Pareidolia


Pareidolia is the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one detects an object, pattern, or meaning where there is none. Pareidolia is a specific but common type of apophenia.
Common examples include perceived images of animals, faces, or objects in cloud formations; seeing faces in inanimate objects; or lunar pareidolia like the Man in the Moon or the Moon rabbit. The concept of pareidolia may extend to include hidden messages in recorded music played in reverse or at higher- or lower-than-normal speeds, and hearing voices or music in random noise, such as that produced by air conditioners or by fans. Face pareidolia has also been demonstrated in rhesus macaques.

Etymology

The word derives from the Greek words pará and the noun eídōlon.
Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum introduced the German term Pareidolie in his 1866 paper "Die Sinnesdelierien". When Kahlbaum's paper was reviewed the following year in The Journal of Mental Science, Volume 13, Pareidolie was translated into English as "pareidolia", and noted to be synonymous with the terms "...changing hallucination, partial hallucination, perception of secondary images."

Link to other conditions

Pareidolia correlates with age and is frequent among patients with Parkinson's disease and dementia with Lewy bodies.
Several case studies report intrusive pareidolia as a symptom presentation in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

Explanations

Pareidolia can cause people to interpret random images, or patterns of light and shadow, as faces. A 2009 magnetoencephalography study found that objects perceived as faces evoke an early activation of the fusiform face area 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 faster time that is 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.
A functional magnetic resonance imaging 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 results indicate that the interpretation of ambiguous stimuli depends upon processes similar to those elicited by known objects.
Pareidolia was found to affect brain function and brain waves. In a 2022 study, EEG records show that responses in the frontal and occipitotemporal cortexes begin prior to when one recognizes faces and later, when they are not recognized. By displaying these proactive brain waves, scientists can then have a basis for data rather than relying on self-reported sightings.
These studies help to explain why people generally identify a few lines and a circle as a "face" so quickly and without hesitation. Cognitive processes are activated by the "face-like" object which alerts the observer to both the emotional state and identity of the subject, even before the conscious mind begins to process or even receive the information. A "stick figure face", despite its simplicity, can convey mood information, and be drawn to indicate emotions such as happiness or anger. This robust and subtle capability is hypothesized to be the result 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 or attack preemptively. This ability, though highly specialized for the processing and recognition of human emotions, also functions to determine the demeanor of wildlife.

Pareidolia and creative thinking

Pareidolia plays a significant role in creative cognition, enabling artists and viewers to perceive novel forms and meanings in ambiguous stimuli. Joanne Lee highlights that this phenomenon has been harnessed in artistic practices for centuries. The phenomenon was particularly important to surrealism, where artists like Salvador Dali, influenced by André Breton, embraced pareidolic ambiguity to challenge rationalist perceptions and provoke new ways of seeing.

Examples

Mimetoliths

A mimetolithic pattern is a pattern created on rocks that may come to mimic recognizable forms through the random processes of formation, weathering and erosion. Many examples exist, from the Old Man of the Mountain to Iztaccíhuatl, a range in Mexico whose name is Nahuatl for "White woman", reflecting the four individual snow-capped peaks which depict the head, chest, knees and feet of a sleeping female when seen from east or west.
A well-known example is the Face on Mars, a rock formation on Mars that resembled a human face in certain satellite photos. Most mimetoliths are much larger than the subjects they resemble, such as a cliff profile that looks like a human face.
Picture jaspers exhibit combinations of patterns, such as banding from flow or depositional patterns, or dendritic or color variations, resulting in what appear to be miniature scenes on a cut section, which is then used for jewelry.
Chert nodules, concretions, or pebbles may in certain cases be mistakenly identified as skeletal remains, egg fossils, or other antiquities of organic origin by amateur enthusiasts.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Japanese researcher Chonosuke Okamura self-published a series of reports titled Original Report of the Okamura Fossil Laboratory, in which he described tiny inclusions in polished limestone from the Silurian period as being preserved fossil 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 an Ig Nobel Prize in biodiversity in 1996.
Some sources describe various mimetolithic features on Pluto, including a heart-shaped region.

