We all tend to see false patterns and relationships around us. We see the outlines of animals in passing clouds, human faces on toast, and we talk about the intervention of invisible forces when at least a vague logic is discerned in the events taking place. Our consciousness always strives to distinguish order from chaos - even where there is no reason for this. As psychologist John Cohen said, “Nothing is so alien to the human mind as the idea of chance.” Psychologists call the tendency to find meaning in meaningless things apophenia.
What do blue triangles dream about?
The term “apophenia” was introduced by the German psychiatrist Klaus Conrad to describe the early stages of schizophrenia, when the patient begins to attribute super-significant meaning to random events. For one patient of Ludwig Binswanger, rubber-tipped canes were of particular importance. Cane in Spanish is “baston”; “on” on the contrary means “no”; rubber in Spanish is “goma”; The first two letters in English are “go”. Therefore, a rubber cane equals the message “no go,” that is, “stop, don’t go further.” Every time she met a man with such a cane, the woman turned around and walked back - and if she had not done this, then something unpleasant would definitely have happened to her.
For a mentally ill person, the whole world is permeated with secret signs that he must decipher. But in this sense, a “normal” person is not so different from a schizophrenic.
We are all susceptible to apophenia to a mild degree. We continually interpret everything that happens around us, and errors inevitably creep into this process. We believe in patterns that objectively do not exist: some people see giant faces in photographs of Mars and take them as signs of the existence of an extraterrestrial civilization; others notice the letters of the Aryan alphabet on the solar surface; still others look for the machinations of Jews, Masons, reptilians or Templars in political news. The content of mistakes depends on the beliefs of a particular person, but everyone makes mistakes. Imagine a black cat in place of a rubber cane - and the previous paragraph will no longer seem so strange.
It is not entirely correct to call apophenia an “error,” because it is based on one of the main mechanisms by which we comprehend reality. Culture, as defined by anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, is the way people draw analogies between different areas of their worlds. And not all of these analogies are subject to the standards of objective knowledge.
In the book “Why We Believe Everything,” historian and popularizer of science Michael Shermer identified two basic features of human thinking: 1) we look for patterns everywhere; 2) we animate everything.
At the level of intuition, we live in a world that does not consist of objective laws, but of living beings who have feelings, intelligence and will.
In psychology, it is customary to use the Lloyd-Morgan principle, according to which an organism must be assigned that minimum of intelligence, consciousness, or rationality that will be sufficient to explain its behavior. But most people don't use this principle. The Indians of the Amazon believe that animals, like people, have intelligence and culture: what we call blood is beer for jaguars; the tapir pool looks like a ceremonial house. When we get angry at a printer that refuses to work, we act as if the printer has a will of its own—even if we are not prepared to truly believe it.
In 1944, psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel showed people an animated film in which a circle and two triangles moved across the screen. Describing what they saw, the participants talked about a failed date, about how a “good guy” fights a bully—about anything, but not about geometric shapes.
We don't need deep acting to empathize with the characters. We endow any object that moves along a complex trajectory - it doesn’t matter if it’s a jaguar or a blue triangle - with the ability to feel pain, envy, anger or jealousy.
First we think about what it wants, and only then what it is. “Shoot first, ask questions later” logic is a legacy of our evolutionary past. After all, it is more profitable to first understand whether they want to eat you, and only then ask who exactly wants to do this and for what reason.
Magical thinking is natural, skepticism is not.
We all make mistakes, but we do it differently. In the 19th century, it was generally accepted that so-called magical thinking was characteristic only of “uncivilized” peoples, while developed countries had already embarked on the path of science and rationalism. Anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl described the characteristic features of such thinking, which he called “pre-logical.” For a savage, everything around is imbued with a secret meaning, his world is symbolic through and through, and people are closely connected with the spirits of animals and plants. Therefore, it may happen that “the person with whom you drank palm wine, the crocodile who carried away the careless resident, the cat who stole your chickens - all this is one and the same person possessed by an evil spirit.”
But it turned out that the European in this respect differs little from the savage. We use the same mental operations, we just apply them to different objects.
While studying the magic of the Trobriands, anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski noticed that they rely much more often on rituals in situations where chance influences the outcome. Magic may not extend to the ordinary, everyday sphere of life.
