much explanation, plots that satisfy the mind of every viewer or reader.
Every story needs a strong protagonist with whom you can identify. If they are down on their luck or recently fell from grace, you see them as being approachable. If they are plucky and face great odds, again, you root for them without having to think about it. Early on, the protagonist will save someone without having to, and you start to like him or her. On the other side, you need a dastardly antagonist who harms someone for no reason, a person who ignores the rules and wants only to satisfy him- or herself no matter the cost. The hero or heroine leaves his or her normal world and enters into a new life full of adventure. Just when it seems as though the protagonist will fail, he or she overcomes whatever has been in the way, in order to defeat the antagonist, sometimes even saving the world in the process. When the hero or heroine returns to home, he or she has been changed for the better. If the story is a tragedy, the protagonist ends up worse off than when the story began.
Joseph Campbell made it his life’s work to identify the common mythology in all humans, the stories you and everyone else know in your hearts. He called the outline above the hero’s journey, and if you think about all the movies and books you’ve digested over the years, you will recognize almost every story is some variation of this tale. From folklore and theater, to modern cinema and video games, the hero’s journey is a monomyth that plugs into your mind like a key into a lock.
You love to watch highly paid actors play professional make-believe because you naturally think in images and stories, in narratives that unfold with characters who fill up your world. Math, science, and logic are much harder to contemplate than social situations. You are keenly aware of what role you play and who is on the stage, the story of your life. Just as with television and film, your memory tends to delete the boring parts and focus on the highlights—the plot points.
A certain kind of story, a mystery, plays on a type of narrative you often believe to be unfolding in the real world. In a mystery like The Da Vinci Code, or in a television series like Lost, where mysterious happenings are at the center of the plot, clues pop up that turn out to be connected in some strange way. You can’t help but be intrigued by the patterns slowly coalescing. It drives you crazy. You find yourself compelled to keep turning the page or popping in the next disc to see what happens, to see how everything connects in the end.
When you do this in the real world, it is called apophenia. Apophenia is an umbrella term that encompasses other phenomena, like the Texas sharpshooter fallacy and pareidolia. When you commit the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, you draw a circle around a series of random events and decide there is some meaning in the chaos that isn’t really there. In pareidolia, you see shapes like clouds or tree limbs as people or faces. Apophenia is refusing to believe in clutter and noise, in coincidence and chance.
Apophenia most often appears in your life when you experience synchronicity. Small moments of synchronicity seem meaningful even when you know they can’t be. If the date lines up in an interesting way, like say 8/9/10, people talk about it. You can’t just ignore it when something that should be random sorts itself out and becomes orderly. The clock reads 11:11 P.M. The next time you look, it reads 12:12 A.M. A brief sense of wonder turns your head askew, and then you move on. Synchronicity may show up in bigger ways as well. If you had a dream about a terrible flood and then turned on the morning news to see a flood had washed away the homes of hundreds of people in a distant place, it would be hard not to feel a chill run down your spine.
Apophenia becomes an issue only when you decide coincidences and random sorting are more than the occasional signal rising from the noise.
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