Nicole Yeung
Edited by Amir Esmaeeli and Lilly Hale
Under a sky dotted with clouds, many may find themselves on a hill with no other desire than to search for funny faces or animals in the dreamy wisps. Even Shakespeare’s Hamlet mentioned seeing creatures in the clouds. Despite often being regarded as a trifling hobby, have you ever wondered about the mechanics behind cloud-gazing? Is the detection of patterns within ambiguous objects solely based on the brain’s visual processing system, or is there also influence from the mastery of creativity and artistry? The term pareidolia may prove itself handy for this probe.
Introducing Pareidolia
Pareidolia (often pronounced pair-uh-doh-lee-uh) refers to detecting patterns or meanings that don’t actually exist, similar to the shapes we detect in clouds. The word pareidolia can be broken down into the Greek words para (παρά: alongside/instead) and eidōlon (εἴδωλον: image/shape). While pareidolia is often experienced as a visual illusion, studies state that this brain phenomenon can also be found in sounds.
The existence of pareidolia has been discovered since long ago, yet there is still a lack of understanding concerning the causes of it. This vast gap has left many scientists and researchers investigating possible contributions from the prefrontal and visual cortex in the brain. A few have chosen to include artistic and creative facets during their studies.
Cognitive Aspects
Regardless of the many shapes and patterns that may be recognized, faces serve as the most common form of pareidolia which may be due to our frequent interaction with other humans and complex face-detecting systems.
Professor and researcher Kang Lee states, “Our findings suggest that it’s common for people to see non-existent features because human brains are uniquely wired to recognize faces, so that even when there’s only a slight suggestion of facial features the brain automatically interprets it as a face.” Put simply, the brain instantly assumes certain objects are faces just by seeing if they bear characteristics similar to our facial features.
A study featuring the rhesus monkey touched on the specifics of face pareidolia in primates. Rhesus monkeys were chosen due to their complex face-interpretation system and the fact that they were a non-human species (researchers wondered if face pareidolia was a unique experience to humans). As the monkeys observed images of faces with and without pareidolia, researchers examined the primates’ eye movements and noticed that they looked longer at images expressing pareidolia. Further analyses suggested that the monkeys interpreted genuine and illusory faces in a similar manner, stating that the experience of face pareidolia may be the result of a face-detection mechanism shared across multiple species.
Creative and Artistic Flair
Although pareidolia may not be directly caused by imagination or artistry, the perception of pareidolic objects may be affected and enhanced by these skills. In a report written by Antoine Bellemare Pepin et al., 50 participants with differing creativity levels looked at synthetic cloud-like images that were generated with the help of fractal dimension and contrast. The participants were tested on their creativity levels, and they were asked to determine as many pareidolic depictions from the given cloud-like images as they could. The results showed that the participants who previously demonstrated higher levels of creativity produced more pareidolic perceptions in a shorter amount of time, ultimately suggesting that creativity can influence the interpretation of pareidolia.
Pareidolia may also be woven into the production of fine arts–in particular, the art of klecksography. Klecksography is the practice in which people would drip ink droplets onto paper and create illustrations out of the inkblots. As seen beside, one has produced and interpreted recognizable patterns out of the random or ambiguous ink spots.
(“Kleksographien” by Kerner, Justinus Andreas Christian 1786-1862)
A Conclusion to Pareidolia
Pareidolia, commonly experienced in everyday life by multiple species, is the recognition of patterns or meaning from random objects. It is often thought to be the result of the brain’s processing system, though pareidolia may express unique personifications in the form of fine arts as well.
References
- “Why the Brain Is Programmed to See Faces in Everyday Objects.” Neuroscience News. https://neurosciencenews.com/object-faces-16827/
- Wang, Chen et al. “Pareidolia in a Built Environment as a Complex Phenomenological Ambiguous Stimuli.” National Institutes of Health. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9103170/#:~:text=Pareidolia%20is%20a%20kind%20of,pareidolian%20images%20are%20human%20faces
- Müri, René & Göbel, Nicole. “See faces in the clouds? It might be a sign of your creativity.” Psyche. https://psyche.co/ideas/see-faces-in-the-clouds-it-might-be-a-sign-of-your-creativity
- Ghose, Tia. “What is pareidolia?” Live Science. https://www.livescience.com/25448-pareidolia.html
- Ali, Dominic. “Seeing Jesus in Toast? A man in the moon? You’re not alone.” University of Toronto. https://www.utoronto.ca/news/seeing-jesus-toast-man-moon-youre-not-alone-or-crazy
- Pepin, Antoine Bellemare et al. “Processing visual ambiguity in fractal patterns: Pareidolia as a sign of creativity.” iScience. https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(22)01375-X?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS258900422201375X%3Fshowall%3Dtrue#%20
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