# Apophenia **Apophenia** is the tendency to perceive meaningful patterns and connections in random or unrelated data — the term was coined by the psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in 1958 for the early stage of schizophrenia, and Michael Shermer later generalized it as "patternicity." It is the cognitive engine of conspiracy thinking: the same faculty that lets a hunter read tracks lets a believer read a timestamp, and the cost of a false positive (seeing a pattern that is not there) has historically been lower than the cost of a false negative, which is why the bias is universal. [[Numerology]] is its arithmetic form; the [[QAnon]] "decode" is its political one. > [!note] Stub > Created to resolve a link from the Numerology page. Expand: Conrad and Shermer; the evolutionary account; the relationship to [[Confirmation Bias]]; apophenia in intelligence analysis and financial "chartism." ## See Also - [[Numerology]] · [[QAnon]] · [[Conspiracy Theories Hub]] · [[Confirmation Bias]]