Pareidolia is awesome! care to share your stories?

Take a look at this photo I took while walking home from grocery shopping



Did you see the Sniper? luckily for me it was just a shadow cast by a streetlight, But I couldn't stick around to take better photos, but I was amazed. And if you aren't aware of the phenomenon, here's the 101.

Paridoelia is a psychological phenomenon in which the mind responds to a stimulus, usually an image or a sound, by perceiving a familiar pattern where none exists. Common examples are perceived images of animals, faces, or objects in cloud formations, the Man in the Moon, the Moon rabbit, hidden messages in recorded music played in reverse or at higher- or lower-than-normal speeds, and hearing indistinct voices in random noise such as that produced by air conditioners or fans.

Now i'm not so sure about the sound thing-that can be attributed to a number of issues e.g Tinnitus, CAP, schizophrenia etc. However many of us have and will see faces and objects, I had a poster of the video game Gears of War 2 which had a face that looked like Hitler burning in flames with a look of agony, and my lounge cover casts a shadow that looks like a statue from Easter island. It's funny how our vision and mind keep playing tricks on us.

Care to share your stories or even images? it would be interesting to hear or see your experiences.

there was a shower curtain in my bathroom growing up and I would find faces, abstract looking humans, animals, etc. The best I ever saw was in the clouds once, it was a perfect human eye, better than any painting could do.

There's a part of the cerebral cortex called the fusiform face area that specializes in facial recognition.

Curious, do you see anything odd in this photo?



A shape maybe?

a reply to: cooperton

It's like that, it comes unexpectedly.

It's like your mind took 'shrooms-for instance the burnt toast Jesus-I am not a person of faith but I will say when I saw it I thought to myself 'holy crap that does look like Jebus!'

Sometimes I think we are not in full control of our grey matter.

originally posted by: ausername
Curious, do you see anything odd in this photo?

A shape maybe?

Nope, I see a recently classified type of cloud that has been falsely accused of the creation of Chemtrails.

Yep. We have a couple of small cork boards hung up in our bedroom for the kids to tack art they make for me & the husband on. Pretty simple & easy way to display creative stuff, I highly recommend it to other parents

Anyway, on one, there's several cutouts -- the old-fashioned fold-n-cut patterns kind, carefully cut out horses, butterflies, etc tacked up there. A few are layered just so that they can create a myriad of pareidolia images in the low bedroom light (we may or may not have one of those Boon Glo lights for very low-level illumination, it gets pitch black in there) The butterflies and a t-rex combine into a larger image in that light and sometimes it looks like a mummy screaming out of the corner of my eye.

a reply to: Thecakeisalie