Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random
stimulusStimulation is the action of various agents on nerves, muscles, or a sensory end organ, by which activity is evoked; especially, the nervous impulse produced by various agents on nerves, or a sensory end organ, by which the part connected with the nerve is thrown into a state of activity.The word...
(often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the
man in the moonThe Man in the Moon is an imaginary figure resembling a human face, head or body, that observers from some cultural backgrounds typically perceive in the bright disc of the full moon...
or the
Moon rabbitThe Moon rabbit, also called the Jade Rabbit, in folklore is a rabbit that lives on the moon, based on pareidolia that identifies the markings of the moon as a rabbit. The story exists in many cultures, particularly in East Asian folklore, where it is seen pounding in a mortar and pestle...
, and hearing
hidden messageA hidden message is information that is not immediately noticeable, and that must be discovered or uncovered and interpreted before it can be known...
s on
recordsA gramophone record, commonly known as a phonograph record , vinyl record , or colloquially, a record, is an analog sound storage medium consisting of a flat disc with an inscribed, modulated spiral groove...
played in reverse. The word comes from the Greek
para- – "beside", "with", or "alongside"—meaning, in this context, something faulty or wrong (as in
paraphasiaParaphasia is a feature of aphasia in which one loses the ability of speaking correctly, substitutes one word for another, and changes words and sentences in an inappropriate way. It often develops after a stroke or brain injury. The patient's speech is fluent but is error-prone, e.g...
, disordered speech) and
eidōlon – "image"; the diminutive of
eidos – "image", "form", "shape". Pareidolia is a type of
apopheniaApophenia is the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness", but it has come to...
.
Religious
There have been many instances of perceptions of religious imagery and themes, especially the faces of religious figures, in ordinary phenomena. Many involve images of
JesusJesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...
, the Virgin Mary, or the word
AllahAllah is a word for God used in the context of Islam. In Arabic, the word means simply "God". It is used primarily by Muslims and Bahá'ís, and often, albeit not exclusively, used by Arabic-speaking Eastern Catholic Christians, Maltese Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Mizrahi Jews and...
.
In 1978, a New Mexican woman found that the burn marks on a
tortillaIn Mexico and Central America, a tortilla is a type of thin, unleavened flat bread, made from finely ground maize...
she had made appeared similar to the traditional western depiction of Jesus Christ's face. Thousands of people came to see the framed tortilla.
Publicity surrounding sightings of religious figures and other surprising images in ordinary objects has spawned a market for such items on online auctions like
eBayeBay Inc. is an American internet consumer-to-consumer corporation that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide...
. One famous instance was a grilled cheese sandwich with the "Virgin Mary"'s face.
In September, 2007, the so-called "
monkey tree phenomenonThe monkey tree phenomenon is a social phenomenon in Singapore, which began in September 2007. It arose from the discovery of a callus on a tree in Hong Kah, which, through the effects of pareidolia, appears monkey-like...
" caused a minor
social maniaSocial manias are mass movements which periodically sweep through society, sometimes on a world-wide basis. They are characterized by an outpouring of enthusiasm, mass involvement and millennialist goals. Social manias are contagious social epidemics, and as such they should be differentiated from...
in
SingaporeSingapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...
. A
callusPlant callus is a mass of undifferentiated cells derived from plant tissue for use in biological research and biotechnology. In plant biology, callus cells are those cells that cover a plant wound. To induce callus formation, plant tissues are surface sterilized and then plated onto in vitro...
on a
treeA tree is a perennial woody plant. It is most often defined as a woody plant that has many secondary branches supported clear of the ground on a single main stem or trunk with clear apical dominance. A minimum height specification at maturity is cited by some authors, varying from 3 m to...
resembled a
monkeyA monkey is a primate, either an Old World monkey or a New World monkey. There are about 260 known living species of monkey. Many are arboreal, although there are species that live primarily on the ground, such as baboons. Monkeys are generally considered to be intelligent. Unlike apes, monkeys...
