Apophenia

[1] The term (German: Apophänie from the Greek verb: ἀποφαίνειν, romanized: apophaínein) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia.

[3][4] He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations.

[1][5] Apophenia has also come to describe a human propensity to unreasonably seek definite patterns in random information, such as can occur in gambling.

In contrast to an epiphany, an apophany (i.e., an instance of apophenia) does not provide insight into the nature of reality nor its interconnectedness, but is a "process of repetitively and monotonously experiencing abnormal meanings in the entire surrounding experiential field".

[11][12] In The Believing Brain (2011), Shermer wrote that humans have "the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency", which he called agenticity.

A clustering illusion is a type of cognitive bias in which a person sees a pattern in a random sequence of numbers or events.

[citation needed] One case, during the early 2000s, involved the occurrence of breast cancer among employees of ABC Studios in Queensland.

A study found that the incidence of breast cancer at the studios was six times the rate in the rest of Queensland.

[14] One of the explanations put forth by evolutionary psychologists for apophenia is that it is not a flaw in the cognition of human brains but rather something that has come about through years of need.

This experiment involved taking a hungry pigeon, placing it in a box and releasing food pellets at random times.