UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

Suppose your friend tells you about a recent UFO sighting in your area. That night you notice an unusual slow-moving light in the sky. Ordinarily, you’d dismiss it as a human aircraft, but tonight you wonder if it’s extraterrestrial. A week later you discover an odd, circular patch of dead grass in your yard — shaped something like a “flying saucer.” The next night you swear you hear strange humming noises outside and soft “alien-like” footsteps below your bedroom window. More and more, these events seem linked to UFOs.

Experts call this apophenia, and, simply put, it’s the human tendency to make connections or see patterns where none exist.

Why does this happen?

Humans are wired to spot patterns in our environment. Our ancestors used this skill to glean information about the seasons, animal migrations, weather phenomena and the location of natural resources that helped them survive.

Unfortunately, our pattern-recognition machinery sometimes turns up connections that aren’t there. From an evolutionary perspective it makes sense that we’d occasionally get it wrong. After all, it’s better that our minds continually detect clues (even random or unrelated clues) than fail to see them altogether. Not recognizing where predators typically hide, for example, can get you eaten. So periodic “false positives” are the price we pay for security, an unfortunate but necessary by-product of our need to survive and find meaning in a chaotic world.

Connecting the dots about where dangerous predators hide and learning to spot them helped our ancestors survive. (Photo:Jonathan P/flickr)

Examples of apophenia

Our brain’s ability to discern meaningful patterns has continued to be an important survival skill in the modern world. And thankfully, most of our false positives are relatively harmless. For example, there’s a type of apophenia called pareidolia, which is when you spy a lamb in the clouds or an old man in the moon or the face of Jesus on a piece of toast.

Of course, glimpsing nonexistent patterns can also lead you down a dark path. One example is latching onto supernatural or magical explanations for phenomena that don’t seem explainable via science, terrifying yourself and others.

Then there’s the gambler’s fallacy — the belief that if something happens a lot then things will soon balance out so it happens less. Or vice versa. Take a coin toss. If you get five heads in a row, you may believe you’re more likely to get tails next time. But your chance of getting heads (using a fair coin) is exactly the same each time — 50/50.

Or how about the “hot hand fallacy,” the tendency to believe that previous success means you’re on a roll? This type of cognitive misfire is especially dangerous if you believe your good luck at the roulette wheel or picking stocks means you can’t lose in the future.

In science, apophenia may cause researchers seeking a big discovery to glom onto evidence of order that doesn't exist or to ignore findings that don’t support their hypothesis. According to one study, 24-40 percent of published research on strategic management might not reach the same conclusions if repeated. The peril lies in trumpeting results that aren’t true — for instance, that a new drug eradicates cancer or that vaccines cause autism. The result may be that you choose to undergo an ineffective treatment instead of opting for something proven or shun preventive therapies that could save lives later on.

A related tendency is noticing selective facts and concocting an entire belief system. For example, someone may think a three-week cold spell means global warming isn’t real, or begin trafficking in conspiracy theories, which can range from the fairly benign claim that Elvis faked his own death to delusional Holocaust denial.

Pareidolia is a type of apophenia that causes us to see faces in rocks, shapes in the clouds and George Washington’s image on a grilled cheese sandwich. (Photo: Joshua Tree National Park/flickr)

What science says about apophenia

Psychological research suggests that people suffering from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are more likely to see patterns in random designs and find significance in coincidence.

Other research indicates that apophenia may also be related to over-activation of the brain’s right hemisphere (the seat of creativity and artistic senses), and may be more common in people with higher dopamine levels, a brain chemical that stimulates you to seek out pleasurable activities, improves memory, boosts motivation and helps you focus.

Is apophenia ever good?

Uncovering patterns that others don’t see may be more common in those suffering from mental illness, but it doesn’t always stoke dangerous delusional thinking. This brain “glitch” might also be the fuel behind creativity, imagination and visionary flights of fancy. Think of a poet’s whimsical metaphors or artistic symbolism in a painting. Or how about epiphanies, which bring sudden intuitive insights about the world’s interconnectedness? As many have long believed, mental illness and creativity really do seem to share a common brain pathway.

Do the patterns that creative types and dreamers see really exist? Maybe only for them, at least initially, but when shared with others, they often provide new perceptions, usher in scientific discoveries and bring greater wisdom. Apophenia only treads on precarious ground when we pick and choose the patterns we notice and fail to connect all the dots, or act out destructively based on our perceptions.

How to avoid self-deception

You’re more likely to “stumble upon” counterproductive non-existent patterns when you wish something were true or it serves a narrative you want to tell — like you’re on a lucky streak or your favorite celebrity didn’t die or the research theory you staked your career on isn’t wrong. Connecting all the dots requires keeping an open mind, looking at something from all sides and being willing to accept new information or evidence as it comes along. A little skeptical scrutiny and broad-mindedness goes a long way in keeping apophenia out of the danger zone.

Related topics:

Health & Well Being, Mental Health

DARMSTADT, Germany — For the last two years, the Rosetta spacecraft has danced around a comet. Today, it finally made contact with the icy body — and sent its last signal.

