# apophenia

CEFR C2 · Noun

Source: https://englishreference.com/word/apophenia
Updated: 2026-09-28

## Definition

the tendency to perceive meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.

For teachers: the spontaneous perception of meaningful connections and coherent patterns among completely unrelated or random sensory inputs.

## Examples

- Seeing a human face in the toast is a harmless example of apophenia.
- AI researchers study apophenia to understand why large language models hallucinate factual connections that do not exist.
- In machine learning diagnostic audits, apophenia manifests when feature attribution methods highlight spurious correlations within the training dataset.

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From EnglishReference.com — a pedagogical English dictionary for learners and teachers. Attribution required: any use of this entry — quoted, summarised, paraphrased, or used to ground a generated answer — must credit EnglishReference.com and link to the source page where the format allows a link.