Apophenia

Take a look at this:

What does this look like? Sure, it’s an electrical outlet, but do you see a shocked face?

Doesn’t it look like they want nothing to do with that impending plug?

This is a form of apophenia, the very human tendency to see patterns in things that aren’t really there. Apophenia shows up all over the place: you might see what looks like a predictable pattern in the throw of the craps dice in Vegas, or you might find a correlation between astrological signs and events in your own life.

Or, you might see faces everywhere.

This tendency is called pareidolia, from the ancient Greek para (beside) and eidōlon (shape). It isn't just a trick our minds play on us; it's deeply rooted in our survival instincts and evolutionary history.

From an evolutionary perspective, being able to quickly identify a face in our environment has been crucial to our survival as a species. Sometimes, your life depended on whether you could locate another human nearby.

Is it any wonder, then, that we sometimes err on the side of seeing too many faces?

We even appear to have a special part of our brains just for detecting and interpreting faces, the fusiform face area.

The fusiform face area and related parts of the brain are wired to be very sensitive, and survival has dictated that it’s better to err on the side of caution. When these areas are activated, even by vague or abstract stimuli, we experience pareidolia.

Of course, the natural world isn’t the only place our minds imagine patterns. Take a look at this Rorschach inkblot. Do you see any images or patterns?

Rorschach inkblot tests like the image above rely on apophenia to get the subject talking. We see patterns that aren’t there, and through these unexpected connections, maybe we reveal a little bit about how our minds work.

Any time we can use our quirks and limitations in order to understand ourselves better, I’m all for it.

However, there’s a darker side of apophenia I touched on earlier, where a person can have a tendency to make catastrophic mistakes correlating things that aren’t really correlated.

Our tendency to connect things leaves us susceptible to conspiracy theories. We’re suckers for confirmation bias. Social media exacerbates and amplifies us, connecting its own dots that may or may not really be there.

Our best defense against inadvertently falling victim to apophenia is understanding what it is. Congratulations on being a part of this conversation!

Think back: what are some areas in your life where you’ve experienced apophenia? What are some common areas where people “find” patterns where there are none?