When I’m in a high emotional state, my mind starts racing and I sometimes develop a moment of Apophenia.

Apophenia
Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.

I don’t know quite how to explain it…maybe you saw Russel Crowe in A Beautiful Mind or The Question from the Justice League. You see….connections between things that don’t have any connections. I feel like I’m in a state of heightened awareness or…I don’t know how to explain it. Like when you play pool and see all the angles to the balls that you wouldn’t regularly see.

I was reading all these connections today…very subtle and unimportant but for me, they were undeniable connections between things. Now, a few hours later, I’m sure these connections never existed. I can see..what I was thinking, but I don’t know how I came to believe them, they’re so…impossible.

Lately, I’ve also been experiencing Pareidolia

Pareidolia
Pareidolia is a type of apophenia involving the finding of images or sounds in random stimuli

Zena’s seen this in action when I believe my iPhone is vibrating when it’s not. I’m not sure what it is but I constantly hear the sound of my iPhone vibrating as well as my Xylophone alarm right after I wake up when it’s not actually on. I would end up checking my phone repeatedly to turn off the alarm but the alarm wouldn’t be on. It might be conditioning, that I associate that sound to the morning or something…but I don’t see how that would fool my sense of hearing.

Also, lately at work when I’m listening to music, I “hear” my name being called randomly. I turn around and no one’s said anything. It’s usually Ron who’s voice I “hear”. I only noticed it these last 2 weeks, but I remember when Karol first started, a couple months ago, I kept “hearing” my name when she hadn’t said anything. Zena’s noticed this too, I keep thinking she’s said something when she hasn’t. All of the above are either girls or are soft-spoken. I had a lot of trouble hearing Ron when I first met him…Karol as well (and still). Maybe their voices are kinda like…phantom voices that I hear mixed within other sounds…

Wow….you know, at first this was a 1/2 serious post. I had already written my closing joke for the post: “Seriously, I think it’s safe to say that I’m simply going crazy. It’s okay, long ago did I accept the onset of senility.” But writing more into it and coming up with recent specific examples is actually scaring me a bit. GG Warren, you’ve scared yourself into stress and anxiety, right before you were about to sleep.

Seriously, I’m going to have to monitor this. This could potentially be…a very very bad thing.