Apophany

Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to attribute meaning to perceived connections or patterns between seemingly unrelated things.Confirmation bias is a variation of apophenia.

The term German, Apophänie, was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia. He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness". He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential, over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations.

Apophenia has come to imply a universal human tendency to seek patterns in random information, such as gambling.

Pareidolia is a type of apophenia involving the perception of images or sounds in random stimuli.

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.

Pareidolia usually occurs as a result of the fusiform face area, which is the part of the human brain that is responsible in seeing faces, mistakenly interpreting an object, shape or configuration with some kind of perceived "face-like" features as being a face.

In statistics and machine learning, apophenia is an example of what is known as overfitting. Overfitting occurs when a statistical model fits the noise rather than the signal. The model overfits the particular data or observations rather than fitting a generalizable pattern in a general population.

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