What is Apophenia?

When someone sees patterns which do not really exist, this is known as apophenia. Apophenia can take a wide range of forms, from thinking that the same number turns up too often to be mere coincidence to seeing a man in the moon. In some cases, apophenia is used as a criteria for the diagnosis of mental illness, but having apophenia does not necessarily imply that someone is mentally ill; many extremely creative people, for example, have demonstrated apophenia.

One of the most common forms of apophenia involves numbers. Many people are under the impression that a particular number keeps appearing in their lives; 23 is a common choice. They may start seeing that particular number everywhere, either in pure form or in the form of numbers which add up to it. This type of apophenia has often been the subject of films and books which involve cursed numbers.

In another form of apophenia called pareidolia, people pull shapes or sounds out of meaningless data. The most well known example of pareidolia is probably cloud-gazing, in which people see shapes in the forms of clouds in the sky. Many people also exhibit pareidolia when they pull meaningful sounds from static in the radio, and it can sometimes be extremely frustrating, as other people will not recognize those sounds or patterns.

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