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Comment by sammalloy | Hacker News Reader

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sammalloy

> very interesting, do you know the name of this phenomenon?

Not OP, but they are describing apophenia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

Many things can trigger it, even high doses of caffeine (such as drinking too much coffee).

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Hyperassociativity is not necessarily apophenia. Apophenia is finding meaningful patterns in random noise, but it is not clear that the patterns being discovered were in random noise, or if the person merely saw the present patterns more clearly. That can happen too, and is not apophenia. It's something more like hypercognition

The original context of the discussion was altering consciousness under the influence of psychedelics. The phenomenon of apophenia is well known in that context and has some unfortunate side effects that overlap with other communities, such as the conspirituality subculture, all of which make use of an almost institutionalized form of apophenia that is accepted as valid by their adherents. More interestingly, this kind of imagery is often used as a social glue to keep the community in sync. The most simple and basic example is the use of imagery such as tie-dye by people in the psychedelic community. The colors and patterns themselves are highly reminiscent of a drug-induced hallucination. The images of colorful, random bits of noise produced by tie-dye designs promote a kind of basic apophenia at the most sensory level which allow the members of the subgroup to engage in apophenic flights of fancy at will by using their eyes. This can evolve into more elaborate forms that go beyond the sensory system, like the kind of all encompassing, conceptual conspiracy theories that are common to more religious and spiritual subsets of related communities. These intellectual flights of fancy are similar to tie-dye designs that facilitate apophenia. Fundamentalist Christians and QAnon adherents, as only two examples, also make great use of this, in their search for signs and symbols that emerge out of the random chaos of everyday experience. This kind of patternicity-seeking is common to these communities, and many of their shared values and beliefs come out of their use of apophenia to create and augment their experience of new or altered realities that align with the values of the group. In a very real way, this is a form of alternate reality role playing, the only problem being that for many of them, they see it as real. This is where the disconnect emerges post-experience. In an attempt to recapture the magic of the altered state, many of them will forget about the mundane nature of noise and how patterns will emerge from random chaos just about anywhere, and attribute real, concrete information where none in fact exists. This is the problem.

Yea, certainly not what I experienced at all. Giving a 'diagnosis' as GP did, cannot be done based on a brief HN comment.

You said up above that you’ve never done psychedelics, so it makes sense that you’ve never experienced it. This is not a simple example of hyperassociation, it’s a classical case of psychedelic apophenia. If you spend just a few minutes browsing r/psychonaut, you’ll see if for yourself. I’ve also found that one can replicate it by drinking too much coffee. The connection between apophenia and psychedelics is well known.

And yet that doesn't mean that all extra associations and cognitions that occur on psychedelics are apophenic.

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