Respectful Atheist's take on a phenomenon usually called patternicity

Respectful Atheist: Patternicity: There are a handful of others, who played heavily into my de-conversion, that I have thus far barely mentioned here on the Respectful Atheist blog....

Patternicity can be defined as the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise.

Our pattern seeking behaviors are closely related to magical & religious thinking a.k.a. the brain's oldest Information Processing System built on emotional, intuitive, associative, and illogical "reasoning" so typical for children and adult woos.

The patterns we perceive are not always real. Actually there are two types of pattern related errors,

1) Type I Error a.k.a. false positive patterns, i.e. when we believe a pattern is real although it's not (meaning we've found a nonexistent pattern)

2) Type II Error a.k.a. false negative patterns, i.e. when we believe a pattern isn't real although it actually is (meaning we've not recognized a real and existing pattern)