I never knew there was a word for this before, but apparently apophenia is “the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena.” Skeptic’s Dictionary has a page dedicated to debunking this type of phenomenon. Coined in 1958 by Karl Conrad, the term was originally intended to describe the state of “distorted” reality present in psychosis. Wikipedia also has a small entry on it. Also worth checking out in relation to this is a previous post of mine with quotes about what the experience of schizophrenia is like.

Despite, or perhaps because of, it’s connection to psychosis, apophenia is also understood to be closely tied to creativity as well. Of course, the entry on Skeptic’s Dictionary completely glosses over that fact, and instead uses the concept of apophenia as some sort of “proof” that paranormal phenomenon are not real, and are merely connections manufactured by the mind. Even though it will likely never come, I can’t wait for the day when us real humans take over the world, and instead of having terms to describe the “disorder” of perceiving connections between things, we have words to describe those primitive minds who are unable to see these meaningful connections.

On a related note, also check out their entry on pareidolia, which is the phenomenon of seeing depictions of the Virgin Mary in burnt grilled cheese sandwiches, and things of that ilk. They similarly spend a lot of time trying to slay that phenomenon as well. They do point out that this tendency is used with some success in the Rorscharch ink blot test, wherein a person projects interior contents outwards. But I think they miss the really important point, that they themselves are doing the whole thing. Their entire website is an example of pareidolia. They are projecting their own biases and feelings onto the metaphorical “grilled cheese sandwiches” of the topics which they discuss.