Apophenia

Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things.

The term (German: Apophänie from the Greek verb: ἀποφαίνειν, romanized: apophaínein) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia. He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness". He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations.

Apophenia has also come to describe a human propensity to unreasonably seek definite patterns in random information, such as can occur in gambling.