Apophenia

A critical and humorous look at apophenia, the human tendency to see patterns in randomness. This essay debunks concepts like Jungian synchronicity and angel numbers, exploring why we're wired to find meaning where none exists.

7/21/2025

Let’s talk patterns, because frankly, they’re everywhere, hiding in your cereal bowl, creeping behind your sweaty armpits, and yes—even lurking behind that smug imbecilic clock face reading “11:11,” which makes pseudo-philosophers and mid-level marketing executives spontaneously orgasm and declare it cosmic destiny. It’s not. It’s your brain’s pendulous self-flatulent personality. It’s called apophenia—a lovely Greek-derived word from apo- (away) and phainein (to show), meaning roughly, “seeing things that aren’t really there.” Yes, hallucinations without drugs—nature’s own “free-to-play” psychosis.

Let me dial this back, or better still, crank this claptrap up. Your brain has an evolutionary affinity designed to spot leopards behind bushes. No leopards? Then the brain says: “Hey, you see that bush over there? Looks suspiciously leopard-shaped. Let’s wet our loincloth and sprint anyway!” Better safe than cat-food. Today, no big lions roam calcutta’s coffee shops—only big mustachioed goons sent by vindictive leading ladies with sand irritating the hairy insides of their loins. Yet the leopard-finder lives on, spotting patterns that don’t at all exist. Enter stage left: Jungian synchronicity—a concept dreamt up by Carl Jung, that Swiss psychoanalytic mentalist with a fetish for mandalas, UFOs, and sharing beds with his patients—attractive ones only. According to Jung, synchronicity is “meaningful coincidence,” which sounds fancy until you realize it translates roughly to, “Wow, look! Things happened at roughly the same time! That never happens except whenever I really think the girl is hot!”

Here’s a fresh batch of cow dung cooked specially for starry-eyed, artsy Bengali chicks—those irresistible, intellectually ripe, bespectacled beauties sipping iced americanos at jadavpur university, who digest Tagore for breakfast and defecate Derrida before bedtime. Show one of these talcum layered fair damsels, the one that likes to pretend she isn’t aware of her oversized mammary or sinuous glutes that she balances, emphasizing to her the number 11:11 a few times, casually whisper about cosmic alignment, nod sagely, sprinkle some Jung, and watch her ninny neurons melt into a puddle of gooey literary submission. It’s psychological gaslighting dressed as intellectual flirtation—nothing cruel, just ethically bankrupt fun. Especially if they say it’s all very fascinating, you can be sure she didn’t understand a bit and you can press closer to her damp voluminous thighs. I tried it with the “arts chicks” at presidency and jadavpur when I was young naive and tried really hard—the girls don’t like too much effort, you must puke poetry pathetically in their tea a bit, be casually indifferent to their jiggling adipose, laugh it off, break their hearts, just when they get interested, otherwise they’ll break yours.

“But Suvro,” you ask, conveniently naive, “what harm does it do? Aren’t patterns everywhere, legitimately?” Of course they’re everywhere—nature loves patterns like Calcutta loves potholes. Fibonacci sequences in flower petals, fractals in river deltas, chaos theory in city traffic, your mother’s disapproving face reflected in literally every reflective surface—real patterns exist and are important. Apophenia, though, is seeing Elvis’s unseen droopy aged and imagined ballsack in burnt toast. It’s mistaking your luck at dice for divine displeasure. It’s every podgy bengali auntie swearing by numerology, astrology, palmistry, and “scientifically proven” vastu-shastra because she failed math from class 5 on but knows cosmic calculus better than Einstein.

Numbers themselves, innocent digits dancing elegantly in mathematical bengali uncle-auntie orgies of precision and logic, get misused by dimwits, charlatans, and that weirdly attractive bohemian chick who believes reading Kafka backward reveals hidden meanings about why men ghost her after two dates. So every loser loony with a basic grasp of arithmetic but zero comprehension of probability screams “11:11,” “111,” or “777”—freaking angel numbers—as proof that the universe gives a damn about his impending promotion to assistant nobody at Generic Urinal Pvt. Ltd.