In which Wolf opens day 5's door... Watch this episode on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/OgUNehcUPaI
Welcome to the Beware of Wolf Advent Calendar of Bad Thinking. To celebrate the holidays, I'm counting down the days until Christmas with a common type of bad thinking each day, described in 60 seconds. This holiday season, give the gift of good thinking by sharing these videos with your friends!
Today is Day 5: "Apophenia"
I'm sure you've seen "accidental faces." This is where you're looking at an everyday object and suddenly have the perception that it's looking back at you. It might be a tree, our a household appliance, or well, almost anything. Our brains are wired to see faces; even to the point of seeing faces where there really aren't any.
"Apophenia" is what we call our tendency to find meaningful connections between all sorts of unrelated things. Like a lot of human behaviors, a little apophenia is a good thing. It's the root of "synchronicity", which Carl Jung described as events related not by causality, but by the meaning we find in them. Apophenia helps us make creative connections and make our own meaning and purpose in life.
Too much apophenia and we start to get into the eccentric world of fantasy prone personalities. Beyond that lies paranoid conspiracies, leading all the way to schizophrenic disconnection from reality, like that depicted in the movie "A Beautiful Mind."
A healthy attitude toward apophenia is to view it as a useful tool that can lead to creative ideas and insights, but always do investigation and analysis before drawing definitive conclusions. Questioning one's own "flashes of insight," and asking others to play "devil's advocate" with your favorite ideas are important ways to help distinguish meaningful connections from false and misleading ones.
Happy Holidays!