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“There are brains that are more prone to illusory pattern perception,” Gretchen said instead of acknowledging it. “More prone to finding connections in unrelated data. They’re simply wired that way.” “All right, so what brains are prone?” “People who have an excess of dopamine pumping through their gray matter,” Gretchen said, popping a slice of decadent duck into her mouth. “It’s the reverse of low dopamine in addicts. That deficit makes them think that nothing matters. For someone with high dopamine levels, they think everything matters.”
“Pareidolia,” Gretchen said easily, snagging the last pierogi without shame. “That’s a fancy word for humans’ tendency to find significance in something where there is none. Like kids finding shapes in clouds. We do that a lot. And that technically is a subset of apophenia, which is the tendency
to find connections where they don’t exist.”
Life wasn’t always about making the right choices. Sometimes it was about making the wrong ones just to see what would happen.
