Pareidolia

What do the clouds look like to you? According to me, the cloud on the right-hand side of the picture resembles a dog. You might think the cloud looks like something totally different. It’s amazing how our mind makes us see faces or things in something completely unrelated.

This phenomenon of relating and recognizing an image in a different and unrelated object is called pareidolia. This word is derived from the Greek work ‘para’ meaning abnormal and ‘eidolia’ meaning image. For example, seeing a colon with the letter p looks like someone sticking their tongue out 😛 . It is a mistake of the mind kind of like illusions. Face pareidolia is the most common. It is finding a face in objects.

Why does it happen?

Our brain has parts of it dedicated to recognizing faces and patterns – the fusiform gyrus and the neocortex respectively. Humans are social beings and so a lot of our neural networks are dedicated to identifying faces. This is what differentiates our brain from the brains of other animals

This quality however can sometimes mislead us. These misidentifications happen in less than 170 milliseconds giving us no conscious control over it. Thus, making it almost impossible to un-see this illusion of a face or pattern.

When facing pareidolia, we match the images with our mental images. Thereby, it is affected by our culture and background. Here are a few examples,