The Wit’s Guide to Apophenia

Or, pattern demolition

If you look long enough at Thomas Cole’s Clouds, you can see a cloud.

You know how sometimes the universe just lines things up for you? The train arrives on time, the barista remembers your order, your emails get responses, your favourite song comes on the radio, the asteroid obliterates the house next door, and the dog brings you your obliterated neighbour’s slippers? That’s all in your head. But the good news is that when everything goes against you, that too is apophenia at work.

“People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence. They are far too ready to dismiss it and to build arcane structures of extremely rickety substance in order to avoid it.”
— Isaac Asimov

Humans are built for pattern recognition, a trait that’s helped us thrive but also explains why horoscopes are the most-read feature in the newspaper. Think of it this way: We don’t have ancestors who didn’t pick up on subtle patterns everywhere they looked because they all got eaten by sabre-tooth tigers.

“Occasionally someone remarks on what a lucky coincidence it is that the Earth is perfectly suitable for life. But this is, at least in part, a confusion of cause and effect.”
— Carl Sagan

Apophenia is when you mistakenly find meaning in randomness, and it’s why if you look at the clouds long enough, you’ll see familiar shapes. This has nothing to do with the clouds. To quote the memorable title of Bruce McCall’s collected works, All Meat Looks Like South America.

“Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania.”
— Dorothy Parker

If I worked for a potato chip company, I’d figure out a way to print the vague outline of a human face on every 100th chip. I wouldn’t mention it in any way, but rather sit back and let pareidolia do the marketing for me. Hence the saga of Maria Rubio, who saw Jesus Christ on a tortilla and thus helped carry out the Lord’s mission of introducing Mexican food to Americans. Rubio also inspired the joke about the Tibetan monk who saw Christ in a tub of margarine and exclaimed, “I can’t believe it’s not Buddha!”

“Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment in recognition of the pattern.”
— Alfred North Whitehead

If you experience an epiphany, you suddenly understand how everything connects. If you experience an apophany, you have the same realization but you’re wrong. Most epiphanies are probably apophanies — though they feel just as good! If you experience a moment of clarity and enlightenment, you might as well enjoy it before you revert to the base human state of confusion and dissatisfaction.

“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
— Christopher Hitchens

For thousands of years, the ancients studied the flight patterns of birds to receive omens. What morons, right? But consider that modern birdwatchers examine our fine feathered friends just as intently even though we now know they don’t predict the future. Another point for the ancients! I occasionally use the Flight Tracker app on my phone to ask a kid where they think a plane in the sky is headed and then reveal the actual destination. If that captures their attention, I ask them to guess where a bird is headed and pretend to check their flight plans on my phone. “To look for worms,” I’ll announce matter-of-factly.

“One of the things that makes novels less plausible than history, I find, is the way they shrink from coincidence.”
— Tom Stoppard

Would you believe that in this morning’s Globe and Mail, there’s an article about the City of Edmonton making the magpie their official bird??! And it’s the mascot of this newsletter! Which also comes out this morning! I’m not saying that everything happens for a reason. I am saying that everything happens.

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“I’m just sayin’, everyone that confuses correlation with causation eventually ends up dead.”
— Siberian Fox

Last week’s poll asked you to choose between a bunch of unfamiliar concepts, so let’s get back to basics for next week’s issue.

To think, if either you or I had never been born, you wouldn’t have just finished reading Issue 315 of Get Wit Quick. Wow, eh? Just wow. The newsletter mascot is an Edmontonian magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. What are the odds you and I tap the ❤️ at exactly same time?!

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All my GWQ VIPs get just a little bit more each week in a special segment we call Quip Service. This week:

Three tremendously useful things to say while parking a car*

*Your car or someone else’s — these high-value lines work for all circumstances!