Apophenia is a term coined in 1958 by K. Conrad. It refers to the act of making connections where none exist. In an environment like the Internet, which is structured entirely by connections between seemingly unconnected things, apophenia becomes a useful mode of thought, since there is nothing on the Internet which cannot be plausibly linked to something else on the Internet. Tenuous links thus begin to define the environment, a kind of Nowhere which cannot be navigated by linear thinking. Apophenia becomes a way of anticipating the structure of this new environment.

Apparent apophenia is also a tool of creativity, which links things whose connectedness is merely hidden to conventional thought. Carried to extremes, apophenia leads to an obsession with conspiracy theories, which can validate unacknowledged emotional pathologies.

The nexus of rational non-liner thought, creativity and emotional pathology is the unsettled existential condition of 21st-Century human beings.

Here's a link to an article about apophenia with links from "The Skeptic's Dictionary":

http://skepdic.com/apophenia.html

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Hit the road to nowhere:

http://home.earthlink.net/~navigare/

I have to disagree strongly. Although I liked the Skeptics dictionary link.

Apophenia does not help you do anything else that spend time on the internet. It can be entertaining, but as any searchstring user will tell, it is the small sensible connections what usually nail the hit. Big random sweeps will find interesting things, but never what you are looking for.

And Geniality (artistic or otherwise) is finding the hidden links that nobody else sees, not a lucky hit among apophenic connections. By its own success, it takes apophenia out of the picture. Just consider military genius an instant...

Probably the same Dopamine related process that is linked with apophenia helps weaken the established neural processes to make it possible to discern those out of the ordinary connections and a few geniuses have been apophenic. But it is not a necessary condition. And considering the ratio of apophenics to genius, a desirable one.

Apophenia is by definition a pathological condition. It represents an exaggeration of the mind's natural tendency to seek connections between things, to make the world legible. The mind has a counter tendency to dismiss or ignore tenuous connections between things, so as not to be overwhelmed by information. There is a theory that autism results from a mind's inability to make distinctions between different kinds of information, to privilege certain kinds of information over others. The world becomes pure noise.
What I was suggesting was that the traditional balance between these tendencies has shifted in the information age, out of necessity. The shift in the amount of information available and the speed and nature of its transmission has caused a parallel shift in the way we process it. It is no accident that the very word apophenia was coined in the second half of the 20th Century. The pathological nature of apophenia is a relative concept. Since all things are in fact connected in some way, the question becomes which connections we should regard as important and useful for organizing experience and which we should dismiss as unimportant and useless.
Apophenia can thus reflect genuine misapprehension, of cause and effect, for example, or it can reflect a slight distortion of the balance between the tendency to seek useful connections between things and the tendency to dismiss useless connections between things. I am suggesting that this balance is in the process of readjustment, which must result in a readjustment of our sense of where the pathological borders of apophenia actually lie.
This dynamic has in fact always been in flux and a subject of cultural negotiation. To a hard-headed man of business, a poet who sees eternity in a grain of sand is in the grip of apophenia. Today, the dynamic has simply grown more intense and dramatic.

In terms of the Internet, for example, you are correct that obvious links between information make it more likely that you will find something you're looking for -- but less obvious links make it more likely that you will find something you didn't know you were looking for but might in fact be more useful to you than what you originally went off in search of.


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Hit the road to nowhere:

http://home.earthlink.net/~navigare/

We are mostly in agreement, now that you explained your point. I do believe many of the pattern recognition habits are social and cultural in origin, so we are already training the next generation on the jumbled nature of internet searching.

Which is why using the same tools, some people always find what they want, while others get frustrated.

My pattern recognition abilities in a forest will be nil, while a hunter friend recognizes a lot of information in one glance.

But I do not think we are shifting the borders between apophenia and real pattern recognition. We are just switching recognition patterns.

" . . . I do not think we are shifting the borders between apophenia and real pattern recognition. We are just switching recognition patterns."

Right -- but as those recognition patterns become more diffuse the boundaries of perceived apophenia recede a bit.

The key point is that apophenia is less a precise medical diagnosis than a cultural perception subject to negotiation, and the point at which it's perceived as a psychological disorder is shifting.

I think this is a major theme of Gibson's book. In order to solve her mysteries, Cayce needs to make lots of apparently irrational (or even paranoid) connections between things, and is always wondering if they are in fact irrational and paranoid or simply logical responses to the new ways information is transmitted and interconnected.
Her dilemma is everyone's these days, to a degree rarely acknowledged -- which is one reason the book seems so radically new.

