ILLUSTRATION: EMMA HEPBURN, FROM A TOOLKIT FOR HAPPINESS
Humans naturally find meaning in things. The brain sifts through millions of data points and finds the patterns, so we can process information effectively. We find meaning in tones of voice and facial expressions, we work out perceptually the meaning of sensory data (that’s a grey thing with a fuzzy tail eating nuts – that must mean it’s a squirrel). We often puzzle over the meaning of something: what did she mean by the wording of that text? The meaning we give to something helps us understand it and consider how to respond. We are so inclined to make sense of everything that we also find meaning in random data when there is none – this is called ‘apophenia’, and we do it a lot – we find meaning when someone phones at the moment we are thinking of them, we look for ‘signs’ to help us make decisions, and look for meaning in the tea leaves in the bottom of the cup. Often this helps us make sense of difficult things (although sometimes the ‘meaning’ we find can be unhelpful, such as conspiracy theories). Meaningmaking in its basic sense is fundamental in helping us make sense of things in our world, feel in control, understand and know how to respond.