Apophenia is a fascinating example of how a psychological trait innate in humans can be both good and bad, and how it can be an essential part of healthy functioning and a part of mental illness.
Humans are information processors. We receive sensory information and our brains process it to make perceptions and judgments. In many cases, these educated guesses (“That’s a dog in the distance,” “That stranger looks friendly”) are accurate. In many cases, they are wrong. As we walk closer we may realize that that dog is a raccoon or a small bush. After interacting with him, we may learn that that stranger is rude.
The word coined by German psychiatrist Klaus Conrad, apophenia is an innate cognitive bias where people perceive connections and meaningfulness in unrelated information. Science writer Michael Shermer coined the term patternicity, defining it as "the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise."
Examples of apophenia include seeing animals in clouds, faces in a stone or the grain of wood, and images in Rorschach ink blots. Other examples include seeing non-existent patterns in gambling, superstitions, numerology, and making decisions such as selecting birthday numbers for a lottery ticket.
Art perception, such as seeing people, animals, trees and other objects in paintings, sketches and even photographs, are examples of apophenia. A painting demonstrates that almost everyone can see the same faces and animal figures where they do not physically exist. In fact, such fanciful, beyond the realms of reality imagination is likely essential to being a great artist.
Apophenia has an evolutionary benefit. It helped our ancestors make quick judgments and assumptions, often leaning towards caution for self-preservation. If you hear a strange sound in the middle of the night, you may automatically wonder if it is an intruder. This guess is usually wrong, but self-preservation requires overestimating danger.
When taken to an extreme, apophenia is unhealthy. People with extreme apophenia are at a higher risk of later developing psychoses including delusions, and are more likely to be conspiracy theorists. A feature of paranoid schizophrenia is perceiving non-existent meaning and connections.
Also interesting, is that the autistic have a heightened ability to detect real patterns in information, and many superintelligent people, such as Sherlock Holmes, are able to see authentic patterns and real meaning where others do not. Perhaps Sherlock Holmes was autistic.
This all says that a trait can itself be neither inherently good or bad, and that people who are considered healthy and mentally ill can share the same traits.
An ongoing issue is that we all make perceptions and judgments in situations where we cannot know and may never know the answer. We all have pet theories about current and historical events and the future where we cannot determine if the theory is legitimate or if we’ve “gone off the rails.” However, we can know how prone we are to seeing things where they do not objectively exist.