Clouds

Seeing shapes in cloud patterns is another example of this phenomenon. Rogowitz and Voss showed a relationship between seeing shapes in cloud patterns and fractal dimension. They varied the fractal dimension of the boundary contour from 1.2 to 1.8, and found that the lower the fractal dimension, the more likely people were to report seeing nameable shapes of animals, faces, and fantasy creatures. From above, pareidolia may be perceived in satellite imagery of tropical cyclones. Notably hurricanes Matthew and Milton gained much attention for resembling a human face or skull when viewed from the side.

Mars canals

A notable example of pareidolia occurred in 1877, when observers using telescopes to view the surface of Mars thought that they saw faint straight lines, which were then interpreted by some as canals. It was theorized that the canals were possibly created by sentient beings. This created a sensation. In the next few years better photographic techniques and stronger telescopes were developed and applied, which resulted in new images in which the faint lines disappeared, and the canal theory was debunked as an example of pareidolia.

Lunar surface

Many cultures recognize pareidolic images in the disc of the full moon, including the human face known as the Man in the Moon in many Northern Hemisphere cultures and the Moon rabbit in East Asian and indigenous American cultures. Other cultures see a walking figure carrying a wide burden on their back, including in Germanic tradition, Haida mythology, and Latvian mythology.

Projective tests

The Rorschach inkblot test uses pareidolia in an attempt to gain insight into a person's mental state. The Rorschach is a projective test that elicits thoughts or feelings of respondents that are "projected" onto the ambiguous inkblot images. Rorschach inkblots have low-fractal-dimension boundary contours, which may elicit general shape-naming behaviors, serving as vehicles for projected meanings.

Banknotes

Owing to the way designs are engraved and printed, occurrences of pareidolia have occasionally been reported in banknotes.
One example is the 1954 Canadian Landscape Canadian dollar banknote series, known among collectors as the "Devil's Head" variety of the initial print runs. The obverse of the notes features what appears to be an exaggerated grinning face, formed from patterns in the hair of Queen Elizabeth II. The phenomenon generated enough attention for revised designs to be issued in 1956, which removed the effect.

Literature

Renaissance authors have shown a particular interest in pareidolia. In William Shakespeare's play Hamlet, for example, Prince Hamlet points at the sky and "demonstrates" his supposed madness in this exchange with Polonius:
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a short story called "The Great Stone Face" in which a face seen in the side of a mountain is revered by a village.

Art

ists often used pareidolia in paintings and drawings: Andrea Mantegna, Leonardo da Vinci, Giotto, Hans Holbein, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, and many more have shown images—often human faces—that due to pareidolia appear in objects or clouds.
In his notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci wrote of pareidolia as a device for painters, writing:
Salem, a 1908 painting by Sydney Curnow Vosper, gained notoriety due to a rumour that it contained a hidden face, that of the devil. This led many commentators to visualize a demonic face depicted in the shawl of the main figure, despite the artist's denial that any faces had deliberately been painted into the shawl.
Surrealist artists such as Salvador Dalí would intentionally use pareidolia in their works, often in the form of a hidden face.

Architecture

Two 13th-century edifices in Turkey display architectural use of shadows of stone carvings at the entrance. Outright pictures are avoided in Islam but tessellations and calligraphic pictures were allowed, so designed "accidental" silhouettes of carved stone tessellations became a creative escape.
  • Niğde Alaaddin Mosque in Niğde, Turkey, with its "mukarnas" art where the shadows of three-dimensional ornamentation with stone masonry around the entrance form a chiaroscuro drawing of a woman's face with a crown and long hair appearing at a specific time, at some specific days of the year.
  • Divriği Great Mosque and Hospital in Sivas, Turkey, shows shadows of the three-dimensional ornaments of both entrances of the mosque part, to cast a giant shadow of a praying man that changes pose as the sun moves, as if to illustrate what the purpose of the building is. Another detail is the difference in the impressions of the clothing of the two shadow-men indicating two different styles, possibly to tell who is to enter through which door.