What Makes Your Mind See Faces Everywhere? The Surprising Science of Pareidolia
What Pareidolia (par-i-DOH-lee-a) Reveals About the Brain’s Deep Need for Meaning
Welcome to the 5th issue of my newsletter, Inkblots & Interpretations.
Pareidolia (par-i-DOH-lee-a). Apart from being a very cool word, what is pareidolia, and what might it mean in psychology, neurology, spirituality, conspiracy theories, creativity, art, and literature?
Simply defined, pareidolia is the perceptual tendency to impose meaningful images on random patterns so that we may detect an object or face where none is there. Pareidolia is a type of phenomenon called apophenia, which is a proneness to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated events or ideas.
Looking for meaningful images in cloud formations is an age-old pastime. But have you ever seen faces in a wall socket, rock, or piece of wood? What about seeing the image of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, or the devil in a piece of toast?
Diane Duyser sold an old piece of grilled cheese sandwich that looked like the Virgin Mary for $28,000 on eBay. Not to be outdone, a man sold a Cheeto resembling Harambe the Gorilla for nearly $100K. Go figure.
Forms of pareidolia. First, let’s distinguish pareidolia from another form of anomalous perception: hallucination. Both hallucinations and illusions are different forms of misperception, but they differ in important ways.
Illusions are misinterpretations of actual stimuli, whereas hallucinations are sensory perceptual experiences for which no stimulus exists. For example, hearing voices when there is no one speaking is an auditory hallucination.
In contrast, mistaking a coatrack in a dark room for a person is a visual illusion. The coat rack is real. The interpretation of it is incorrect. Pareidolia is essentially a perceptual illusion. The patterned cloud, rock formation, or piece of toast is a real stimulus that is perceived, but it is misinterpreted as something else.
Although any sensory experience may be misinterpreted, people usually report either visual or auditory pareidolia. Visual pareidolia is most represented in images of faces, although other objects may be seen as well. Auditory pareidolia occurs when one hears a message in random sounds.
Remember the Beatles’ song “Revolution 9” on the album Revolver that apparently had the words “turn me on, dead man” when the record was reversed and slowed down?
This led a generation of my fellow Boomers to engage in conspiratorial fantasies about Paul’s death. It was later shown that The Beatles purposely “back-masked” this message.
Who experiences pareidolia? Lots of us do. Although it is a common human tendency, some may experience pareidolia more than others.
But before we get too specific, let’s see if we can unpeel the layers to understand just what causes pareidolia to occur in the brain and how it might relate to neurophysiology, psychopathology, spirituality, conspiracy theories, creativity, art, and literature.
What Happens in the Brain?
The brain has specific areas sensitive to detecting and processing facial cues. The evolutionary significance of rapid facial detection is clear: recognizing faces may either raise or lower potential threat and assure survival. Even false detection is better than missing vital cues.
The fusiform face area (FFA) is located in the inferior temporal lobes. Even minimal cues can trigger the FFA, prompting facial detection. It is important to note that the brain isn’t a passive receptacle. Instead of simply receiving perceptual information, our brains actively interpret based on prior knowledge, memories, and expectations.
Interestingly, when auditory or visual information is ambiguous, the brain “fills in the gaps.”
The result is that we sometimes perceive patterns or images that aren’t really there. The Rorschach Inkblot test, which I’ll say more about in a moment, is a wonderful example of how our brains search for meaning in ambiguous situations.
Can Pareidolia Represent a Psychological Disturbance?
Studies demonstrate that healthy people report pareidolic experiences, but other studies have correlated pareidolia with certain personality traits, religiosity, negative emotions, schizophrenia, and drug usage.
Not surprisingly, these experiences are common when one has taken LSD. Research also demonstrated that depression, anxiety, and loneliness increase pareidolic phenomena. The same is true for neurodegenerative diseases like Lewy Body Dementia and Parkinson’s.
Some may wonder about pareidolia and autism. Interestingly, studies show that children with autism have more difficulty recognizing faces and pareidolic images, which may be related to their decreased recognition of social and affective cues.
Religious Pareidolia
Religious individuals report perceptions of religious thematic imagery in ambiguous stimuli. Most typically, these have involved seeing images of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, or the word Allah.
During catastrophic events, like 911 or the fire that consumed Notre Dame Cathedral, groups of onlookers claimed to see either images of Satan or Jesus in the flames. Others have examined the Shroud of Turin and claimed to see a variety of other objects in the linen.
Conspiracy Theories and Pareidolia?
Conspiracy theories may be examples of apophenia, or the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated events or ideas. I discussed conspiracy theories in a previous blog.
