Some people can instantly tell how many stars there are in this image. Some have to count.

I just watched the movie The Number 23, and in spite of the film’s theme of obsessive recognition of numerological patterns, the only pattern I’m beginning to see is that I prefer Jim Carrey in comedic roles. But it did get me thinking about how we perceive things, and the kind of nuttiness that can take over a person’s brain when they first get exposed to things like astrology and numerology (or maybe Fox News). First of all, I’ve always found it interesting that although people typically can’t enumerate five or more objects quickly unless they’re arranged in a pattern, they can, on the other hand, identify random patterns as something meaningful when there’s nothing there at all. That is of course, unless they suffer from Simultanagnosia, in which case they tragically can only recognize ONE object at a time. Combine these innaccuracies of perception, and pretty quickly you realize that we’re probably wrong an awful lot of the time. If you think you’re seeing meaningful patterns in the appearance of numbers or objects for instance, it’s possible that you’re falling prey to something like the clustering illusion or some form of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. All of this frailty of human perception is fine and dandy until you add the emotional component, and end up with a serious case of confirmation bias, which is why I jokingly referenced Fox News at the top. Much like a psychic, media organizations have – whether knowingly or unknowingly – gotten very good at manipulating subjective validation to feed the bandwagon effect. As a result, we end up with a bizarre variant of anthropomorphism, in which people ascribe human and in sometimes superhuman characteristics to talking heads. A pathetic fallacy indeed. I could go on about this for hours, but my cat is giving me that “Oh God, you’re not creating another Wikipedia linkfest masquerading as an article, are you?” look. Besides, I haven’t checked my astrology for tomorrow. So for fun, see if you can find the hidden message in this text by selecting the “xth” word of each sentence.