, and believers flocked to the tree to pay homage to the "Monkey god" (either
Sun WukongSun Wukong , also known as the Monkey King is a main character in the classical Chinese epic novel Journey to the West . In the novel, he is a monkey born from a stone who acquires supernatural powers through Taoist practices...
or
HanumanHanuman , is a Hindu deity, who is an ardent devotee of Rama, a central character in the Indian epic Ramayana and one of the dearest devotees of lord Rama. A general among the vanaras, an ape-like race of forest-dwellers, Hanuman is an incarnation of the divine and a disciple of Lord Rama in the...
).
Divination
Various European ancient
divinationDivination is the attempt to gain insight into a question or situation by way of an occultic standardized process or ritual...
practices involve the interpretation of shadows cast by objects. For example, in Nordic
molybdomancyMolybdomancy is a technique of divination using molten metal. Typically molten lead or tin is dropped into water.The method was invented in ancient Greece, and today it is a common New Year tradition in the Nordic countries and Germany. Classically, tin is melted on a stove and poured into a bucket...
, a random shape produced by pouring molten tin into cold water is interpreted by the shadow it casts in candlelight.
Fossil hunting
From the late 1970s through the early 1980s, Japanese researcher
Chonosuke Okamurawas a twentieth-century Japanese palaeontologist noted for his claim to have discovered fossils from the Silurian period of miniature animals, ranging from humans to dinosaurs, and more than one thousand other extinct "mini-species", each less than 0.25 mm in length. He claimed that "There...
self-published a famous series of reports titled "Original Report of the Okamura Fossil Laboratory" in which he described tiny inclusions in polished
limestoneLimestone is a sedimentary rock composed largely of the minerals calcite and aragonite, which are different crystal forms of calcium carbonate . Many limestones are composed from skeletal fragments of marine organisms such as coral or foraminifera....
from the
SilurianThe Silurian is a geologic period and system that extends from the end of the Ordovician Period, about 443.7 ± 1.5 Mya , to the beginning of the Devonian Period, about 416.0 ± 2.8 Mya . As with other geologic periods, the rock beds that define the period's start and end are well identified, but the...
period (425 mya) as being preserved
fossilFossils are the preserved remains or traces of animals , plants, and other organisms from the remote past...
remains of tiny humans, gorillas, dogs, dragons, dinosaurs, and other organisms, all of them only millimeters long, leading him to claim "There have been no changes in the bodies of mankind since the Silurian period ... except for a growth in stature from 3.5 mm to 1,700 mm." Okamura's research earned him a winner of the
Ig Nobel PrizeThe Ig Nobel Prizes are an American parody of the Nobel Prizes and are given each year in early October for ten unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research. The stated aim of the prizes is to "first make people laugh, and then make them think"...
in
biodiversityBiodiversity is the degree of variation of life forms within a given ecosystem, biome, or an entire planet. Biodiversity is a measure of the health of ecosystems. Biodiversity is in part a function of climate. In terrestrial habitats, tropical regions are typically rich whereas polar regions...
. See List of Ig Nobel Prize winners#1996.
Audio
In 1971,
Konstantin RaudiveDr. Konstantīns Raudive was a Latvian writer and intellectual, and husband of Zenta Mauriņa. Raudive was born in Latvia but studied extensively abroad, later becoming a student of Carl Jung...
wrote
Breakthrough, detailing what he believed was the discovery of
electronic voice phenomenonElectronic voice phenomena are electronically generated noises that resemble speech, but are not the result of intentional voice recordings or renderings. Common sources of EVP include static, stray radio transmissions, and background noise...
(EVP). EVP has been described as auditory pareidolia.
The allegations of
backmaskingBackmasking is a recording technique in which a sound or message is recorded backward on to a track that is meant to be played forward...
in popular music have also been described as pareidolia.
Projective tests
The
Rorschach inkblot testThe Rorschach test is a psychological test in which subjects' perceptions of inkblots are recorded and then analyzed using psychological interpretation, complex algorithms, or both. Some psychologists use this test to examine a person's personality characteristics and emotional functioning...
uses pareidolia in an attempt to gain insight into a person's mental state. The Rorschach is a projective test, as it intentionally elicits the thoughts or feelings of respondents which are "projected" onto the ambiguous inkblot images. Projection in this instance is a form of "directed pareidolia" because the cards have been deliberately designed not to resemble anything in particular.
Advertising
An
American ExpressAmerican Express Company or AmEx, is an American multinational financial services corporation headquartered in Three World Financial Center, Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States. Founded in 1850, it is one of the 30 components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company is best...