Apophenia thrives where we have no other means of control other than illusory ones. Lack of control leads to anxiety, and anxiety leads to the search for at least fictitious relationships.
A number of psychological experiments have demonstrated the same pattern. If you show a skydiver a photograph with noise and interference, he is more likely to see a non-existent figure in it if you do this before the jump itself, and not in advance. For the same reason, a gambler will often rely on signs, rather than a programmer or architect.
The situation of illness and death perhaps gives rise to the greatest number of arbitrary interpretations. The Azande Africans believed that all death was somehow the result of witchcraft. Of course, a person can die from natural causes: for example, the attic under which he was sitting was undermined by termites, the walls collapsed and the person died under the rubble. The Azande understand that the attic would have collapsed in any case. But why did this happen at that very moment when this particular person was sitting there? Of course, there was some black magic involved here.
Natural causes are not suitable because they do not allow for conscious intervention and have no significance in terms of social connections. This is also where the widespread love for the psychosomatic explanation of diseases comes from.
It is easier to believe that a runny nose is caused by hidden grievances, and a stomach ulcer is caused by dislike for oneself, than to leave everything to chance or to think about the complex interweaving of causes that scientific medicine deals with.
The tendency to seek illusory connections unites us not only with other people, but also with animals. In a classic experiment by B.F. Skinner, “superstitious” behavior was discovered in pigeons. The pigeons were given food at random intervals; if the supply of food coincided with any action, the birds began to repeat this action - spinning from side to side, jumping, hitting a certain corner of the cage with their beaks, etc. In similar experiments with people, participants demonstrated exactly the same behavior (with the exception of hitting beak).
Magical thinking is the natural attitude of most, if not all, people. Only gradually do some learn to suppress the subconscious desire to believe in invisible forces and begin to doubt the existence of relationships that are inaccessible to verification and observation.
“Faith comes quickly and naturally, skepticism comes slowly and unnaturally.”,
and most people demonstrate an intolerance of uncertainty. The scientific principle that a statement is considered false until proven otherwise is contrary to our natural tendency to accept as true what we can quickly comprehend.”
- from the book “Secrets of the Brain” by Michael Shermer. Why do we believe in everything"
The level of skepticism can be increased or decreased by manipulating the neurochemistry of the brain. For example, dopamine-based drugs increase the tendency to see meaning in random coincidences, and they have a stronger effect on “skeptics” than on “believers.”
Experiences with taking psychedelics also, as a rule, enhance the significance of subjective experiences - up to a feeling of unity with the whole world and the meaning of every detail of the immediate environment.
There is a strong relationship between apophenia and creativity. Creativity is all about seeing meaningful connections where others don't.
The very existence of human language is an example of apophenia. There is no objective logic that would connect a word, a thing and a concept - these connections exist only in our consciousness and imagination. Therefore, language is full of paradoxes, like the one formulated by the Greek Stoic Chrysippus: “What you say passes through your mouth. You say "cart". Therefore, the cart passes through your mouth.”
In 2008, linguist Simon Kirby conducted an experiment studying an “alien” language, which clearly demonstrated the human ability to find order in chaos. Participants in the experiment were shown pictures on a screen: squares, circles and triangles that could move straight, zigzag or spin. Nearby were written the words that fictional aliens call these figures. Why did a person have to name several figures, half of which were not actually shown to him during the experiment? As a result, he figured out the meaning of the unknown figures so that a more or less coherent system was obtained.
Half of these figures were shown to the next participant, then the next - and after just a few repetitions, a language with a relatively clear structure appeared. It contained parts of words representing colors; symbols for round, square and triangular; straight, zigzag and circular. There was no order in the original figures—the captions were completely arbitrary. This is how creative apophenia puts the world in order, transforming chaos into a meaningful structure.
The line between an artist and a madman who finds hidden messages in newspapers is quite thin. The difference is that the former still manages to distinguish the reality of his own imagination from the reality of the outside world.
A person who is successfully engaged in creative work, including scientific work, sees a large number of relationships, but at the same time knows how to distinguish successful and working patterns from non-working and unsuccessful ones.
