Have you ever spotted a face in the clouds? A profile in a rock formation? Does the front end of a car sometimes look like it’s staring at you? Have you ever looked at the halves of your tomato you just sliced and thought they strangely seem to be smiling back at you? If you said yes to any of these questions or experienced something similar, you've experienced something known as pareidolia.
The dictionary defines pareidolia as “the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern,” and that is just what’s happening when we see a celebrity's face on our piece of toast. Our brains possess an incredible talent for finding meaning and patterns in the world around us, even where none exist.
Pareidolia originated from the combination of two Greek words, “para” meaning beside or beyond, and “eidos” meaning images, appearance, and looks. Victor Kandinsky, a Russian psychiatrist, offered the word in 1885 to formally name the partial visual illusion.
Pareidolia is sometimes called a “misperception” of, most commonly, human faces. This emphasis on the human face seems to be hard-wired into our brains for survival because even a newborn baby can recognize faces and expressions.
A study done in 2022 and found in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, had some interesting findings:
Females are more likely to identify faces in ambiguous patterns than males
Smokers and long-time medicine users are more likely to see the images in ambiguous patterns
“Pareidolian” images were most likely spotted during the early morning hours and at midnight, and less likely during the midday hours
The study cited examples of finding the face of Jesus Christ on a potato chip, a cinnamon bun that looks like Mother Teresa, and a grilled cheese sandwich that seemed to show a portrait of the Virgin Mary, and Satan appearing in the smoke of Twin Tower tragedy. I’m sure most of these are familiar to you.
The origin of the phenomenon is unclear, but there are some theories:
In psychology, it is considered a partial illusion and it happens with a condition called low luminance, which, as it sounds, relates to vision that is less illuminated (either due to a low-lit environment or degeneration of visual ability).
Visually, when the brain receives data that seems incomplete but seems familiar, it will attempt to fill in the rest of the information with pre-existing knowledge and data
Interesting, a lot of the images seen with this phenomenon are religious in nature, and it is believed that the ambiguous stimuli are seen as mythological icons because of the sacralization and significance of mythology in societies
Another study done by the University of Pennsylvania propose an evolving theory that they penned, “sensory referenced suppression.” The study explains that as information comes in through the rods and cones of the eye, it travels “neuron by neuron through a stack of brain areas that make up the visual system” until the information reach the visual part of the brain, called the IT cortex. 16 million neurons will assess the information that is being viewed and interpret it like a supercomputer. Each pattern that is identified is given its own silo, one for your favorite coffee cup, one for your writing pen, and one for your car, for example. More neural activity indicates to the brain that the image being seen in new, so the neural activity for things familiar has less activity. From this, they concluded that the brain easily identifies new information and tries to ‘figure it out.’
Some recent studies have also linked pareidolia and creativity, proposing that the presence of this phenomenon may indicate higher levels of creativity in a person. This notion also proposes that creativity isn’t only about thinking, but also seeing. And creativity, in this way, is all about making meaning from the raw material that we experience every day. Allowing for ambiguity, such as being confronted with incomplete data, our brain will creatively fill in the blanks, and in many ways, this allows us to project our own perspectives out to the world. Our version of creativity, as seen through our lens.
So next time you see what looks like a face in your bowl of cereal, thank your brain for being a creative mastermind.
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