Monday, September 12, 2005

Apophenia

I've got a busy day today so the only bone I can throw you is a word that you can toss into a discussion of weblogs (or indeed almost any internet phenomenon) if you are bored but you want to sound clever.

Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness".

Conrad originally described this phenomenon in relation to the distortion of reality present in psychosis, but it has become more widely used to describe this tendency in healthy individuals without necessarily implying the presence of neurological or mental illness.

He travelled all aroung the world and everywhere he went
He'd use this word and all would say, "there goes a clever gent."

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