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Apophenia (/ æ p oʊ ˈ f iː n i ə /) is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. [ 1 ] 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 .
The following are types of apophenia: Clustering illusion, the tendency to overestimate the importance of small runs, streaks, or clusters in large samples of random data (that is, seeing phantom patterns). [12] Illusory correlation, a tendency to inaccurately perceive a relationship between two unrelated events. [18] [19]
Satellite photograph of a mesa in the Cydonia region of Mars, often called the "Face on Mars" and cited as evidence of extraterrestrial habitation. Pareidolia (/ ˌ p ær ɪ ˈ d oʊ l i ə, ˌ p ɛər-/; [1] also US: / ˌ p ɛər aɪ-/) [2] is the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one detects an object, pattern, or ...
Apophenia, also known as patternicity, [21] [22] or agenticity, [23] is the human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns within random data. Apophenia is well documented as a rationalization for gambling. Gamblers may imagine that they see patterns in the numbers which appear in lotteries, card games, or roulette wheels. [24]
Apophenia – Tendency to perceive connections between unrelated things; Affirming the consequent – Type of fallacious argument (logical fallacy) Association fallacy – Informal inductive fallacy; Cargo cult – New religious movement; Causal inference – Branch of statistics concerned with inferring causal relationships between variables
This fallacy is the philosophical or rhetorical application of the multiple comparisons problem (in statistics) and apophenia (in cognitive psychology). It is related to the clustering illusion, which is the tendency in human cognition to interpret patterns where none actually exist.
Apophenia is defined as "the spontaneous finding of connections or meaning in things which are random, unconnected or meaningless", and has been put forward as a possible explanation. [52] According to the psychologist James Alcock what people hear in EVP recordings can best be explained by apophenia, cross-modulation or expectation and wishful ...
Historically, the terms apophenia and apophany derive from the German neologism Apophänie, which was introduced in or shortly before 1958 by the German neurologist and psychiatrist Klaus Conrad (1905–1961) to denote an “unmotivated seeing of connections” accompanied by a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness”.