06 December 2007

Word of the minute/hour/day/week/month/year

In my recent readings of all things skeptical and inquiring, I came across a new favorite word:

APOPHENIA

As far as I've studied and researched, this concept provides a great starting point for understanding all manner of pseudoscience, anti-science, new-age philosophy and other assorted crazy make-'em-ups the world over. Below I'll lay out the simple definition and click on the word above to see a more expansive background on this mot du jour.

Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness".

1 comment:

Liam said...

On a related note, in 2006 my favorite new term was Cargo Cult:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult