I just finished reading William Gibson‘s Pattern Recognition. (As with all things Gibsonian, I highly recommend it). One of the concepts that comes up throughout it is apophenia. For those unfamiliar with the term, here’s the Wikipedia definition (with examples):
Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.
This made it all the more ironic for me when I read this sentence in the book this morning, pertaining to an email where a character talks about a plane he has found during a dig on the steppes outside Stalingrad/Volgograd:
It’s a whole plane and for some fucking reason it wound up under four feet of muck, but this Guru character knew where it was. He claims its dreams and visions but I think he walks around in the winter with a metal detector. So he’d said here, this plane is here, dig, and before we came back to London they’d sunk a trench and hit it. But bribery and threats prevailed, at least till we got back with the extra cameras and crew, because I wanted this plane emerging to be the climax of the film. No idea it would be a Stuka; blew me away; it’s just this most Nazi-looking aircraft, amazing. Dive-bomber, they used them on the Spanish, Guernica and that.
Now, pivot to a New York Times article I’m reading just a few minutes later, recommended by someone I follow on Twitter:
Grab a timer and set it for one minute. Now list as many creative uses for a brick as you can imagine. Go.
The question is part of a classic test for creativity, a quality that scientists are trying for the first time to track in the brain.
They hope to figure out precisely which biochemicals, electrical impulses and regions were used when, say, Picasso painted “Guernica,” or Louise Nevelson assembled her wooden sculptures.
I love it. Teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for his life. Teach a man about apophenia and he’ll see meaningless connections everywhere.