“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,” Shakespeare wrote, “have such seething brains, such shaping fantasies.” Their imaginations give “to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.” A seething brain can be a great asset for an artist, but, like Knausgaard’s churning, gray-green swell, it can be dangerous too. Inspired metaphors, paranormal beliefs, conspiracy theories, and delusional episodes may all exist on a single spectrum, recent research suggests. The name for the concept that links them is
apophenia.
Apophenia, he said, was a weakness of human cognition: the “pervasive tendency … to see order in random configurations,” an “unmotivated seeing of connections,” the experience of “delusion as revelation.” On the phone he unveiled his favorite formulation yet: “the tendency to be overwhelmed by meaningful coincidences.”
It is not just poets and the supernaturally suggestible (believers in witchcraft, Bigfoot, or psychic auras) who seem disposed to find signals in static. It is men and women suffering from schizophrenia, and perhaps bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder as well.
According to the researchers at University College, London, “[t]here is now considerable evidence that high
schizotypes … show a greater tendency to see patterns in random configurations and perceive meaning in coincidental events.”
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It’s All Connected ~What links creativity, conspiracy theories, and delusions? A phenomenon called apophenia.
