Wait, it's all apophenia?
Always has been
(For a quick reminder on what apophenia is in case you missed it, check out this earlier post!)
The other night I was lay in bed half asleep and had an epiphany about the number 4. I realised how it connects to so many things and has had major significance throughout my life. Plus my favourite number is 16 which is FOUR TIMES FOUR so that’s got to be super important, right? I mean obviously not, no. I woke up the next day and 4 no longer seemed like anything special, and the note in my phone that just read “2024” and nothing else seemed entirely meaningless.
It did make me want to share this video with you. I first saw this when a teacher showed it to us at school. I was around 15 years old at the time and it has stuck with me ever since. I love that, how something can impact you so much that you continue to refer back to it time after time over the years. Anyway, it’s funny and clever so you should give it a watch if you’ve never seen it (or even if you have).
Watching Rives talk about the 4am Mystery really hammers home how easy it is to find patterns and links in absolutely anything. I know his point is probably to make fun of conspiracy theories and demonstrate how easy they are to evidence - which I totally get - but to me he also seems to amazingly exemplify how my mind works. As I’ve previously mentioned, my brain regularly goes into overdrive with pattern-seeking. I see connections constantly, which ranges from being really helpful in my work as an artist to being classed as delusional and resulting in psychiatric treatment. Personally I couldn’t imagine seeing the world in any other way, so it’s something I’m perfectly happy with.
An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior
I’ve also previously talked about the way one perceives meaning in narrative works. Combine this with a well-known form of apophenia, pareidolia, and you get this amazing study.
Participants were asked to describe what happened in the clip above. Only one of 34 participants described the scene in “geometrical” terms.
All other [participants] interpreted the movements as actions of animate beings, in most cases of persons; in two cases of birds. Nineteen [participants] reported a connected story.
Heider F. & Simmel M. (1944)
(Academic login required if you want to read it sorry ;_;)
I absolutely love this. People came up with entire stories to describe what was going on, featuring lovers and heroes and villains. What a wonderful aspect of human interpretation. There’s also something to be said around how this sets us apart from artificially intelligent machines, as we are able to interpret so much additional meaning beyond what is concretely visible. This is a massive topic that I don’t think I could do much justice to, but if you are interested in it I recommend Casey Hudetz's very sweet and interesting series I Want My Son Back.
Anyway, this article about the Heider & Simmel study features some of the descriptions if you’d like to read them.
Thanks as always for reading. I hope you enjoyed this week’s travels in unreality. I’ve got many more excellent posts lined up ahead for you so if you’ve not subscribed yet please do. You wouldn’t wanna miss it, I promise.
And with that, I shall leave you on this incredibly unnerving note...
Edie xxx
We are all story tellers , and the brain loves a narrative to help it make sense of its experiences. I am intrigued by the Wason selection task: the puzzle is easily solved when the criteria are changed because our brains are wired to perform some logical tasks rather than others. Or something like that..