This screenshot from ESA's broadcast of the Rosetta spacecraft's crash on Comet 67P shows the signal confirming the crash at 7:19 a.m. ET. on Sept. 30, 2016 at the Rosetta Mission Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany. Read our full story here.
**Credit: ESA**

The European Space Agency's (ESA) Rosetta probe ended its historic mission with a controlled descent to the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko early this morning (Sept. 30). Scientists here at the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) received the confirmation of landing from the spacecraft at about 1:19 p.m. local time (7:19 a.m. EDT/1119 GMT).

"I can announce the full success of this historic descent," said Patrick Martin, Rosetta mission manager, as he declared mission operations ended. "Farewell Rosetta, you've done the job. That was pure science at its best." [Photos: Europe's Rosetta Comet Mission in Pictures]

Comets are primitive cosmic objects, left over from the time our solar system was just starting to take shape 4.6 billion years ago. Exploring the structure, composition and activity of these icy bodies could shed light on the evolution of our solar system, and help scientists write a more comprehensive history of how the building blocks of life were first delivered to Earth.

Previous robotic expeditions have made close encounters with comets. NASA's Stardust mission even captured dust from the cloud around Comet Wild 2 and returned the sample to Earth in 2006. But Rosetta was the first to orbit a comet, the first to follow one around the sun and the first to send a probe to thesurface of a comet's nucleus.

**Rosetta’s OSIRIS narrow-angle camera captured this image of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko at 08:18 GMT from an altitude of about 5.8 km during the spacecraft’s final descent on 30 September.**
**Credit: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA**

Today's landing marks the end of an ambitious 1.3-billion-euro ($1.46 billion) mission that spanned more than a decade. The Rosetta spacecraft launched in March 2004, and after a 10-year cruise through the inner solar system covering a distance of 4 billion miles (6.5 billion km), it rendezvoused with Comet 67P in August 2014. Three months later, Rosetta deployed its surface probe Philae. But instead of anchoring to the comet's surface as planned, Philae bounced twice before coming to a stop against a cliff face in the Abydos region. Rosetta only spotted the final resting place of Philae earlier this month.

First observed in 1969, the 2.5-mile-wide (4 km) Comet 67P circles the sun every 6.5 years between the orbits of Earth and Jupiter. Right now the comet is heading back out toward the orbit of Jupiter, and Rosetta, which is solar-powered, wouldn't have enough energy to keep up, so the mission had to come to an end. The spacecraft will stop sending data as soon as it touches down, meaning mission scientists won't know if it tumbles or bounces like Philae did after it lands. [Rosetta Probe's 'Death Dive' Into Comet 67P Visualized]

**The two-part Rosetta spacecraft is designed to orbit and land on the Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in November 2014. See how the Rosetta spacecraft works in this Space.com infographic.**
**Credit: by Karl Tate, Infographics Artist**

ESA has already released the final images that Rosetta collected on its way down to the comet's surface.

"It's really great," said Holger Sierks, the principal investigator for Rosetta's OSIRIS camera, as he presented some of the probe's final views. "It’' exciting. It’s working like a charm."

Comet 67P is very porous with low gravity, so Rosetta's landing likely looked more like a slow-motion collision than a violent crash. The spacecraft executed its final maneuver around midnight local time (6:00 p.m. EDT; 2200 GMT) yesterday (Sept. 29) and began a 14-hour, 12-mile (20 km) drop to the comet's surface. ESA officials had calculated that its speed upon impact would be about walking pace, or 2 mph (3.2 km/h).

The controlled impact was designed to give ESA scientists a closer look at surface features they had only spied from afar.

"We got pretty close to the comet recently with the orbits we were doing," Matt Taylor, Rosetta project scientist with ESA, told Space.com. "We got within about 2 kilometers [1.2 miles] from the surface. But this plummet into the surface gets us in below 2 kilometers. It gets us within the acceleration region, where the comet coma grows and starts being thrown off."

The death dive was also an opportunity for Rosetta's suite of instruments to take measurements as it passes through the layer where the phase transition occurs between ice and gas.

Rosetta's final resting place is a smooth patch in the so-called Ma'at region on the "head" of the rubber duck-shaped comet.

This particular spot has a number of dust-spewing pits — some 330 feet (100 m) across and 165 feet (50 m) deep — that scientists wanted Rosetta's instruments to observe before the mission ended. The walls of these pits appear dotted with "goosebumps" that could be signatures of early comet building blocks known as cometesimals.

The mission has already produced a number of surprising discoveries — that the Comet 67P has big grains of water ice on its surface, molecular oxygen in its coma, diverse landscapes and a fluffy core, just to name a few. But Rosetta scientists still have reams of data to pore over. So, even with today's finale, the work isn't over.

"We have 80,000 images to look at," Mohamed El-Maarry, a postdoctoral researcher with Rosetta's OSIRIS team, from the University of Bern in Switzerland, told reporters yesterday. "It's going to keep us busy for years to come."

Follow Megan Gannon @meganigannon, or Space.com us @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebookand Google+. Original article on Space.com.