Apophenia

I encourage everyone to real William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition for a number of reasons. Gibson coined the term cyberspace in one of his earlier novels. He's an excellent writer and storyteller with believable if quirky characters that has been on the edge of realistic sci-fi for a generation. One reason I highlight this novel is due to its exploration of apophenia. We humans have a tendency to see patterns where there is only jibberish. And/or even if we see some legitimate patterns and form models therefrom, we tend to continue to impose those modeled patterns on new data despite other data to the contrary, i.e., confirmation bias. I know I've done this several times throughout my life, like with hermetic qabalah and kennilingus. I get so attached to the models I interpret everything through them and it becomes  an ideology that prevents further growth. Oft times I'd go through the most bizarre contortions to try to fit all data, no matter how contradictory, into the models. Granted, I've eventually come around on those two models and named that phenomenon kennilingus when it comes to Kennilingam's AQALitus.