Charge Card advertising campaign, begun in 2009, features everyday objects that look (or have been made to look) like sad and happy faces.
Evolutionary advantage
Carl SaganCarl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, science popularizer and science communicator in astronomy and natural sciences. He published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books...
hypothesized that as a survival technique, human beings are "hard-wired" from birth to
identify the human faceFace perception is the process by which the brain and mind understand and interpret the face, particularly the human face.The human face's proportions and expressions are important to identify origin, emotional tendencies, health qualities, and some social information. From birth, faces are...
. This allows people to use only minimal details to recognize faces from a distance and in poor visibility but can also lead them to interpret random images or patterns of light and shade as being faces. The evolutionary advantages of being able to identify friend from foe with split-second accuracy are numerous; prehistoric (and even modern) men and women who accidentally identify an enemy as a friend could face deadly consequences for this mistake. This is only one among many evolutionary pressures responsible for the development of the facial recognition capability of modern humans.
In
Cosmos: A Personal VoyageCosmos: A Personal Voyage is a thirteen-part television series written by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, and Steven Soter, with Sagan as presenter. It was executive-produced by Adrian Malone, produced by David Kennard, Geoffrey Haines-Stiles and Gregory Andorfer, and directed by the producers, David...
Sagan claimed that
HeikeganiHeikegani is a species of crab native to Japan, with a shell that bears a pattern resembling a human face...
crabs' occasional resemblance to Samurai resulted in their being spared from capture and thus exaggerate the trait in their offspring, a hypothesis proposed by
Julian HuxleySir Julian Sorell Huxley FRS was an English evolutionary biologist, humanist and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century evolutionary synthesis...
in 1952. Such claims have been met with skepticism.
A 2009
magnetoencephalographyMagnetoencephalography is a technique for mapping brain activity by recording magnetic fields produced by electrical currents occurring naturally in the brain, using arrays of SQUIDs...
study found that objects incidentally perceived as faces evoke an early (165 ms) activation in the ventral fusiform cortex, at a time and location similar to that evoked by faces, whereas other common objects do not evoke such activation. This activation is similar to a slightly earlier peak at 130 ms seen for images of real faces. The authors suggest that face perception evoked by face-like objects is a relatively early process, and not a late cognitive reinterpretation phenomenon. An fMRI study in 2011 similarly showed that repeated presentation of novel visual shapes that were interpreted as meaningful led to decreased fMRI responses for real objects. These result indicate that interpretation of ambiguous stimuli depends on similar processes as those elicited for known objects.
These studies helps to explain why people identify the line a few circles and lines as a "face" so quickly and without hesitation;
cognitive processesIn science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science...
are activated by the "face-like" object, which alert the observer to the emotional state and
identityIn philosophy, identity, from , is the relation each thing bears just to itself. According to Leibniz's law two things sharing every attribute are not only similar, but are the same thing. The concept of sameness has given rise to the general concept of identity, as in personal identity and...
of the subject - even before the conscious mind begins to process - or even receive - the information. The "stick figure face," despite its simplicity, conveys mood information (in this case, disappointment or mild unhappiness); it would be just as simple to draw a stick figure face that would be perceived (by most people) as hostile and aggressive. This robust and subtle capability is the result of eons of natural selection favoring people most able to quickly identify the mental state, for example, of threatening people, thus providing the individual an opportunity to flee and fight another day. In other words, processing this information subcortically (and therefore subconsciously) - before it is passed on to the rest of the brain for detailed processing - accelerates judgment and decision making when alacrity is paramount. This ability, though highly specialized for the processing and recognition of
human emotions also functions to determine the demeanor of wildlife.
Combined with
ApopheniaApophenia is the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness", but it has come to...
, seeing patterns in randomness, and
HierophanyThe term "hierophany" signifies a manifestation of the sacred.-In Mircea Eliade's writings:...
, a manifestation of the sacred, pareidolia may have helped early societies organize chaos and make the world intelligible for our ancestors.
Pathologies
There are a number of conditions that can cause an individual to lose his/her ability to recognize faces; stroke, tumors, and trauma to the ventral fusiform gyrus are the most common culprits. This is known as
prosopagnosiaProsopagnosia is a disorder of face perception where the ability to recognize faces is impaired, while the ability to recognize other objects may be relatively intact...
