Making Connections where there are none. Part 1
To be read in conjunction with Part 2
Apophenia - "in psychology, the perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things."
- medterms.com
Yeah, I harp on a lot about apophenia. And that's because as a BiPolar Type 1 I've had loads of experience of psychosis. Apophenia and psychosis go hand-in-hand. For example, a psychotic notices 02:11 on the clock and, because her birthday is on 2 November (or 11 Feb if your date formats are that way inclined), she deduces emaphatically that the clock is talking to her. Classic symptom.
But is identifying connections in previously unnoticed relations between things/events all bad? No fkcn siree! Think about it - Science & Maths. What are they? They're just set of complex rules. IF this, then THAT. Connections! And how does every advance in science proceed? Yeah, by some genuis scientist recognising a pattern between phenomena, and from that putting forward a hypothesis. Newton, Einstein, Gallileo. They all did it.
And how do we know that an infant is making steps towards cognition? By the infant making connections. Same with those experiments you see with chimpanzees pushing certain switches for the light to come on. Chimp thinks: "Ah, a connection, push this switch - light comes on." And pray tell me what did Pavlov's Dog do other than work out that there was a connection between bell ringing and food coming.
OK, so we can't trash connection making abilities. Clearly there is a spectrum at work somewhere here,
With deaf mute at one end, and apophenic paranoid schizophrenic at the other end. But where do you draw the line. People that proposed radical (and often paradigm-shifting) connections in the past were often first dismissed as mad. Think Galileo.
So my questions are this:
Where do you draw the line? IE: where do you place apophenia on the above graph. And as apophenia gets worse where does the line go? Up? Down? Or does it just disappear altogether?
To be read in conjunction with Part 2
But is identifying connections in previously unnoticed relations between things/events all bad? No fkcn siree! Think about it - Science & Maths. What are they? They're just set of complex rules. IF this, then THAT. Connections! And how does every advance in science proceed? Yeah, by some genuis scientist recognising a pattern between phenomena, and from that putting forward a hypothesis. Newton, Einstein, Gallileo. They all did it.
And how do we know that an infant is making steps towards cognition? By the infant making connections. Same with those experiments you see with chimpanzees pushing certain switches for the light to come on. Chimp thinks: "Ah, a connection, push this switch - light comes on." And pray tell me what did Pavlov's Dog do other than work out that there was a connection between bell ringing and food coming.
OK, so we can't trash connection making abilities. Clearly there is a spectrum at work somewhere here,
With deaf mute at one end, and apophenic paranoid schizophrenic at the other end. But where do you draw the line. People that proposed radical (and often paradigm-shifting) connections in the past were often first dismissed as mad. Think Galileo.
So my questions are this:
Where do you draw the line? IE: where do you place apophenia on the above graph. And as apophenia gets worse where does the line go? Up? Down? Or does it just disappear altogether?
To be read in conjunction with Part 2
I don't quite understand. Is your question about the intelligence axis? Number one, I think you're making a big assumption by saying that only intelligent people suffer from apophenia. I think anybody, clever or dumb can suffer from it. So, is your question, "Do you get cleverer or stupider the more or less apophenia you have?"
ReplyDeleteApophenia, as Simone has pointed out, can happen anywhere on that line. In the context of whether or not the connection has true meaning is impossible to answer. However in your examples of esteemed scientific reasoning not until there is peer recognition will the connection(s) be valid.
ReplyDeleteLook at Scientology. One man, L. Ron Hubbard, made a number of connections. A number of people believe but does that make it the truth?
OCD folks often have apophenia in spades. My OCD trumps my BPD in terms of navigating the daily grind and has to do with the issue of numbers you use in your example. The appearance of certain numbers on a clock, tv, a billboard, the Net, etc., can instantly paralyze me or dictate my next move.
ReplyDeleteThere's a clear evolutionary reason for the human ability to make instant connections, especially when physical danger was an omnipresent reality for our ancestors. But as willbefine points-out, it's when the connections are without corroborating evidence, are non-falsifiable, or when EVERYTHING get connected, that the red flag should go up.
The anxious mind is always scanning its environment for danger and aphonenia becomes part of its arsenal. Like so much else in mental illness, the coping mechanisms themselves often take on lives of their own and become problems.
k, add another label to your sorry self: apophenic mensianic beeper jeeper with psychotix gallore.
ReplyDeletenow what? do you feel relieved for 5.8 minutes? do you feel avenged? RIGHT? all along? "i told you so" type of feeling?
brother, it's all just another trip of your senses. how many sense organs you got, 5, skandhas or whatevah they call it?
& brain is one of them. go beyond alaya consciousness bro, BEYOND!
nevah evah again will a "mental disturbance" be able to lay hands on you.
Willbefine: I like what you said. It's logical.
ReplyDeleteZotl: Here's a question for you, or maybe everybody here. What do you think about Deepak Chopra and Quantum Healing? That's kinda what you're talking about right? That you can "go beyond consciousness" and maybe kinda "think" yourself out of bipolar? I'm really thinking (hahaha) hard about this one. Do you think it's possible?
