Apophenia

Apophenia /æpoʊˈfiːniə/ is the human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns within random data.

The term apparently dates back to 1958, when Klaus Conrad published a monograph titled Die beginnende Schizophrenie. Versuch einer Gestaltanalyse des Wahns ("The onset of schizophrenia: an attempt to form an analysis of delusion"), in which he described in groundbreaking detail the prodromal mood and earliest stages of schizophrenia. He coined the word "Apophänie" to characterize the onset of delusional thinking in psychosis. Conrad's theories on the genesis of schizophrenia have since been partially, yet inconclusively, confirmed in psychiatric literature when tested against empirical findings.

Conrad's neologism was translated into English as "apophenia" (from the Greek apo [away from] + phaenein [to show]) to reflect the fact that a person with schizophrenia initially experiences delusion as revelation.

In 2001 neuroscientist Peter Brugger referenced Conrad's terminology and defined the term as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness".

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.

For example, hearing a ringing phone, while taking a shower. The noise produced by the running water provides a background from which the mind perceives the sound of a phone. A more 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.

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Wikipedia