Apophenia:
A Patterned Life

[This essay, and others, are published no Medium.com here]

I learned a new word today; Apophenia.

I’m almost (but not) embarrassed to reveal that I learned it from TV. Well, from whatever we call TV now (Netflix, actually), from a show called ‘The Queen’s Gambit’. It’s a show about brilliance/addiction/youth/family, among other things (including, mostly, chess) written and directed by Scott Frank who also wrote screenplays for Minority Report, Get Shorty, The Interpreter, Little Man Tate, and Logan, on what seems like an impossible range of topics.

I’m still in mid-series (so don’t spoil it for me) but there’s a moment when a Life Magazine journalist asks the main character she’s interviewing if she has ever heard of apophenia. I hadn’t so made a note and looked it up:

Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to mistakenly perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. The term (German: Apophänie) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia.

That’s a bit misleading (we hope) leaning a bit too much on the pathology rather than the neuro/psychological aspect, but intriguing enough to jot down in the midst of an episode. Pareidolia, another word I’ve never heard until now appears to be a subset of apophenia:

Pareidolia (/pærɪˈdoʊliə/ parr-i-DOH-lee-ə) is the tendency for incorrect perception of a stimulus as an object, pattern or meaning known to the observer, such as seeing shapes in clouds, seeing faces in inanimate objects or abstract patterns, or hearing hidden messages in music. Pareidolia can be considered a subcategory of apophenia.

A common example is the perception of a face within an inanimate object — the headlights and grill of an automobile may appear to be “grinning”. People around the world see the “Man in the Moon”. People sometimes see the face of a religious figure in a piece of toast or in the grain of a piece of wood. There is strong evidence that the use of psychedelic drugs tends to induce or enhance pareidolia.

Pareidolia was at one time considered a symptom of human psychosis, but it is now seen as a normal human tendency.

I understand the dual nature of pattern perception, at once a magical insight that can tip over into extremely disturbing illusions, even delusions.

The dual nature of pattern recognition doesn’t, in my view, compromise its incredible usefulness: 
I live a life of apophenia, and can’t imagine a life without it.

For someone whose first understanding of something tends to be visual, apophenia is an invaluable tool. It’s a way of organizing the visual world and extrapolating meaning from it. The meaning part is where, for some, it can go off the rails.

Belief in QAnon depends on the tendency to make connections where there are none. In fact, all conspiracy theory, and other mistaken conclusions like the gambler’s fallacy, rely on the usually useful tendency to connect disconnected things. This is not an ‘explorative’ use of connections, where one is open to a variety of disparate inputs. This is a closed, predetermined methodology for arriving at a foregone conclusion. One can use pattern recognition in service of evoking solutions (good), or one can follow conspiracists and devise an answer for any contradictory input (bad).

This may be the difference between psychotic and creative uses of patterns and connections. Psychotics (and an alarmingly wide variety of the mentally ill) use patterns to reinforce what they already believe (“Democrats run a child trafficking ring out of the basement of a pizza restaurant”) and to explain countervailing information so as not to undo their beliefs (“the restaurant has no basement, so they must have filled it in to deter the conspiracists”).

Connections, the 1970’s BBC show with leisure-suited James Burke linking a daisy-chain of inventions/realizations into a cogent theory of scientific theory, is one of those touchstones in my TV life. It is a seminal idea packaged in the most BBC-ish way possible. [It contains, btw, the best-timed bit of television ever shot, here.] It is apophenia structured as an enjoyable almost-hour of TV.

[As an aside, BBC TV never fits into our time scheme, here in the advertising-driven US of A. 49 minutes? In the USA that’s really 39 minutes. It’s like the pound vs dollar. In fact it is almost exactly like the GBP vs USD, based on today’s exchange rate. I guess we need a TV-time-exchange-rate too.]

I do the New York Times crossword puzzle every day. According to the statistics on the app I use, I’ve done it every day for the last 1,176 days. Distractions are absolutely necessary these days especially since the reign of Don Trump (which are happily numbered! Go Joe!). Patterns are essential in solving crosswords, and I always solve them. I can solve any NYT’s crossword, given enough time, so speed is the real measure of facility for me.

