Apophenia, Henry
Learned Vol. 7, Issue 5
The Nineties1 has the distinction of being the first history book I've read where I actually remember, first hand, the events being discussed. And I don't mean some kind of vague, half recollected, half informed-after-the-fact event like the way I remember the Challenger exploding. No, Klosterman is writing about events that I remember having opinions about; Nirvana and N.W.A. and O.J. Simpson and the Gulf War stand out in my mind as mile markers on my personal timeline. And yet, as Klosterman says:
People change, and they tend to view past actions through the prism of their current self. Memories are replaced by projections.
In discussing the Ross Perot era of politics, I'm finding my memory is distinctly at odds with the well-researched facts being presented. Maybe it's because I was 16 when Perot ran for president; maybe because even in 1991 we knew that the information being fed to us had been massaged and manipulated into talking points rather than objective fact. To again quote Klosterman:
The information can seem contradictory or cohesive, depending on your level of apophenia.
Welcome back to Learned where we take time out of our day to look up the words we don't know. Like apophenia. From Merriam-Webster:
the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas)
Ohhhh. So, based on how likely I am to see two objectively unrelated things as actually related, I might remember things differently than objective history might. I'd like to call bullshit but only because I'm offended by being called out so easily.
Apophenia is an interesting phenomenon. It was coined as a term of art for describing the early stages of schizophrenia by Klaus Conrad but has broadened to include several concepts related to how the human brain constantly seeks to find patterns and connections between disparate ideas or objects. Taken to an extreme, it's a symptom of a brain not working correctly and has been directly linked to issues with gambling addiction and the aforementioned schizophrenia.
But we're human. We find meaning in everything. Actually, we don't just find meaning, we ascribe meaning, we insist on meaning being present in damn near everything we do, often to our own detriment. And once we've found meaning, we seek to add connection, which is where apophenia comes into play. We see faces in clouds and mythic animals in the stars. We find faces in our toast and on the leaves of trees. We even find signals in the static of a t.v. late at night and in the white noise of a radio tuned to nothing. We find patterns everywhere, even where none actually exist.
Ironically, seeing the word apophenia triggered a dormant memory of something to do with pronunciation. I looked it up:
In linguistics, apophony...is any alternation within a word that indicates grammatical information.
Ah, yes. The phenomenon that discusses why goose becomes geese and food becomes feed and why a song is sung and you can have one book but two books and on and on and on. In other words, apophony is the study of patterns in English words.
But also, apophenia and apophony arrived in English via different routes. The latter is a calque of the German ablaut while the former was deliberately derived from Greek roots and designed to fit, pattern-wise, with the clinical usage of the term schizophrenia. Etymonline says:
from Greek apophainein "to show, make known, show by reasoning, produce evidence," from apo- "from" (see apo-) + phainein " to show, cause to appear" (from PIE root *bha- (1) "to shine")
We don't see a lot of other words following the same pattern, deliberate or otherwise. Following the “related entries” links on Etymonline goes straight down the PIE rabbit holes only to dead end in a tangle of Greek, Sanskrit, and Old Irish words that kind of maybe a little sound like each other.
On the other hand, Merriam-Webster takes us straight to the phonetically dissimilar but categorically related pareidolia, which is the phenomenon where humans can find patterns in random displays of visual information. Think ink blot tests or finding the face of Jesus in your toast.
Tangentials & Parentheticals
My family gifted me a “hot sand” maker for Father’s Day. You might know these devices better as a panini press. But Japan gonna Japan and thus “hot sandwich” has become “hot sand.” All of which is pretext for why I have been strolling about my house singing “Hawwwt sand. You don’t have to spread that cheese tonight. Walk the streets for honey. You don’t care if it’s rye or if it’s light.” Gomennasorry.
Also, because many of you will not have watched every episode of the television classic that is M*A*S*H2, when actor McLean Stevenson, who played Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake decided to leave the show at the end of the third season, his character was written off in an episode titled “Abyssinia, Henry.” A joke I did not get until decades later. Hence the title of this week’s Learned.
This is an affiliate link to my bookstore on Bookshop.org. Thanks and you’re welcome.
Yes, I have. More than once.