Pareidolia
Overview
Pareidolia is the tendency to perceive meaningful patterns, especially faces, figures, or words, in random or ambiguous stimuli. The face in the clouds, the man in the Moon, the Virgin Mary on a slice of toast, and the voice in the static are all pareidolia.
Notes
- It is a feature, not a fault. A brain that occasionally sees a face that is not there costs little; a brain that occasionally misses a face that is there could cost everything. Natural selection tuned the detector towards false positives. The same bias explains why we attribute agency to the weather, luck, and the universe (see Ghosts and The human need for religion).
- It is the engine of a great deal of pseudo-evidence. The "helicopter" at Abydos and the "astronaut" at Palenque (Ancient Aliens), the "slit pupils" in compressed video (Reptilian Elite), the "faces" in Martian photographs, and the "messages" in records played backwards are all pattern detection running on noise.
- The cure is to ask what the pattern looks like in context, with the full data, and whether someone who did not already expect it would see it. Usually they would not.