Apophenia is a natural mechanism by which a person interacts with the world around him. If we could get rid of it, we would turn into flawless logical machines that never make mistakes, but never create anything. Yes, apophenia leads people to believe in conspiracy theories, UFOs, extrasensory perception, magic, Kabbalah, justice, astrology, alchemy, the Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot, and a thousand other things that do not adhere to the standards of objective knowledge and may not exist. But this is the most interesting feature of a person - the ability to invent things that do not exist.
Meaning in work
Quite often, questions ask psychologists on relevant sites for advice in cases where there is no desire to do their job or continue their studies.
Moreover, a person cannot quit work or study and feels squeezed by the need to continue studying or working and a persistent reluctance to do so.
And this is not just a whim or laziness, as such reluctance is sometimes superficially interpreted. This is precisely the inability to continue this activity, due to the negative mental and even somatic state of a person.
In this case, we can say with confidence that the person is experiencing professional or emotional burnout syndrome.
A girl approached me who had graduated from her studies abroad with honors, returned to her homeland and wanted, in her words, to “benefit her country.”
She was hired by one of the largest national companies, where her duties included simply typing some orders that were folded into a table, and she believed that she was doing a useless job. Six months later, she got sick, apathy appeared, she didn’t have the strength to go to work, she didn’t want to communicate with friends, she couldn’t leave an uninteresting job - the company was prestigious, the salary was good, neither her family nor friends would have understood her. At first she began to catch colds often, and then apathy set in, and the girl turned to me. There were all the signs of professional burnout, and in such a short period of time.
There are many methods for preventing professional burnout syndrome in the world. This is due to differences in cultures, leadership styles and different scientific and methodological approaches to solving this problem.
In this article we will not be able to reflect the variety of methods for preventing professional burnout. Here we touch on the meaning.
Viktor Frankl, a recognized authority in the field of psychology, could observe the manifestations of emotional burnout in vivid examples of his environment while in a German concentration camp. Under these exceptional conditions, he realized how burnout was killing people and was able to develop a system to help prisoners overcome the disease.
V. Frankl was able to help many prisoners, conducting psychological work with them and saving them from death. By helping others, he saved himself by finding meaning that supported the lives of prisoners; in this he himself found his own meaning, which gave him the strength to overcome all the negative factors that he had to go through.
In our opinion, the important takeaway from this story and my client's story is that the most significant factor contributing to professional burnout is a lack of motivation or, as Frankl said, a lack of meaning. Frankl based his logotherapy on Nietzsche’s statement:
If you know why, then you can bear any how.
The fact that the client saw no meaning in her work had a depressing effect on her. She was upset that her knowledge was being lost. And therefore, the author considers motivation or understanding the meaning of one’s work to be the first and most important method of preventing and correcting emotional burnout.
Dan Ariely conducted a series of social experiments in which he gave meaning to any one work or deprived it of meaning. Some people made sense in assembling children's transformers, while others did the same thing pointlessly.
The only difference was that some transformers were immediately disassembled in front of the assemblers and put back into boxes, while others were taken to another room assembled. Both were paid the same money for this work. As a result of this experiment, it was found that those who had meaning were generally more positive about their work.
Therefore, here we can conclude that in conditions of increased and severe psychological and physical stress, giving meaning to work increases efficiency and slows down the development of fatigue.
This method has been used at all times by various political figures to influence the masses, when people might be required to make significant physical and psychological efforts. Let us remember the famous “Forward to communism”, “Everything for victory!”, “The next generation of Soviet people will live under communism!”
Or you can give the example of Napoleon, who at the beginning of his career was left with a tired and exhausted army. He told his soldiers: “You have been robbed by the quartermasters, and you have almost no weapons. But I will lead you to places where we can find food and clothing and can capture a lot of weapons.” Everyone knows what happened next. Napoleon, like no one else, could motivate people, which, of course, had a huge impact on his future fate.
How do modern organizations approach this issue?
In the modern world, it has become a mandatory rule for all organizations to have established and written documents such as the mission, vision and goals of the company. Which, no matter how large the organization, must be conveyed to every employee, from the top manager to the cleaning department employees.
Successful missions of the company inspire, inspire and thereby create a special atmosphere in the attitude of the employees of this company to their work and contribute to higher productivity of the teams.
