Clustering Illusion: They're Real!

Friday, August 9, 2013

At Wall Drug, a jackanapes on a jackalope:

Posted by Yonts at 3:36 PM

Labels: Animals, Travel

Yonts: There are lots of interesting ways that your brain can play little tricks on you. You see a coffee stain on the table and think it looks like a face. The doorbell rings just as you are sneezing, and it seems as if one caused the other. The clustering illusion is when you perceive patterns in random data. For instance,if you flip a coin a thousand times, you might hit a stretch where you get heads ten times in a row. It really looks as if you're doing something to make heads come up that many times, but the results of the coin flip are random. People tend not to appreciate how many clusters there can be in random data, and that's known as the clustering illusion. It's also a play on words--I'm very interested in filmmaking, and seeing a movie involves a bunch of people watching images on a screen and inferring a story--a clustering illusion.

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