What do you call the phenomenon of seeing patterns in otherwise meaningless information?

Question

I thought the word was "apophenia," but dictionary.com denies this.

Answer 1

While 'apophenia' is one word used to describe this phenomenon, it is certainly not the only one. Which is, perhaps, where some of your difficulty arises.

The term apophenia was coined by Klaus Conrad who was a neurologist who tended to focus on the symptoms of psychosis. His definition in 1958 specifies 'abnormal meaningfulness' that is 'unmotivated'. And though he was looking for psychotic conditions, he decided that apophenia was not too uncommon for completely normal people, making it something on the order of deja-vu.

A term for what might be considered a sub-type of apophenia was also coined in 1994 by an advertising copywriter Steven Goldstein. 'Pareidolia' involves mistakenly recognizing an image or sound in what is actually a random sample. Commonly cited examples of this are seeing the 'man in the moon' or the face of Jesus in a tortilla.

You'll note the subtle difference between the two - pareidolia requires a random input and recognition, while apophenia just requires an excess of meaning. Both, however, are described as errors. It's interesting to note that pareidolia can LEAD to apophenia: as in the above torilla incident, first a person might see an unintended image, and then conclude that the image has some kind of vast and personal significance.

We can get more general as well as more specific, too. I mentioned deja vu above... all these conditions are almost undoubtedly quirks of the temporal lobe. The temporal lobe is responsible for pattern recognition and memory creation and recall. So misfires in the temporal lobe can not only cause false patterns to appear, but mistakes in some memories, linguisitic accidents such as spoonerisms, and other strange juxtapositions of meaning and nonsense.

Answer 2

It kind of reminds me of the main character in "A Beautiful Mind" John Forbes Nash Jr. His problem was schizophrenia though. In the movie he was finding links to communist plots in magazine articles.

Answer 3

Creative boredom.
Creating meaning out of an endless boring information.

Answer 4

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia