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InvisibleSwami
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Registered: 01/18/00
Posts: 15,413
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Apophenia
    #4863373 - 10/28/05 12:28 PM (18 years, 3 months ago)

from a CSICOP article:

This refers to a common perceptual phenomenon whereby we spontaneously perceive connections and find meaningfulness in unrelated things. In other words, it involves seeing or hearing patterns where in reality, none exist. A visual example is the Rorschach Inkblot test.

We may be the best pattern detectors that exist, but not all the patterns we find have any objective meaning. However, once we think we have detected a pattern, it is hard to ignore it, and generally, we take it to be meaningful. A common example of apophenia occurs when people are in the shower, and mistakenly think that they hear their door bell or telephone ringing. The white noise produced by the shower contains a broad spectrum of sounds, including those that make up ringing bells. The ear picks out certain sounds from the spectrum, and we ?detect? a pattern corresponding roughly to a bell.

(Apophenia is virtually synonymous with what has been called Pareidolia, an illusion involving misperception of an external stimulus; an obscure stimulus is viewed as something clear and distinct. Examples include instances such as when thousands of people in New Mexico saw the face of Jesus on a Tortilla chip in 1978. This perception, or misperception, does not involve conscious effort or any particular mental set, and the illusion does not vanish even when one pays closer attention to the stimulus because it is so ambiguous that it has no objective meaning at all.


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The proof is in the pudding.


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OfflinePanoramix
Getafix
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Registered: 11/26/03
Posts: 634
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Last seen: 11 years, 4 months
Re: Apophenia [Re: Swami]
    #4863942 - 10/28/05 03:29 PM (18 years, 3 months ago)

Neat stuff, that. People have a particular predilection for seeing eyes and faces in random patterns. Stems from a desire to see the familiar. When it comes to making mental connections that aren't there (that shopping bag is dancing with me, God wants me to know everything's peachy), it seems it's a sense of need for that 'objective meaning' nonsense that article kept talking about.


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Don't worry, I'm wrong.


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