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Hit the road to nowhere:

http://home.earthlink.net/~navigare/

I'm most likely confused.
I got distracted a little in reading the thread.
Is pattern recognition linked to branching as a multitasking behavior? If so then are ADD and hyperactives with branching abilities likely to stumble on a pattern, apophenic or not? But if the pattern is apophenic and it leads to the original goal is the apophenia spiraled around a fact based branch? Nevermind, I lost my point in questions.

Lloyd posted:

The key point is that apophenia is less a precise medical diagnosis than a cultural perception subject to negotiation, and the point at which it's perceived as a psychological disorder is shifting.

Apophenia is not a disorder. It is a common response programmed into the human brain. The brain is highly developed to look for patterns in our surroundings. It is perfectly natural to mistakenly perceive patterns where none exist. The effect is strongly amplified by past experience and preconceptions. Gibson's character, Cayce, exhibits all of these behaviors. His mesage (to me) was that there is this huge reservoir of random noise to tap into called the internet, so we are highly empowered to extract all varieties of images with much more complex structures than we were pre-internet. My own message that I extracted from the book is a self-referrential one - that these images are a reflection of our own pysche and not of the information available.

quote:

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Originally posted by noisemaker:

Apophenia is not a disorder. It is a common response programmed into the human brain. The brain is highly developed to look for patterns in our surroundings. It is perfectly natural to mistakenly perceive patterns where none exist. The effect is strongly amplified by past experience and preconceptions. Gibson's character, Cayce, exhibits all of these behaviors. His mesage (to me) was that there is this huge reservoir of random noise to tap into called the internet, so we are highly empowered to extract all varieties of images with much more complex structures than we were pre-internet. My own message that I extracted from the book is a self-referrential one - that these images are a reflection of our own pysche and not of the information available.

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Apophenia does not refer to the brain's natural inclination to find patterns but to a condition in which that inclination is exaggerated to an extreme degree leading to dysfunctional reasoning. It's a disordering of the natural process.

In "Pattern Recognition", Cayce is certainly projecting her own psyche onto the informational noise of the Internet, but she's also trying to read that noise for useful conclusions about real-life events.

It's the dynamic between these two modes of thought, and the ways that the Internet is affecting that dynamic, which Gibson is speculating about in the novel.

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Hit the road to nowhere:

http://home.earthlink.net/~navigare/

I was not going to post, but I believe good posts should be recognized. Even if we clearly think differently on the form, I believe we agree in the fundamental idea.

I just encountered this word last night.

Does anybody if it is a clinical diagnosis yet?
Are there meds?1?

Apophenia is a symptom, a disorder, not a diagnosis. There are many causes, from minor to serious. You should try to get your particular problem diagnosed, and if treated correctly, the apophenia should disappear too.

I WANT MEDS!

You know, the unrefective easy fix.

Yup. That's for me.

Actually, my condidtion is more fun than a problem. I ain't near schitzophrenic...yet.

Is it apophenia when you notice a pattern of spelling errors and rapid posting in multiple forums on the WGB?
I don't think so.

If you look long enough at your monitor, do you see the image of Macaulay Culkin?

quote:

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Originally posted by Fashionpolice:
Is it apophenia when you notice a pattern of spelling errors and rapid posting in multiple forums on the WGB?
I don't think so.

If you look long enough at your monitor, do you see the image of Macaulay Culkin?

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Is it apopholiptic to notice that there's one of you on every board.

You're kinda slacking though...took you about two hours to get on top of this "situation"...doesn't bode well fo Control...don't expect a lot of attention from me in the future...nothing personal....

A good candidate for Apophenia indeed. Lots of related symptoms. Of course, the real tragedy of apopheniacs is that they cannot understand why the other people do not see things the way they do.

I do sometimes wonder how is that obliviousness has somehow become adaptive, it our rich cultural mileu....yah!

But really, reminds me of theose stories about the high incidence of forms of autism in those superbrained Silicon Valley families...there are worries that if genetic testing causes such a population to not breed or to have selective abortion, then we'd loss that one out of four who would be an uber-genius instead of an autistic.

Maybe apophenia is similar, diysfunctional to mildly annoying in 75% of those who manifest it, and utter brilliance in the other 25%.

Oh um I guess maybe i am babbling...sorry....

If it is brilliant it is not apophenia, although you have nothing to fear in that respect. You know yourself best.