Pareidolia: Imaginary Significance
Ever hear of a Rorschach test? Developed by Hermann Rorschach in the 1920’s, the inkblot is a commonly used tool for forensic assessment by Psychologists. While it is commonly thought that a Rorschach analysis is done by interpreting and psychoanalyzing what the patient sees in the inkblot (”Since you saw your dead mother, that means you have unresolved maternal issues”), they are more commonly analyzed with the Exner method: the responses of the patient are compared to a large statistical body of responses and a profile is created based on which personality types most fit the response. (”45% of the people that saw a crow also suffer from clinical depression. 60% of people who saw a bicycle are schizophrenics.” etc.) The interpretation is correlative, rather than directly interpretive.
Rorschach’s function based on some trickery of our brains known as pareidolia.Pareidolia is essentially when we perceive a random or vague visual/audio stimulus as being significant, when in fact it is not.
Some common examples of pareidolia (in addition to rorschach inkblots):
- Seeing animal shapes in clouds
- Seeing a “face” on the moon, or on Mars
- Hearing words or phrase when playing a record backwards (”Saaaatan I lurrrrveyou Sataaaaaan”)
- Believing that certain religious figures, such as the Virgin Mary or Jesus Christ, have appeared in mundane places (i.e. a piece of toast, a baby’s ultrasound image, in a cloud, on a bloody bandage, etc.)
- Seeing human-like qualities in natural formations of rock, trees, etc.
You get the idea.
There are a number of ideas about what causes pareidolia. Carl Sagan (the charismatic Cosmologist from PBS’s Nova series) believed that human beings are “hard-wired” to identifying the human face. There are probably some survival implications in an ability like that. It could also simply be that we want to see these things, and so we do.
The variety I always find a bit strange are the religious sightings: when people claim to see the face /body of Jesus or the Virgin Mary in bizarre places. There was one fellow from Ohio that claimed an image of Jesus appeared in his breakfast pancake! Someone else saw Jesus’s face on a piece of toast. A woman named Diana Duyser saw what she believed was the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese [pictured, left]. (She saved it and ate something else I presume).
What’s peculiar about this is the immediate jump to assuming that the identity behind the face is specifically the face of someone whom the viewer has not only never seen personally, but whose actual appearance was only recorded in text. How do these people know they aren’t actually seeing a bearded man from Salem, Oregon? Or a lady’s face from Sao Paolo, Brazil? If I went through all the trouble to have my face telekinetically projected onto a piece of toast far-far away, I’d be pretty annoyed if someone assumed it was the face of Christ.
Remember the panic of Rock Music back when the Beatles grew their hair long, the Stones were still releasing their records on vinyl (instead of on iTunes), and parents would toss their kids “devil music” into a roaring fireplace? People believed that playing a record backwards (called Backwards Masking) revealed subliminal messages that advocated murder, satan-worshipping, and voting Democrat.
I’ve heard some of these recordings and you have to listen really carefully to even hear something that sounds remotely like spoken English. Nevermind that our human brains aren’t really equipped to decode audio in reverse — so the fact that a hidden message is only noticeable when playing the record backwards is a moot point anyways. Then again, there are some that still believe Subliminal Sleep messages are an effective way of learning.
The bottom line is that we naturally see what we want to see. But just like an optical illusion or a sleight-of-hand magic trick, our mind plays tricks on us.
June 14th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
the other day i was making general tso’s- and a cut of the chicken i used looked exactly like the outline of a flea… coincidence? or a message from beyond?
did i want to see the flea? certainly not in my dinner! perhaps i’m hardwired to see parasites..