Anonymous: Sounds like you got a tough deal. I had kind of the same thing where "God" was talking to me through bumper stickers and different people, posters, some bum selling bookmarks in front of a mall. Now I've given up on the idea that God will ever talk to me (a mere mortal), directly. I think God does talk to people, but how will I know if it's God or apophenia? So rather give up on that idea and if God really has a special message for me, he'll make sure that I will know it. Does that make sense?
Your current diatribe so removes you for what you are. This intellectual masturbation and microscopic sight has no bearing of you.
ReplyDeleteI am with zOtl on this one. Suck deep or suck off, but don't measure me by it.
V.
the answer to "is it possible" is absolutely YES.
ReplyDeletevia deepak choprah? absolutely NO.
start with http://youtube.com/sfjane
Two of your respondents have already suggested an answer:
ReplyDelete"[N]ot until there is [scientific] peer recognition will the connection(s) be valid" because they will then have exhibited "corroborating evidence" that is "non-falsifiable".
For my money, (and like it or not since it doesn't allow for the "woo" factors of religion, navel-gazing, occultism or pseudo-science) the more prosaic methods of logic and science are the most likely to answer your question with any kind of accuracy.
i am diagnosed BP2 rapid cycling
ReplyDeletethe fricken cycling seems to be getting rapid-er and rapid-er....
i live my life by following the signs
that the benevolent gods of circumstance, provide me.
i usually don't tell anybody about it
else they think i'm crazy (who me?)
or condescend or pretend
or worry at me.
the system, aided and abetted by 150mg effexor
a quarter ounce primo weed per week,
has been working well enough for 2.5 years, but there are big clear unmissable signs that it's time for me to change the regime and go back to the real world.
finding your blog, which i am reading from start to THE END has been helping me to face up and prepare.partly because you are medicated AND can write and think so impressively.you prove to me that meds doesn't necessarily mean deadheadedness, my greatest fear.
if you read this could/would you tell me if there is somewhere else i can read you? email:gailisms@yahoo.com.au
can't you just write here and choose not to have a free-for-all comments section? i am a new kid in blogsville and don't really see the need for the open slather, i am here to read you sir.
could you write the blog sans comments forum and contact preferred readers/potential friends by email and vice-versa?
looks to me like some commenters are taking advantage of a captive audience, BP Guy's readers,to rant and postulate willy-nilly at an undeservedly attained readership us/me, and embellish their own ego and hypo/er MANIA.
tis to be expected with all us lot at some time or another i suppose? us being bipolars an all....
gail in sydney
interesting blog, great read, good info.
ReplyDeletemarsha
www.didyoutakeyourmeds.com
I like your graph. Maybe it doesn't make since to people who don't know. Sorry about some of the posts. I found this post while again trying to figure out how to spell apophenia.
ReplyDeleteBPD, OCD, wishing I was deaf, and to a lesser extent blind (because reading is also difficult). And to those dudes up there who think that because they have a choice, everybody else has it the same way: not true, and so reductive, unimaginative, un-empathetic. You sound like those people who saw A Beautiful Mind and now think that schizophrenics who can't heal themselves aren't smart or determined enough (and of course the movie version was a lie, he actually just aged out of it). Or maybe it's possible to think (and presumably smoke and/or trip?) yourself out of it if you don't have to have a job, if you don't have to keep yourself out of the mental hospital.
ReplyDeleteI wonder whether this would be easier as a non-atheist. I still find it very, very hard not to personify the phenomenon. Like there's an actual team or something responsible for other people's conversations feeling like real-time reactions to my thoughts and feelings. (And jesus do I not want to start thinking of people as weird living dolls somebody's using to communicate seemingly spot-on but also ridiculously useless color commentary to me personally. When it isn't painful in a "stop looking at me" way, it's like, "how would this even work?" I can try to remember that I'm feeling and thinking eight different things and I'm in the habit of making these stupid useless connections, but the slow sensible doesn't have the same emotional/mental pull as the one produced by mania/OCD/everything-should-be-about-me.)
BPD, OCD, wishing I was deaf, and to a lesser extent blind (because reading is also difficult). And to those dudes up there who think that because they have a choice, everybody else has it the same way: not true, and so reductive, unimaginative, un-empathetic. You sound like those people who saw A Beautiful Mind and now think that schizophrenics who can't heal themselves aren't smart or determined enough (and of course the movie version was a lie, he actually just aged out of it). Or maybe it's possible to think (and presumably smoke and/or trip?) yourself out of it if you don't have to have a job, if you don't have to keep yourself out of the mental hospital.
ReplyDeleteI wonder whether this would be easier as a non-atheist. I still find it very, very hard not to personify the phenomenon. Like there's an actual team or something responsible for other people's conversations feeling like real-time reactions to my thoughts and feelings. (And jesus do I not want to start thinking of people as weird living dolls somebody's using to communicate seemingly spot-on but also ridiculously useless color commentary to me personally. When it isn't painful in a "stop looking at me" way, it's like, "how would this even work?" I can try to remember that I'm feeling and thinking eight different things and I'm in the habit of making these stupid useless connections, but the slow sensible doesn't have the same emotional/mental pull as the one produced by mania/OCD/everything-should-be-about-me.)