Apophenia
Tendency to perceive connections between unrelated things / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Apophany" redirects here. For the concept in linguistics, see Apophony.
Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things.[1] The term (German: Apophänie from the Greek verb ἀποφαίνειν (apophaínein)) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia.[2] He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness".[3][4] He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations.[1][5] Apophenia has also come to describe a human propensity to unreasonably seek definite patterns in random information, such as can occur in gambling.[4]
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