The other day, I came across a word that was new to me: apophenia. It is not in Chambers Dictionary, and at first I wondered whether it was a misprint. But, of course, there is masses about it on the internet.
What seems a reliable article in Wikipedia attributes it to the psychologist Klaus Conrad, who defined it in 1958 as ‘the unmotivated seeing of connections’, and the article goes on to say that ‘apophenia has come to imply a universal tendency to seek patterns in random information’.
The penny dropped that this is what is behind some of my ‘phantom flies in amber’ (search on that term for previous posts). I have put together certain objective features on the photograph of the 1st KOSB going over the top on 4 June 1915 and made a pattern that I’ve called ‘George Calderon’ (see my post of 14 June 2016). I took the facts that my great-aunt and -uncle lived a couple of miles from Kittie in Ashford, Kent, demonstrably shared some acquaintances with Kittie, and told me after I returned from Russia in 1973 that ‘Mrs X’s husband also went to Russia’, where X was a foreign-sounding name that I promptly forgot, and I perceived a pattern in this information that spelt ‘my family knew Kittie Calderon’. But in neither case, I stress, did I believe that these perceived patterns had any basis in reality. In fact, I regard them both as nearly unverifiable ever in this world, and therefore intriguing but nothing more.
There seems, however, to be some confusion about ‘apophenia’. You would have thought that the ability to see patterns was a vital creative ability for both artists and scientists. But Conrad’s 1958 publication was entitled Incipient Schizophrenia: An Attempt at a Gestalt-Analysis of Delusion and he thought ‘apophenia’ was a symptom of the onset of delusional thinking in psychosis!
Apparently, apophenia is all right when the pattern leads to empirical testing that in turn leads to ‘insight into the nature of reality or its interconnectedness’, but when it is just ‘a process of […] experiencing abnormal meanings in the entire experiential field’ then those meanings are ‘entirely self-referential, solipsistic, and paranoid’. In fact, one learns, the proper word for the first (i.e. leading to insight into the nature of reality etc) is pareidolia, and apophenia is the abnormal one leading to conspiracy theories, OCD, paranoia and schizophrenia.
It took me forty-five years before I could see the Man in the Moon, yet this is a standard case of pareidolia, apparently. Another would be the ‘face of Satan’ in the smoke trailing down one of the twin towers on 11 September 2001, which I spotted immediately. It’s difficult to see, though, how either of these provides ‘insight into the nature of reality or its interconnectedness’; there’s nothing empirically revealing about them, they are just images. On the other hand, if I jumped to the conclusion that the moon really is a big man’s head, or that Satan personally was telling us he is still alive and kicking, that would be apophenia and the first step towards schizophrenia.
So presumably, wondering whether the famous photograph of the 1st KOSB going over the top shows George Calderon, and hypothesising that my great-aunt and -uncle knew Kittie, are examples of pareidolia (even though I don’t attach any empirical value to them) because at least I’m not mad enough to attach any mystical, conspiratorial significance to the patterns I have perceived here.
That’s all right, then. But it seems to me that apophenia and pareidolia still share the very same process of initial discovery or ‘revelation’. According to Wikipedia’s entry on pareidolia, the latter is a sub-category of apophenia. But surely, if apophenia is the abnormal one, it should be a sub-category of pareidolia, or they both should be sub-categories of that ‘universal tendency to seek patterns in random information’ which apparently does not have a name of its own?
All I can say is, it seems to me that (a) as a biographer one should always be alert to these perceivable patterns, in case there is something verifiable and empirically useful in them, and (b) like the ‘phantom flies in amber’ these patterns don’t half ‘bug’ you once you’ve joined up the dots and perceived them!
For the archive of posts since 31 July 2015, please click here.
…and a brain surgeon writes
Much as I am enjoying writing this blog free of the constraints of 1914-15 Time, I think long-term followers may understand when I say that I still think of my 1914-15 ‘blography’ of George as Calderonia proper.
Those followers will remember that several posts between July 2014 and July 2015 touched on what I called chronotopia (e.g. 12 September 2014, 8 December 2014, 30 March 2015, 18 June 2015). This word was intended to define the difficulty I had, as a biographer, of two-timing with time, viz. of writing the day-to-day 1914-15 blog strictly in ‘real time’ whilst continuing to write George Calderon: Edwardian Genius in extended narrated time. I don’t know if it was Bakhtin who invented the word ‘chronotope’, but it was certainly needed, to identify the different time/space forms that different genres of writing employ (‘temporalities’ has also been used). When I was trying to write in two chronotopes simultaneously, I felt that circuits in my brain kept shorting. Above all, the ‘real time’ chronotope of the blog kept infecting my writing of the book, sapping its narrative propulsion, until faute de mieux I gave up writing the book for five months, concentrating on completing research for the last two chapters, which I started writing only when Calderonia
proper was over.When I said that I felt it was my brain that couldn’t cope with writing in these two chronotopes simultaneously, I was aware that I was speaking metaphorically, since I have, of course, no idea of how my own brain physically works. I was also very ready to believe that younger writers’ brains would be more able to two-time than a sixty-eight-year-old’s. But in the course of working on something quite different, I have just read a short article by Dr Detlef B. Linke, Professor of Clinical Neurophysiology and Neurosurgical Rehabilitation at Bonn University, which — in so far as I can understand it — seems to suggest there is empirical evidence for my metaphorical hypothesis.
Dr Linke begins his article by stating that ‘there is no common pacemaker by which intervals of time could be defined in the brain. […] The data demonstrate that the brain is not a clock in the physiological sense’. The brain has developed ‘different time-scales’ for itself, partly through ‘imaginative capabilities’ according to German Idealist philosophers (which I daresay Bakhtin would agree with), but:
Polychronotopia, then, can cause a complete brainstorm… To complicate matters further, ‘for the right hemisphere, the flow of time is experienced as slower than for the left hemisphere’. Could this mean that two-timing with the narrative-biography-chronotope (slower) and the real-time-chronotope (faster) is a question of repeatedly switching from one hemisphere to the other, which some brains might be better at than others? Linke even seems to suggest that ‘a part of biography […] belongs to the way from the right to the left hemisphere’. He concludes, encouragingly:
This begs a few questions, and sounds to me as though it may have been translated from German by someone whose native language is not the target one, but it’s still interesting, I find, coming from someone who is described as a ‘brain scientist’ and clearly works with measurable data, unlike myself who can merely speculate.
The full reference for this article is: Detlef Linke, ‘The Lord of Time: Brain Theory and Eschatology’, in The End of the World and the Ends of God, ed. by John Polkinghorne and Michael Welker (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Trinity Press International, 2000), pp. 42-46.
Last year in Calderonia, John Dewey, the author of Mirror of the Soul: A Life of the Poet Fyodor Tyutchev (2010), and I discussed the tristesse that a biographer often experiences when the subject of their biography has died in the text, so to speak. Since s/he has always known the subject is dead, and the death in the text being written rarely coincides with any commemorative date, we speculated that the tristesse/mourning is also connected with something happening in the brain as that very personal ‘time-track’ comes to an end.
Since then Dewey has published a much-needed collection, in his own elegant English translation, of stories by Yevgeniy Zamyatin, the bracing ‘first dissident’ Soviet writer; see http://www.brimstonepress.co.uk/books/detail/YZ-TheSignAndOtherStories.htm . In my first post next week I shall look at the possibility that there is a link between Zamyatin and George; whilst endeavouring to avoid both apophenia and pareidolia.
For the archive of posts since 31 July 2015, please click here.