I've been sick enough to be delirious before. Maybe this is because my brain is so information-focused, but I hallucinated messages everywhere. I could "read" messages in the weave of the blankets.
It's creepy how logical it all seemed, and yet none of it was real. I was reflecting on how maybe this hospital has problems with theft, so they decided to print their name into the very weave of the blanket. I thought that was a pretty cool innovation.
When I mentioned it to the nurses as I was checking out I got only arched eyebrows. I only figured it out a week later.
Anyone who has ever tried to debug a random piece of software, and guessed wrong about the cause has imagined a pattern that wasn't really there. Especially when you are looking at sporadic concurrency bugs and other psuedo unpredictable issues.
I certainly remember seeing shapes, figures, people, and other things in randomness of the cracks in my ceiling when I was a child. I also remember "seeing" patterns in the television snow on empty channels.
I think any gambler sees patterns in streaks, whether it be roulette or poker.
People see patterns in athlete's hot streaks, but really these streaks aren't outside of statistical randomness. People think that someone on a streak should take the next shot, but really their next shot is as likely as any other shot.
Well, that may be true for truly random processes. I don't agree with the comment about athletes. Winning gives confidence, confidence can improve performance.
Look into the research done on 'Hot hand' in professional basketball. I had a university professor in psychology/computer learning that did some research in that field.
Maybe in a sport like football or hockey where you can make an outstanding physical effort confidence comes into play, but for an individual basketball shot the evidence is strongly against hot streaks.
I used to know a psychologist that talked about this. It's linked into a whole bunch of other research such as theory-of-mind and other pieces.
Seeing patterns that aren't there is perfectly natural - because we've grown up and been designed to expect patterns.
Most of our life is cause and effect, so when we see an effect we're naturally inclined to extrapolate on the cause... You see a fresh kill on the savanna, it's pretty reasonable to conclude there is a predator around... This works really well most of the time, which is why we do it.
Of course, it doesn't always work... But it's to be expected.
It's creepy how logical it all seemed, and yet none of it was real. I was reflecting on how maybe this hospital has problems with theft, so they decided to print their name into the very weave of the blanket. I thought that was a pretty cool innovation.
When I mentioned it to the nurses as I was checking out I got only arched eyebrows. I only figured it out a week later.