Apophenia and anesthesia: how we sometimes change our practice prematurely

Abstract

Human beings are predisposed to identifying false patterns in statistical noise, a likely survival advantage during our evolutionary development. Moreover, humans seem to prefer “positive” results over “negative” ones. These two cognitive features lay a framework for premature adoption of falsely positive studies. Added to this predisposition is the tendency of journals to “overbid” for exciting or newsworthy manuscripts, incentives in both the academic and publishing industries that value change over truth and scientific rigour, and a growing dependence on complex statistical techniques that some reviewers do not understand. The purpose of this article is to describe the underlying causes of premature adoption and provide recommendations that may improve the quality of published science.

Regional anaesthesia for thoracic surgery: what is the PROSPECT that fascial plane blocks are the answer?

“…Although evidence is accumulating, gaps remain: the size and clinical significance of the effect in some cases; the lack of an appropriate comparator or use of multimodal analgesia in others; the need for more attention to functional outcomes, duration of analgesic blockade and the role of catheters; and prevention of CPSP. While these issues should not necessarily negate our enthusiasm for ESP and serratus anterior plane blocks, particularly if the alternative is no block, it is important we also acknowledge that eagerness to adopt new techniques sometimes outpaces the evidence, the reasons for which are complex [23]. We must maintain a healthy level of scrutiny for any novel technique but it is exciting as regional enthusiasts to see the evidence for chest wall fascial plane blocks increasing.…”

Sensitivity of endogenous autofluorescence in HeLa cells to the application of external magnetic fields

“…Detecting small differences between treatment and control groups requires especially large sampling 71 , 72 , 80 . This is absolutely required to avoid false positive findings due to human inherited ability to apophenia (the “tendency to perceive meaning in noise”) 81 . We can illustrate this ability by taking control distribution of normalized residuals and fitting this data to different mathematical models (Fig.…”

The function of web decorations in orb web spiders

“…The human brain, however, has an aversion to accept randomness, but instead always tries to derive a meaning (Rominger et al, 2022), for example by assigning purpose to incidental patterns where there is actually none (Gladwell, 2005;Hanson et al, 2021). For the web decoration phenomenon this is interesting insofar as there are studies suggesting that these structures may well have no function and shaped into a reproducible pattern by non-intentional processes (Walter and Elgar, 2016; see also discussion below).…”