Apophenia

I find there are very rare chances in my day to day life to meet a really crazy person.  Sure, Victoria is full of the homeless and lots of drug addiction of course, but it’s not the same.  Of course where I work downtown lots of disheveled shuffle past, making random noises or half walking half dancing from the crack rock, but if movies and TV have taught me anything about mental illness it is just not quite the same.  And what makes mental illness even more interesting is the cultural context totally affects how people in that culture interact with them.  In some cultures people who mutter, hear voices, or have other collections of behaviors that set them apart from the average person are revered or treated as touched by divine or supernatural forces, or just generally treated special in some way.  In North American Eurocentric culture however they are treated as having a maladaptive problem that must be dealt with, like back pain or high cholesterol.

Of course this involves drug related treatment, and it seems like our society is at the point where any abnormalities or behaviors that don’t fit the norm need to be medicated, either at doctor direction or desired by the patient themselves.  And let’s be clear, this is the same culture that has normalized people imitating The Jersey Shore.  I guess having excessive over tanned skin and ugly haircuts isn’t enough to have someone committed to a mental hospital.  Ultimately, as with most other illnesses, it is more important that you are socially functional than any other sort of problems, mental or physical.  Being productive, having a job and some sort of friends and family life need to be hindered in some way before anything can be considered problematic.  This is probably why prohibition was revoked, and why many people choose to self-medicate, because as long as you can hold down a job and aren’t beating your wife, nobody cares enough beyond that how well you are doing or how you feel about this life you’ve been thrust in to.  How many functional alcoholics do you know?  There are few fates worse than not being able to fit in or get along with people around you, which is probably why people will do whatever it takes to change themselves, including self-medicating.  Even homeless people value their relationships with their fellow peers, and I’m sure some people who are addicted to hard drugs do them because it makes them feel like they can fit in, or at least participate in their subculture on some level.

The internet probably maintains the best chance for having an interaction with a sincere, down to earth Lovecraft style crazy person, since neither you nor they have to leave the house for this to happen.  And while if you spend a lot of time online you might be lead to think our civilization is at the apex of crazy people, I would guess this isn’t actually so, since people are just more apt to be open about their craziness online.  I’m sure many people have enough intelligence and discipline to confine their personality quirks online, and come across as perfectly normal when face to face. 

Recently though while reading recent Psychology literature on Emotional Intelligence I came across a term I’ve never heard before called Apophenia.  This is a condition in the scientific grey area of crazy-but-not-quite-diagnosis-crazy, studied in the context of the more extreme version as schizophrenia, described as the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.  A good example of this would be conspiracy theorists like 9-11 truthers, or Jim Carry in the movie The Number 23.  Like many constructs of psychology, this can have a wide spectrum of implication, and taken to extremes, can make a person’s lives problematic.  In my mind this seems to relate back to the problem of thinking you are unique, special or especially lucky, such as gamblers who think they can see the pattern in games of chance or finding images of the Virgin Mary in water stains and chicken nuggets.  Taken to a less harmful extreme are people like film students, who (in my personal favorite example) interpret a movie like The Exorcist as being some sort of metaphor for homosexuality, where two male ‘lovers’ exorcise the female from their lives, with the possessed girl being a corrupt, physically ugly being of power trying to confuse and control them.  While this is a fascinating interpretation, neither the writer nor movie director had any intention of making this the underlying theme of the movie. 

There has been some interesting research in apophenia, such as a study by Mintz and Alpert (1972) where they found that 40% of non-clinical participants hear the song “White Christmas” when played white noise and given a simple suggestion, and that those who are prone to hallucinations are more likely to hear it.  Another study using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (basically rubbing powerful electronic magnets across your skull) found that stimulating the left lateral temporal cortex reduced the perception of meaningful information in noise, and since TMS has an inhibitory effect it is thought that this type of thinking originates in this area (Bell et al, 2007). 

Sure, by the strict definition of apophenia, overanalysis of what is going on around you may be a symptom, but I don’t think anyone would argue this is a mental illness…it’s creative thinking.  Creativity itself is just connecting two unrelated ideas, and forms the very basis for progress and new ways of thinking in human existence.  Really, everything we do as humans can be thought of as over interpretation…any other animals just seek food, shelter, mating and relaxation.  We are different in that we are constantly striving over mentally conjured ideals to give us purpose, but is that not just extreme over interpretation of the world around us compared to the lives of the lions and the tigers and the bears?  Apophenia drives us to philosophize a higher meaning and gives rise to more complex forms of humor – such as upping the ante in repetitious humor by making the joke progressively more convoluted and complex, tying in less and less related ideas until the joke does not even resemble itself.  Overthinking things just seems to be a component of creativity, and might just be its very essence.  Seeing things that aren’t there are, depending on the situation, both genius and madness, the very root of paranoid – the only thing that sets them apart is application – applying apophenia to engineering problems such as architecture, energy or food production can make you a wealthy, benevolent savior, but apply it to social relationships, government regulations, secret testing and political intrigue and you become a paranoid schizophrenic.  The difference, I suppose, is between the practical, physical, directly useful, vs. abstract social order and what are they up to and what really happened at this historical moment.  Taking history at face value is almost certainly not what actually happened, as we know that the victors write the history books, but for reasons that aren’t clear to me this is frowned on at large.  Is re-examination of social policy frowned on for some deep rooted genetic level reason, or has the idea just been pounded in to our heads for generations as to be seen as a natural belief of order?

While the treatment of mental illness has many beneficial applications and has been helpful to people…epilepsy comes to mind as a good example, I can’t help but think of how much creativity as a whole we are losing to overmedication and stigmatizing minor mental illness…things like strange art, bizarre new inventions and radical social theory.  While many people feel like the problems they struggle with daily like depression and anxiety strangle and stop them from leading full lives, these problematic states often lead to amazing novel ideas.