feature of our lives, it is certainly pervasive, and it is probably essential to our humanness (a word I will defend, as having been used by Coleridge).
Jimmy may have come across this in OED, which he appears to frequent (to his credit)
Noetica, that’s more credit than I can accept!
For the record, I do not own any copy of the OED and never use it (I am not proud of it; I know I’ll have to, some day). The only dictionaries I have are the English-French Harrap’s (very unsufficient), an old Greek-American Divrys (where I learned how to write a letter to Mr George Pappas in Youngstown, OH) and an abridged English-Chinese dictionary in pocket format. However, I do use Dictionary.com (which does have OED references) when I am on the Web, but only if I am really curious about a particular word or expression (I am awfully lazy when it comes to English), and it didn’t happen for my comment on this thread. In a way, I am flattered that I came across as an OED reader for once!
Actually, my familiarity with Dalí’s paranoïa-critique comes from my teenage years, when I was fascinated with surrealism (as an adult, I sided with Caillois against Breton) and used to read Maurice Nadeau’s Histoire du surréalisme at least every two months. It has a chapter called “Dali et la paranoïa-critique”, which describes the “method” and discusses its influence on the movement. According to Nadeau, Dalí (who coined the term around 1930) felt his intuitions about paranoïa were scientifically corroborated by Jacques Lacan’s MD thesis (published in 1932) De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (young Lacan was a friend of Raymond Queneau’s, then a Surrealist, with whom he attended Alexandre Kojève’s historical lectures on Hegel).
By the way, LH, parakalo (sorry, no Greek font on this computer)! I had a few philosophy teachers (in France) who felt very uneasy about confusing the apophatic with the apophantic.
No OED? Then I am even more impressed, Jimmy.
I too have been a student of Dalí’s excesses and an amateur of his coruscations – clearly not as well informed as you, though. I didn’t know about the Lacan angle. Till now I have not been tempted to approach the Lacanian [im]penetralia, but I’ll follow your lead if there are such riches to mine on paranoia.
(I think we should email on a couple of matters. Be warned!)
And once again, LH brings people together. I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony…
*dodges vegetables*
We’ll get you for that, Hat.
Nobody has even mentioned Seymour Glass, who accused the world of conspiring to make him happy (but committed suicide anyway.) I guess that Salinger’s reputation didn’t survive the Joyce Maynard episode.
One of the most interesting threads anywhere, anytime. Sorry I missed most of it.
Perhaps apophenia could designate mild, harmless, paranoia.
“Well, I keep having this strange feeling that people are plotting to do me good. That they’re trying to be benevolent and kind toward me. I don’t know exactly who they are, or why they wish me all this kindness, but…it’s all very fantastic, isn’t it?”
—Narapoia.
Suddenly there wells inside me the megalomaniac impression that I have been a part of something truly grand – something like… the most interesting thread anywhere, anytime. But then I think, nah. We have just received a
MISDIRECTION
from
IDIOCENTRISM.
Those patterns? They’re out there, I tell you. They’re out there!
I sometimes believe that I control other people’s minds, and sometimes they agree.
I’m not as paranoid as you all secretly think I am.
I’m just reporting what everyone else says, N.
As an ‘apophenic’ astrologer, it’s clear to me that the more you look for connections, the furtheraway from the centre you get. Apophenia suggests the the ability to intuitively wed unrelated phenomena and derive novelty as a result.
The connections are there. Stop staring at the lines and start trying to read the spaces. Neither couold exist without the other.
Neal, one of the early posts on this word topic, noted as did I that William Gibson, in his brilliant 2003 novel, Pattern Recognition, (after the term coined by McCluhan as the most vital ability of information gatherers), used the word apophenia (including definition, which he also disputed a bit.) Though I’ve been involved since the early 70s in keeping a journal of seemingly random but meaningful events or ‘coincidences; this was the first time I had encountered this word.
I understand that the marvelous August Strindberg was accused by psychiatrists of being psychotic due to his propensity towards what they termed ‘apophenia.’ Leave it to a criminal field like psychiatry, with their ECT, lobotomy, ‘therapeutic castration’ and Prozac to assault any evidence of the mystic or divine as madness. Worthy of mention that, in the psychiatric mouthpiece the New York Times, Sunday Science section in 1987, was an article stating that “The fastest growing schizophrenia in the Western world is the belief that one is a soul which can leave the body.” As an animist, artist and psychedelics expert, I just had to laugh at that one. To think the word ‘psyche’ bears on the Greek for soul and these villains usurped it for their name, then damn it with such insipid disinformation as that…
In mostly 2-3 line notes, I’ve amassed a journal (long-since entered in a Quark page layout), of over 200 pages length of such incidents from my experience, since 1973.
Rather than attempt to convince others of the authentic, rather than delusory importance of the phenomena of what WIlliam Burroughs called ‘Intersection Points’ and others have called ‘Synchronicity’; I suggest that anyone may start keeping a journal of these types of events in their own life and that in the process can learn for themselves that it is not ‘false’, ‘paranoiod’ nor demented. As with the keeping of a dream journal (my dream journal is over a thousand word-processor pages from 1968-2005), the more you notate, the more you recall. In the case of such a journal of Intersection Points, you will shortly see that the more you note them, the more plentiful and indeed, often deeply meaningful they are.
