A posh word for it…

The other day, I came across a word that was new to me: apophenia. It is not in Chambers Dictionary, and at first I wondered whether it was a misprint. But, of course, there is masses about it on the internet.

What seems a reliable article in Wikipedia attributes it to the psychologist Klaus Conrad, who defined it in 1958 as ‘the unmotivated seeing of connections’, and the article goes on to say that ‘apophenia has come to imply a universal tendency to seek patterns in random information’.

The penny dropped that this is what is behind some of my ‘phantom flies in amber’ (search on that term for previous posts). I have put together certain objective features on the photograph of the 1st KOSB going over the top on 4 June 1915 and made a pattern that I’ve called ‘George Calderon’ (see my post of 14 June 2016). I took the facts that my great-aunt and -uncle lived a couple of miles from Kittie in Ashford, Kent, demonstrably shared some acquaintances with Kittie, and told me after I returned from Russia in 1973 that ‘Mrs X’s husband also went to Russia’, where X was a foreign-sounding name that I promptly forgot, and I perceived a pattern in this information that spelt ‘my family knew Kittie Calderon’. But in neither case, I stress, did I believe that these perceived patterns had any basis in reality. In fact, I regard them both as nearly unverifiable ever in this world, and therefore intriguing but nothing more.

There seems, however, to be some confusion about ‘apophenia’. You would have thought that the ability to see patterns was a vital creative ability for both artists and scientists. But Conrad’s 1958 publication was entitled Incipient Schizophrenia: An Attempt at a Gestalt-Analysis of Delusion and he thought ‘apophenia’ was a symptom of the onset of delusional thinking in psychosis!

Apparently, apophenia is all right when the pattern leads to empirical testing that in turn leads to ‘insight into the nature of reality or its interconnectedness’, but when it is just ‘a process of […] experiencing abnormal meanings in the entire experiential field’ then those meanings are ‘entirely self-referential, solipsistic, and paranoid’. In fact, one learns, the proper word for the first (i.e. leading to insight into the nature of reality etc) is pareidolia, and apophenia is the abnormal one leading to conspiracy theories, OCD, paranoia and schizophrenia.

It took me forty-five years before I could see the Man in the Moon, yet this is a standard case of pareidolia, apparently. Another would be the ‘face of Satan’ in the smoke trailing down one of the twin towers on 11 September 2001, which I spotted immediately. It’s difficult to see, though, how either of these provides ‘insight into the nature of reality or its interconnectedness’; there’s nothing empirically revealing about them, they are just images. On the other hand, if I jumped to the conclusion that the moon really is a big man’s head, or that Satan personally was telling us he is still alive and kicking, that would be apophenia and the first step towards schizophrenia.

So presumably, wondering whether the famous photograph of the 1st KOSB going over the top shows George Calderon, and hypothesising that my great-aunt and -uncle knew Kittie, are examples of pareidolia (even though I don’t attach any empirical value to them) because at least I’m not mad enough to attach any mystical, conspiratorial significance to the patterns I have perceived here.

That’s all right, then. But it seems to me that apophenia and pareidolia still share the very same process of initial discovery or ‘revelation’. According to Wikipedia’s entry on pareidolia, the latter is a sub-category of apophenia. But surely, if apophenia is the abnormal one, it should be a sub-category of pareidolia, or they both should be sub-categories of that ‘universal tendency to seek patterns in random information’ which apparently does not have a name of its own?

All I can say is, it seems to me that (a) as a biographer one should always be alert to these perceivable patterns, in case there is something verifiable and empirically useful in them, and (b) like the ‘phantom flies in amber’ these patterns don’t half ‘bug’ you once you’ve joined up the dots and perceived them!

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