apophenia_makes_unrelated_things_seem_connected_metaphors_paranormal_beliefs.html

David J. Morris, former Marine officer, has written a book—The Evil Hours—that functions as “a biography of post-traumatic stress disorder.” He says he was surprised at how apophenia became an organizing principle not just for the text but for his own experiences in Iraq. “In a war zone,” he told me, “you run into people with a heightened sense of superstition, people trying to find ways to deal with the uncertainty of death.” Morris hallucinated that he had a doppelganger while in Iraq and developed an obsession with anniversaries. He thinks shattering experiences have a way of remaking the world, sending survivors into frenzies of analysis as they encounter each thing anew. “Trauma destroys your connection to the universe,” he suggested. “You can no longer make sense of the social and moral order; it’s as if reality has turned on you in a paranormal way.” A victim’s brain can respond by going into overdrive: “You try to explain what happened, why you … what are the laws of cause and effect.”
Sometimes, the military encourages this rewiring. The official U.S. manual for counterinsurgency urges troops to “attend to intangibles”—the vibe on the streets, the presence or absence of kids playing soccer, microevents, and their own gut feelings. “We’re supposed to be hyperaware of ‘atmospherics,’ ” Morris told me, pinpointing the sticky problem of apophenia, its grace and peril. “But when does that alertness save your life, and when does it mean you’re insane?”

And when does it make the world better, not worse? Unplug the lamp of imagination and you will stumble around in darkness, like the Wordsworth cave-goer if he’d never bothered to light his torch. Without attempting to resolve whether apophenia is good or evil, I will note that Western culture hallows a lot of notions about the singularity of creative genius, even as we boast a long and dangerous tradition of romanticizing madness. Is that just a coincidence … or something more?