Or you can stay in the mentally flatline universe of spychiatry…
it is not ‘false’, ‘paranoiod’ nor demented
No, but it is coincidental. That’s the thing about coincidences: they’re everywhere.
i have been studying this defenition of apophenia and pareidolia for about 5 years, i have been documenting apophenia in nature, there is certainly an art connection or creative connection and a feeling of being in the moment. feelings are the main ingredient in apophenia as a guide. like an endorphin lift from giggles or laughing thinking these irrational thoughts have a creative use, you see things i like to call likenesses. like a vw after you buy one you start to recognize them from behind upside down or even on the side. they say gambling is a type of apophenia, i would agree as i think there are some pretty perceptive highly focused poker players, phil helmuth, daniel negranue, phil gordon, doyle brunsen. these are the ones you have to study if you want to know what they know. they watch the signs of others, the human animal us and sometimes can predict what they are doing. youi have to be in the top 90% to make money and there are a lot of players that are there and work to be there. apophenia is a skill. clouds for instance have been a warning to sailors for a long time. the weather is unpredictable but watching the wind blow by watching a flag can tell us what kind of day we are going to have on the water. so these pattern and meaning that are not supposed to be there are certainly telling us a lot. i have been documenting these visual patterns by way of digital camera and in hindsight has become a great hobby study. i have an interest because i think i am learning some good stuff? check out my website, nothing for sale.
allen comeau
The “Jet-Propelled Couch = Cordwainer Smith” theory has no direct proof, and probably no direct proof or disproof will ever be found, given that both Lindner and Linebarger’s papers were largely destroyed. Here are Alan Elms’s views as of 2002.
Wow, what a fascinating read. Did he ever finish and publish the biography of Linebarger? If so, did he discuss this? I suppose I could google, but I’m feeling lazy.
He’s retired, but still working on it. He also wrote an article on James Tiptree / Alice Sheldon (JSTOR), which points out that Tiptree’s story “The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things To Rats” is basically a light fictionalization of Sheldon’s Ph.D. studies on rats’ preferences for visual novelty.
Elms was Stanley Milgram’s original research assistant and still writes on authority issues. His home page is starcraving.com, which refers to the working title of Norstrilia, which was Star-Craving Mad; as he says, that sounds more like Smith himself than like Rod McBan.
Starcraving.com has unfortunately been down since 2016, although I haven’t been able to find out the status of Elms himself. However, one chapter of his book is posted there, a discussion of the story “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard”. Elms suggests that the term “Alpha Ralpha” is derived from the name of Ralph Alpher, a physicist and author of the famous Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow paper, who also taught at GWU at the same time as Linebarger, though they did not know each other: Alpher, Ralph (as he would appear in a directory listing) > Alpha Ralpha. There are other excellent insights in the essay.
Alpher did not appreciate the joke of including Bethe’s name on the paper. (Bethe did not contribute to the paper, which was based on Alpher’s dissertation reasearch on Big Bang nucleosynthesis, done under Gamow.) He felt that he would get less credit for the work if the world’s leading nuclear astrophysicist was added to the author list. (Bethe had already solved the problem of how hydrogen fusion could occur in the sun in 1939.)
Robert Herman, Gamow says, stubbornly refused to change his name to Delter.
Sam Knight discusses alleged precognition at the New Yorker. (All apophenia, of course, although as a reporter dedicated to entertainment and both-sidesism he leaves a bit of doubt hanging.)
There are now three English-language Google results for “apophaenia”. One is from The Beatles or the ‘White Album’, a book by Mark Goodall. One is from Languagehat. One is from “This Goes All the Way to the Queen” on Metafilter. All the rest seem to be in foreign language terminological sites, mainly Slavic.
And apophaenia.com was expired or deleted as a domain name in February 2018, so go for it!
Almost 17 years later: “apophenia” was a new entry in the OED in December 2021. The etymology notes that the word coined by K. Conrad in 1958 was actually Apophänie, in German and referring specifically to a stage of schizophrenia, followed by a first use of “apophenia” in English in a psychiatry journal in 1959. And the first citation in the sense you mean, “erroneous perception of patterns or correlations,” is from the very page you link to, The Skeptic’s Dictionary, dated 1999! So it was a brand new sense then — no wonder it took a while to get into dictionaries. (The skepdic page attributes this sense of “apophenia” to Peter Brugger, a Swiss neurologist, but Brugger’s article wasn’t published until 2001, so skepdic gets priority.)
Merriam-Webster was ahead of the OED: the Wayback Machine has captures for “apophenia” there starting from 2014. I haven’t found it in any other general dictionaries.
Sometime after you made this post, skepdic dutifully added a peeve sent in by a reader objecting to the new sense of “apophenia”: “a misnomer that has taken on a bastardized meaning never intended by the psychiatrist who coined the neologism”. Yeah, too late for that.
Ha! Thanks very much for that update; I’m glad it’s made it to the OED.
Huh, there was only one occurrence of pareidolia in this entire thread…
And for that matter only one occurrence of grmphthsfgrsly.
“From that gate grurmstipths start every quarter of an hour, both ways——”
“Would you mind repeating that word?” said Norman. “Grurm——?”
“Grurmstipths,” the Governor repeated. “You call them omnibuses in England.”
(A Tangled Tale, Knot VIII)