There are a few tools one develops to solve crosswords; learning the familiar, high vowel count, words that appear where no solution seems possible (repeaters, they are sometimes called): Emu, Iambi, Erato, Smee, Oreo, Sty and Stye, Ere, Ante, Epee. And just being old helps, when the clues call for old TV show stars, names of ancient weapons or long gone singers. But my fave is to ignore the clues and focus on what words fill a developing pattern. It is exercising a different muscle, more visual and less grammatical, more right-brained and less left-brained.

The psychedelic citation in the definition of pareidolia is interesting. Current clinical studies using LSD, psilocybin, ketamine, etc. are aimed at breaking, not making, patterns of thought. Maybe it’s similar to ADHD and Adderall. Adderall is speed, which is a counterintuitive way to create calm and focus in an easily distracted person. It’s the opposite effect from what other, unafflicted users might experience, but helpful for attention deficit.

In ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ the drug of choice is a tranquilizer, ostensibly Librium, which seems an unlikely way to access the predictive qualities of pattern recognition for chess, but I’ll play along. That Anya Taylor-Joy’s character hallucinates chess boards on her bedroom ceiling is an interesting conceit, but more an illustrative device than a realistic interpretation of how one ‘sees’ patterns. When we refer to ‘3-dimensional chess’ or seeing ’11 moves ahead’ we are talking about complex pattern recognition and projection. It is represented as computer-like, rapid sequences exploring all possible answer trees; but in actual thinking, it is really insight, not iteration.

Alice Collins Plebuch is at the center of a story about her own confusing DNA test and her deceased father’s ancestry (spoiler alert: he was switched at birth in a Bronx hospital). She was able to sort backward through the confusing mess of data because, as it turns out, she ‘likes to find patterns hidden in the chaos’. Her ability to see what other’s might not is a kind of innate genius, something she recognized and employed in her work life as a data and IT analyst. It lead to a disturbing conclusion, but maybe that’s the flip side of seeing patterns; they aren’t always positive.

Of course, some pattern meanings are simply superstitions, especially numbers; 222 (my draft lottery number that kept me out of Vietnam), 030303 (the date I turned 50), 101010 (Julius Shulman’s birthday and the date I started Biber Architects), and virtually every set of numbers people play for Lotto, Powerball, Kino and Mega Millions. If you have to pick some numbers they might as well be harmless, yet personally meaningful.

Patterns are an invaluable part of making architecture, and I don’t mean stripes or plaids. When I had just graduated A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander, was published, and I still don’t really understand it. Or, to be more precise, I am utterly disinterested in prescriptive methodologies for design. A Pattern Language tries to codify patterns, which is exactly the opposite of what I think pattern recognition is good for.

Finding connections, seeing patterns, is part of what we bring to the game and codifying it seems like draining all the fun out. I started my college career studying biology, something I loved and was reasonably good at in high school. Being good at something in high school, we find out a bit too late, is indicative of exactly nothing. I left that world when, in addition to my dread of organic chemistry, I realized that I would be jettisoning all my moral choices and processing data at the most minute level. I wouldn’t be making things, but observing and recording things. [That was then, and now biology is an entirely different world, but I still dread organic chemistry]

Design Thinking, the latest attempt to elevate design’s usefulness in business, is an attempt to codify a method for the unexplainable. It is like teaching a language by focusing on pronunciation, not words or meaning; misguided and ultimately obstructive. Teaching creativity can’t be about methodology, but about literacy.

My elementary school had required classes in art, woodworking, music, cooking, even French, in an attempt to create facility across a range of right brain tasks (also teaching us the proper way to fold the New York Times in order to read it on the subway). Pattern recognition requires a bit of knowledge in lots of areas, and sensitivity to how they might connect. Turning this into a spreadsheet, a rote method or a mechanical process undermines the very exercise one needs to creatively useful apophenia.

Happy to learn a new word, especially one that I have been unwittingly referring to for years. And happy to have A Queen’s Gambit to help pass the time nervously awaiting election results. And most of all, happy the insanely complicated and addictive apophenia we have all been living with (i.e. electoral college results, based on popular vote by state) is behind us. For now. Sort of.