. Pareidolia can also be related to obsessive–compulsive disorder as seen in one woman's case
Artifical
See also
- Apophenia
Apophenia is the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness", but it has come to...
- Confabulation
Confabulation is the process in which a memory is remembered falsely. Confabulations are indicative of a complicated and intricate process that can be led astray at any given point during encoding, storage, or recall of a memory. Two distinct types of confabulation are often distinguished...
- Psychological projection
Psychological projection or projection bias is a psychological defense mechanism where a person subconsciously denies his or her own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, usually to other people...
- Clustering illusion
The clustering illusion refers to the tendency erroneously to perceive small samples from random distributions to have significant "streaks" or "clusters", caused by a human tendency to underpredict the amount of variability likely to appear in a small sample of random or semi-random data due to...
- Face perception
Face perception is the process by which the brain and mind understand and interpret the face, particularly the human face.The human face's proportions and expressions are important to identify origin, emotional tendencies, health qualities, and some social information. From birth, faces are...
, for the cognitive process
- Fooled by Randomness
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets is a book written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb about the fallibility of human knowledge.-Reaction:The book was selected by Fortune as one of the 75 "Smartest Books of All Time."...
- Ghosts as an artifact of pareidolia
- Images of Jesus
The depiction of Jesus in art took several centuries to reach a conventional standardized form for his physical appearance, which has subsequently remained largely stable since that time...
- Nephelococcygia
- Paranoiac-critical method
The paranoiac-critical method is a surrealist technique developed by Salvador Dalí in the early 1930s. He employed it in the production of paintings and other artworks, especially those that involved optical illusions and other multiple images.- Origins :...
- Perceptions of religious imagery in natural phenomena
- Simulacrum
Simulacrum , from the Latin simulacrum which means "likeness, similarity", was first recorded in the English language in the late 16th century, used to describe a representation, such as a statue or a painting, especially of a god...
Other natural examples
- Badlands Guardian
The Badlands Guardian is a geomorphological feature located near Medicine Hat in the south east corner of Alberta, Canada. Viewed from the air, the feature bears a strong resemblance to a human head wearing a full native American headdress, facing directly westward. Because of additional man-made...
- Cydonia (the "Face on Mars")
- Man in the Moon
The Man in the Moon is an imaginary figure resembling a human face, head or body, that observers from some cultural backgrounds typically perceive in the bright disc of the full moon...
- Manicouagan Reservoir
Manicouagan Reservoir is an annular lake in central Quebec, Canada. The lake covers an area of 1,942 km², and its eastern shore is accessible via Route 389. The island in the centre of the lake is known as René-Levasseur Island, and its highest point is Mount Babel...
- Moon rabbit
The Moon rabbit, also called the Jade Rabbit, in folklore is a rabbit that lives on the moon, based on pareidolia that identifies the markings of the moon as a rabbit. The story exists in many cultures, particularly in East Asian folklore, where it is seen pounding in a mortar and pestle...
- Old Man of the Mountain
The Old Man of the Mountain, also known as the Great Stone Face or the Profile, was a series of five granite cliff ledges on Cannon Mountain in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, USA that, when viewed from the north, appeared to be the jagged profile of a face. The rock formation was above...
- Runamo
Runamo is a cracked dolerite dike that was for centuries held to be a runic inscription and gave rise to a famous scholarly controversy in the 19th century. It is located 2.7 km from the church of Bräkne-Hoby in Blekinge, Sweden...
- Sleeping Giant (Ontario)
The Sleeping Giant is a formation of mesas and sills on Sibley Peninsula which resembles a giant lying on its back when viewed from the West to North-Northwest section of Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. As one moves southward along the shoreline toward Squaw Bay the Sleeping Giant starts to separate...
- Ayu-Dag
Ayu-Dag or Medved'-gora , is the peak in Crimea, Ukraine. It is also known under Russified name Medved'-gora . The peak is located 16 km north-east from Yalta between the towns of Gurzuf and Partenit....
- Pedra da Galinha Choca
Pedra da Galinha Choca is the name given to one of the most famous monolith in the city of Quixadá, taking its name from its curious shape. It is located 5 km from the city center...
External links