Apophenia
Apophenia (from ancient Greek ἀποφαίνειν apophaínein , German 'show' , 'appear', 'realize') describes in schizophrenia the experience of perceiving apparent patterns and relationships in random, meaningless details of the environment.
The term was coined in 1958 by the psychiatrist Klaus Conrad , who defined apophenia as "groundless seeing of connections, accompanied by the special sensation of abnormal significance". He originally described the phenomenon in terms of perceptual distortions that occur in psychosis ; but his term is now also applied to similar tendencies in healthy people who have no neurological or mental illnesses.
Apophenia is a variant of the clustering illusion . It is also a sub-form of the pareidolia . Apophenia is limited to its aspect of “looking into” a random structure, whereas pareidolia also contains the (actively) “sought” perceptions.
Neurological and psychiatric interpretation by Peter Brugger
The Zurich neuropsychologist Peter Brugger suspects a neurological mechanism that would force us to see meaningful meanings in random data, such as cloud shapes or acoustic noise. The right hemisphere of the brain in particular creates semantic associations for every observation . This is a major source of human creativity . Alfred Wegener's continental drift theory came about, for example, because Wegener was irritated by the coinciding coastlines of Africa and South America. Temporal coincidences in particular created almost irrefutable connections. In Brugger's view, it is difficult, if not impossible, to perceive real “ coincidence ” as such. The personality of the test subjects plays an important role in determining the strength of the effect; In particular, people who, according to self-assessment, strongly believe in paranormal phenomena, described more similarities between randomly compiled pairs of images.
Paranoid psychoses, in turn, cause this mechanism to get out of hand. Brugger describes the psychosis of the Swedish author August Strindberg , who z. B. saw Greek letters in fallen branches, which communicated to him (Occult Diary, 1888).
Apophänien on the cognitive level, as a judgment heuristics of complexity reduction are used, also called illusory correlations .
art
Postmodern authors and directors have worked with apophaneous processes - paranoidly altered memories, unclear conspiracies - e.g. B. Vladimir Nabokov's Signs and Symbols (1948), Thomas Pynchon's The Auction of No. 49 (1966), Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (1980) and The Foucault Pendulum (1988), William Gibson's Pattern Recognition (2003), Arturo Pérez-Revertes The Club Dumas (1993) and the films Fletcher's Visionen (1997), π ( 1998) and A Beautiful Mind - Genie und Wahnsinn (2001). Since retelling is one of the most important tools our minds use to grasp reality, there is an overlap between apophenia and memory errors like the hindsight error . Since the pattern recognition can be influenced by plans, goals and ideologies, and is more an object of the common worldview than a solitary self-delusion, the observer will get into interpretive conflicts when trying to make diagnoses and recognize apophenias.
In the fine arts, the term apophänia refers to the creative process in which motifs are associated and worked out in random patterns, structures and spots ( pareidolia ). These motifs are then assigned a meaning that is not inherent in them through poems, text fragments or titles. Justinus Kerner writes about the interpretation of his klecksographies:
"It is remarkable that such (note: Klecksographien) very often bear the type of times long past from the childhood of ancient peoples, such as idols, urns, mummies and so on. The image of man and animal emerges from these in the most varied of shapes Blotches emerge, especially very often the skeleton of the human being. Where the imagination is not sufficient, a few strokes of the pen can sometimes be used (...). For example, a human image can emerge in its entire form and clothing, but perhaps without a head, Hand and so on, where (...) here and there what is missing is easy to replace. "
In illustration, this means the reversal of the illustration process: It is not texts that are illustrated, but stories that emerge from motifs that are first concretized in action.
"I also have to note that these pictures were of course not made according to the text, but that the text was made according to them , and so may the reader and viewer of these sheets of paper accept them and their explanations in verse with indulgence."
The apophanic artist walks a tightrope between reality and fantasy worlds. In contrast to people who suffer from schizophrenia, an artist can create new worlds through the power of free association and allow himself to be overwhelmed by it without it dominating his everyday life in a destructive way.
literature
- Klaus Conrad: The beginning schizophrenia. Attempt a gestalt analysis of madness. Thieme, Stuttgart 1958. New edition: Psychiatrie-Verlag, 2003, ISBN 3-88414-342-5 .
- Peter Brugger: From Haunted Brain To Haunted Science. A Cognitive Neuroscience View of Paranormal and Pseudoscientific Thought. In: J. Houran, R. Lange (Eds.): Hauntings and Poltergeists. Multidisciplinary Perspectives. McFarland & Co., Jefferson 2001, ISBN 0-7864-0984-3 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Christian Scharfetter: General Psychopathology. An introduction. 6th edition, Georg Thieme, 2010. ISBN 978-3-13-158726-8 . P. 257.
- ↑ a b Jutta Assel, Georg Jäger: Klecksographien mit Versen. In: The Goethezeitportal. Goethezeitportal eV Society for the scientific promotion and cultural mediation of literature, art and culture on a media basis, December 2014, accessed on December 14, 2018 .
- ↑ Bachelor thesis "IL-LUST-RATIO-N | About the inversion of the illustration process ” by Angela Otto