Pareidolia

Pareidolia (pronounced pair-ahy-doh-lee-uh or pair-uh-doh-lee-uh)

In psychiatry and psychology, the tendency to interpret a vague stimulus as something known to the observer, such as seeing shapes in clouds, or hearing hidden messages in music; the perception of meaning in a shape which exists by mere coincidence.

1867 (in English): From the German Pareidolie, the construct being the Ancient Greek παρα- (para-) (alongside, concurrent) + εἴδωλον (eídōlon) (image) + -ία (-ía).  The -ia suffix was from the Latin -ia and the Ancient Greek -ία (-ía) & -εια (-eia), used to form abstract nouns of feminine gender.  It was applied to the names of countries, diseases, species etc and, occasionally, collections of stuff.  In English, the word was re-introduced by UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) debunker Steven Goldstein in 22 June 1994 edition of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, a publication devoted to rational, evidence-based explanations of the para-normal, magic, flying saucers and the many crackpot notions spread by new-agers, spiritualists, conspiracy theorists and other such folk.  Pareidolia is a noun and paradolic is an adjective; the noun plural is pareidolias.  There are circumstances in which the adjectives paradolish & paradolesque might be useful but neither exists.

The German word Pareidolie was in 1866 used by German psychiatrist Dr Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum (1828–1899) in his academic paper Die Sinnesdelierien (On Delusion of the Senses and in 1867, upon re-publication in volume 13 of The Journal of Mental Science, it was translated into English as “pareidolia” and noted as synonymous with the terms “...changing hallucination, partial hallucination, and perception of secondary images.”  The use of “pareidolia” is nuanced because any object (whether constructed or natural phenomenon) which even vaguely resembles something or someone can be pareidolic but the condition of pareidolia exists only when an individual attaches some meaning to the appearance or sound.  The general term is apophenia (the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things), coined in 1958 by German neurologist and psychiatrist (and one-time Nazi) Dr Klaus Conrad (1905-1961) as Apophänie, from the Ancient Greek verb ἀποφαίνω (apophaínō), the construct being ἀπο- (apo-) and φαίνω (phaínō) (appear).  Herr Dr Conrad’s paper was on the topic of early-stage schizophrenia and he defined Apophänie as the “…unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness.”  In this, he distinguished between Apophänie as the early stages of delusional (and self-referential) over-interpretation of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations which were wholly illusory.

Pareidolia is a form of apophenia where the mind will attempt to find connections in random events, thoughts or patterns where none actually exist.  Pareidolia concentrates the visual and audio aspects of the brain in constructing a perception from a vague stimulus.  Clinically, there are two forms of pareidolia: (1) the “mechanistic”, where man-made objects, by mere coincidence have a resemblance to something else and (2) the “matrixed”, where natural phenomenon such as rock formations, clouds or the surfaces of planets include shapes which can be interpreted as something human, animal or supernatural and instead of being regarded as coincidental and amusing, are treated as having some inherent meaning or being evidence of some theory otherwise unsupported by any evidence.

The vast majority of pareidolias reported resemble the human face.  It’s believed that early in human evolution, the visual system developed specialized neural mechanisms which exist rapidly to detect faces and this “broad tuning” for facial features is thought to underlie the illusory perception of faces in inanimate objects (the phenomenon classified as “face pareidolia”).  There were all sorts of reasons why evolution operated in this way (family and societal relationships, recognition of threats by other creatures with a vaguely similar facial structure) and recent research suggests the mechanisms underlying face processing (certainly during the earliest phase of visual encoding) may treat objects that resemble faces as real faces, prioritizing their detection (this phase operating as something of a “clearing house”; the “positives” further processed, the “negatives” discarded.  What is of interest in psychology is that face pareidolia has been more frequently reported amongst individuals prone to hallucinations.

That the phenomenon of face pareidolia manifests with such frequency as the identification of the human face in various structures prompted some to ponder the evidence from behavioral studies of diminished orientation towards faces as well as the presence of face perception impairments in autism spectrum disorder (ASD); the research in this aspect of the condition has been criticized but the design of the experimental approach was challenging, interest was taken in the possibility of a relationship between the two.  In ASD research, face-like object stimuli which had been shown to evoke pareidolia in TD (typically developing according defined criteria in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5, 2013)) individuals were used to test the effect of a global face-like configuration on orientation and perceptual processes in young children with ASD and age-matched TD controls.  That had demonstrated TD children were more likely to look first towards upright face-like objects than children with ASD, suggesting a global face-like configuration elicit a stronger orientation bias in TD children as compared to children with ASD.  However, once focused on the stimuli, both groups spent more time exploring the upright face-like object, suggesting both perceived it as a face.  The conclusion was the result was in agreement with earlier work in the field of abnormal social orienting in ASD.  The conclusion was something like the usual “more research required”.

Detecting faces in non-face stimuli may have a strong adaptive value given that from an evolutionary point of view, the cost of erroneously detecting a face in non-face stimuli might be less than failing to detect another’s face in the environment.  Pareidolia may thus be just another spectrum condition in that the perception of pareidolic faces or other shapes in a variety of surfaces or spaces may vary little between people, the difference being more the individual’s reaction and the reporting of the event(s).

Sometimes a cloud is just a cloud (left) but when Lindsay Lohan wanted something to encapsulate the spirit of her Instagram post requesting privacy to “solve personal matters” after a tiff with her then with fiancé, she choose a pareidolic cloud in the shape of a “heart” (complete with silver lining, centre).  Before their tiff, Donald Trump's (b 1946; US president 2017-2021) fixer and personal counsel Michael Cohen (b 1966) would receive messages (right) from God in the shape of clouds, assuring him Mr Trump was the Almighty's choice as the "people's messenger".