apophenia

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the tendency to perceive meaningful connections, patterns, or relationships between unrelated things, coined by the German psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in 1958 to describe a symptom of the early stages of psychosis; apophenia encompasses pareidolia — finding meaningful patterns in visual noise — as well as the perception of meaningful coincidences, hidden messages directed at oneself, and causal connections between unrelated events; while extreme apophenia is associated with schizophrenia spectrum disorders, mild apophenic tendencies are universal in human cognition and may reflect the same adaptive pattern-detection systems that support learning, creativity, and the identification of genuine causal relationships in complex environments; the concept is relevant to the understanding of conspiracy thinking, magical beliefs, gambling fallacies, and the formation of superstitions, all of which involve the perception of meaningful pattern in what statistics would characterise as noise or coincidence