March 25 – COVID-19 pandemic: The number of vaccinations administered worldwide exceeds 500 million.
April 2 – Russia warns NATO against sending any troops to aid Ukraine, amid reports of a large Russian military build-up on its borders.
Apophenia is a general term that refers to seeing meaningful patterns in randomness. Here are the subcategories of apophenia:
Pareidolia. Pareidolia is a type of apophenia that occurs specifically with visual stimuli. People with this tendency most often see human faces in inanimate objects. An example of pareidolia is seeing a face in a slice of toast.
Gambler’s fallacy. People who regularly gamble often fall prey to the gambler’s fallacy. They may perceive patterns or meaning in random numbers, often interpreting the pattern as an indication of an oncoming win.
Clustering illusion. A clustering illusion occurs when looking at large amounts of data—humans tend to see patterns or trends in data even when it is entirely random.
Confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is a psychological phenomenon in which a person will test a hypothesis under the assumption that it’s true. This form of apophenia can lead to overemphasizing data that confirms a hypothesis and explaining away information that disproves it.
