Psychology Facts

▲ Pareidolia ▲

(Examples shown at the bottom of the page.)

》Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon that perceives a dedifferentiated sensory stimulus as indicating a familiar object or structure such as a face. (Seeing faces on everyday objects, like clouds.)

》Descriptions of pareidolia date farther back and are found in Leonardo da Vinci's 16th-century A Treatise on Painting. Writes da Vinci, "...by throwing a sponge impregnated with various colors against a wall, it leaves some spots upon it...a variety of compositions may be seen in such spots, according to the disposition of the mind...such as heads of men, various animals, battles, rocky scenes, seas, clouds, woods, and the like..."

》Some believe that pareidolia is a "marker for idea generation and a predictor of creativity" because it reflects a "more flexible" integration of ambiguous stimuli (Bellemare et al, 2022), not unlike creative responses to a Rorschach test. (Ink blot test)

》There is also the suggestion that the illusory faces of pareidolia elicit a "perceived age, gender, and emotional expression," and at least in one study, a "robust" cognitive bias (4:1) to perceive and interpret them as male.

》The reason for face pareidolia is that the brain interprets illusory faces using the same cognitive processes that identify real human faces.

》Face recognition is so important to human beings that we process faces in just a few hundreds of milliseconds.

》Our brains have specialised 'face recognition' circuits, which non-faces also get processed by automatically.
That is why we also see facial expressions in inanimate objects.

》Studies show that neurotic people, and people in negative moods, are more likely to experience pareidolia. The reason for this seems to be that these people are on higher alert for danger, so are more likely to spot something that isn't there. Women seem to be more prone to seeing faces where there are none.

》Though seeing these illusory faces in inanimate objects is completely normal and common, there are references to pareidolia found in neurodegenerative conditions, such as Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, and Lewy body dementia.
One study, for example, found that patients with Parkinson's disease, even without the visual hallucinations common in these patients, often experienced pareidolia related to anxiety (Kurumada et al).

》While pareidolia in neurocognitive disorders "do not reflect visual hallucinations themselves," they may reflect a "susceptibility" or "predisposition" to them

》Here are three ideas for using pareidolias to enhance your creativity:

Actively look for pareidolias. Suggestive patterns can be found everywhere: in the natural world of clouds and rocks and tree trunks, and in the manmade world of cars and buildings and tools. For someone alert to pareidolias, everyday life is enchanted.

Attend to pareidolias in your own work. Creators who are masters of their craft are adept at spotting nascent and as-yet-unexplored patterns in their own drafts and sketches.

Contemplate pareidolia as a way of easing yourself into a creative mindset. Engaging in pareidolia is itself a creative act: We're perceiving something that doesn't (yet) exist, which is the essence of creativity. At the same time, the beauty of pareidolias is that they are effortless and automatic: Our brains create them for us, using what the psychologist Alfred Binet called our "involuntary imagination."

Some examples of pareidolia: