Shannon Ficklin, 50, gets signs from the universe nearly every day—usually in the form of feathers, yellow butterflies, or repeating numbers. Ficklin, a realtor living outside Austin, often interprets those physical symbols to mean she’s on the right path. She’s found hundreds of feathers over the past few years: on her lawn, in her grocery basket, on the sidewalk downtown. Last year, Ficklin was feeling a little sad and anxious about moving out of her family’s home of 23 years. During her final walk in the nearby park, she found 16 white bird feathers under a tree and took it as a good omen. “Like, I’m leaving in peace, it’s time to move on, and, yes, you should be going,” Ficklin tells SELF.
Maybe you’ve had similar experiences where you felt like the universe—or depending on your beliefs, maybe God, an angel, or an ancestor—was trying to send you a subtle message via unlikely coincidences or recurring symbols. Perhaps your car broke down on the way to an interview, and you took it to mean the job wasn’t meant for you. Or maybe you notice the number 33 everywhere and see it as a breadcrumb leading you in a certain direction. Or you bumped into your ex right after you heard their favorite song—and now you’re wondering if it means you should get back together.
So…what’s actually going on here? Not to ruin anyone’s fun, but it turns out there’s a scientific reason for why we sometimes see a connection between unrelated events, a recurring number, or motif in nature and call it a sign from above—instead of the coincidence it really is. It’s something called apophenia, which is “the tendency to perceive patterns or connections that don’t really exist,” Colin DeYoung, PhD, a psychology professor and personality researcher at the University of Minnesota who has studied the phenomenon, tells SELF. It also explains why you might see a face in the clouds or hear your name being called in a noisy crowd (when no one is saying it), he says.
Thanks to the way your brain processes the world around you, “you get the impression that these things are connected meaningfully,” Christian Rominger, PhD, a professor of biological psychology at the University of Graz in Austria who studies apophenia, tells SELF. When in reality they’re completely random. Below, experts explain why our minds play these games on us, and whether or not you should be concerned if you or someone you know often relies on these sorts of “signs” in everyday life.
Apophenia is a very normal result of your brain’s ability to recognize patterns.
This tendency to find meaning in the world around us is practically in our DNA. The human brain evolved to be pattern-recognizing, connection-forming, meaning-making machines, Tali Sharot, PhD, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and MIT who studies how we make decisions, process information, and form beliefs, tells SELF. “One of the main things [the brain] is supposed to do is to find patterns.”
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