INSANE: Pareidolia faces in things | Rare Historical Photos

Pareidolia is part of a broader psychological phenomenon known as apophenia, or the tendency to create meaning from unrelated events. For example, an athlete might have a lucky shirt they wear for important games. The shirt is “lucky” because the athlete wore it when something significant happened, such as winning a big match or playing particularly well. The pareidolic tendency to see familiar forms in arbitrary shapes or objects or to hear voices or music in noise is the mind trying to find some significance in randomness; therefore, it is classified as a form of apophenia.

In the past, pareidolia was considered a sign of mental illness. The way people interpreted visual stimuli was also seen as a way of gaining insight into the human psyche. This is, in part, the theory behind the Rorschach inkblot tests, in which subjects are shown inkblot images on cards and asked to tell an examiner what they see. Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach established the technique in 1921. He based the test on a favorite childhood game called Klecksography, which also used inkblots, after he noticed that children with certain conditions saw similar images in the blots.

While inkblot testing remains a tool of psychoanalytic diagnosis, it’s less emphasized today. There’s an understanding that pareidolia is a normal tendency built into the human brain, and it only becomes a symptom of illness when it interferes with a person’s ability to function.

New findings suggest that our brains are wired to detect facial features, even in meaningless visual noise.

In a study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, researchers showed participants everyday objects that resembled faces, as well as abstract images of visual noise that had no inherent meaning.

The vast majority of them—90%—reported seeing a face in at least one of the noise images.

Study co-author Professor Branka Spehar, of the University of New South Wales, Australia, said the aim was to investigate whether images more minimal than objects with face-like features, with “two round things which could be eyes ... and a horizontal thing which could be a mouth”, would elicit similar visual responses.

People saw faces more frequently in images of objects (96.7%) than in visual noise (53.4%).

“People tend to see pareidolia images as male and young and happy,” said Professor David Alais, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Sydney, Australia, who was not involved in the research. “The most striking pareidolia images have these ... open, wide-eyed expressions that maybe make you think of youthful enthusiasm, or babies.”

In the study, faces perceived in artificial noise were more likely to be perceived as older and angrier, while object faces were more likely to be perceived as happy or surprised.

The reasons for this were still unknown, Spehar said, wondering whether it might be because our brains are primed to identify threats in unfamiliar environments.

In a second experiment, the researchers showed short clips of moving noise in both random and vertically symmetrical patterns. Participants saw faces more often in symmetrical clips (65.8%) than in random-pattern clips (23.6%).

Participants reported seeing various images—such as dragons and demons—in the random noise. “Once you introduce vertical symmetry, faces predominate,” Spehar said.

“One of the most highly adapted things we do with our visual system is detect the presence of faces,” Alais said. “You want to detect faces as quickly as possible, in case they’re friends or foes ... but you get a bit of a by-catch, you sometimes catch false faces.”

“The contemporary view of the brain, and how it works to generate our perceptions of the world, is that it imposes patterns and predictions on incoming input. It does that for reasons of efficiency and speed.”

Professor Alais said a system within the brain, known as the face-selective network, was geared to detect the eyes, nose, and mouth.

“We’re predisposed to use that sort of a template, and there’s maybe a bias to see faces in noise compared to other objects.”

For more, check out these 30 Times People Experienced Pareidolia In The Most Unexpected Places.