As we have seen, both pareidolia and apophenia are common phenomena in everyday life and may be adaptive when quick interpretation of human facial stimuli is necessary for survival.
However, these same tendencies may spread and give way to what Robert Bendarik called “collective pareidolia,” where perceiving meaning in random events may be reinforced by social needs, political beliefs, and peer pressure.
The compelling belief that “THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE” may lead groups of people to search for confirmation bias, seeking meaningful images, symbols, and messages in random events or stimuli.
Invited Pareidolia: The Rorschach Test
For the last century, psychologists have handed their patients an inkblot and asked, “What might this be?” The Rorschach Test, a widely used psychodiagnostic instrument in clinical and forensic psychology, is an evidence-based procedure created in 1921 by Swiss Psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach.
My 50-year fascination with the Rorschach inspired me to write my first novel, a historical fiction called The 11th Inkblot.
Hermann Rorschach, who was trained as an artist, created his inkblots as pareidolic stimuli to assess aspects of psychological functioning. In essence, respondents are invited to see something in an inherently ambiguous and meaningless visual stimulus.
Creativity, Art, and Literature
I wrote about creativity in an earlier blog, but more from the perspective of distinguishing it from madness.
In a study of creative potential, Ann Printz demonstrated the link between creativity and pareidolic processing.
Specifically, Printz found that individuals with higher creative potential grasped pareidolic stimuli more quickly than subjects with lower potential.
In writing about creativity pareidolia, Annie Murphy Paul noted that as children, Salvador Dalí and Paul Klee were fascinated by seeing faces in marble or plaster. Renaissance painters sometimes used pareidolia in their artwork.
In his notebooks, Leonardo Da Vinci wrote about pareidolia as a device for painters. Da Vinci’s words in his notebooks are telling
If you look at any walls spotted with various stains or a mixture of different kinds of stones, if you are about to invent some scene you will be able to see in it a resemblance to various different landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys and various groups of hills.
You will also be able to see divers, combats, and figures in quick movement and strange expressions of faces and outlandish costumes, and an infinite number of things which you can then reduce into separate and well-conceived forms (R. Jon & J. Don Read (Eds.), 1923).
Literary giants have referred to pareidolia. Shakespeare had Hamlet ask Polonius, “Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost the shape of a camel?” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Great Stone Face concerns a face that’s seen on the side of a mountain.
Kelly Pedro’s 2024 award-winning short story “Pareidolia” incorporates the theme of grief as the motivation for pareidolia. A poignant excerpt reads,
My mother sees my father’s face everywhere. Last week it was in our neighbour’s wilting asters. Then, an angry version in a banana she decided to save.
“Maybe it’ll brown into the Virgin Mary, and we can sell it on eBay like that ten-year-old cheese sandwich,” I said.
Several books explore the theme of pareidolia:
• Suddenly, It Was Pareidolia! by Karen E. Smith is a children's book about kids discovering pareidolia in nature
• Pareidolia: Faces in Everyday Objects by Mark Baker and Pareidolia: A Retrospective of Beloved and New Works by James Jean, focus on pareidolia in photography and art
Here is a book of short stories. Pareidolia is an anthology edited by James Everington & Dan Howarth. I’m hooked by the cover!
To give you a flavor of the dark tone of the stories,
Have you ever seen figures in the clouds, heard voices in the sound of a detuned TV, recognised faces made by the shadows in the corner of a room?... But what if what you were seeing was really there? What if the voice you heard really was speaking to you, calling you?
Psychological horror and thrillers exploit pareidolia to heighten suspense. We all get chills when we think we see a figure out of the corner of our eye or detect a shadowy face in the window. L.N. Coniff elaborated on pareidolia in horror stories in his 2017 online piece in Medium.
If you have 13 minutes, watch this bone-chilling short film on YouTube. It’s quite well done. It captures the idea that reality is not always what it seems. Our minds play tricks on us to the point that we may question our existence.
If you can’t spare 13 minutes, check out this one-minute gem by filmmaker Carlos Andrés Reyes called Pareidolia:
And As for Me…
Against this impressive backdrop of neurology, psychology, literature, art, and horror, I couldn’t resist the call to write a novel where pareidolia becomes a powerful metaphor for the tension between reality and illusion.
My work in progress, provisionally titled Pareidolia. Realities & Illusions, follows Nicola Kitts, my character from Tears Are Only Water and, more recently, Whispers, as she struggles to maintain her sanity and avoid crossing the thin line that separates reality from illusion and truth from deception.
So that’s it….
Oh, imagine my surprise when I pulled this out of the toaster this morning!
Thank you for stopping by to read my newsletter, and special thanks to those who have taken the time to read my novels!