Pareidolia

Pareidolia ( ancient Greek παρά para , German 'beside' , 'over' and εἴδωλον eídolon , German 'form' , 'appearance', '(deception) image', 'shadow image', theologically also 'idol') denotes the phenomenon in To recognize objects and patterns, supposed faces and familiar beings or objects. It is a variant of the clustering illusion .

Examples

Well-known examples of pareidolia include passing clouds , whose shapes are reminiscent of everyday things, but also landscape formations, such as the " face of Mars " in the Cydonia region of Mars or the stone heads in Marcahuasi . The spots on the earth's moon also evoke a sense of shape, such as the face of the moon or the “ hare in the moon ”. The NASA published in 2014 recordings of the Chandra observatory , where the viewer of the photographs of the object PSR B1509-58 can perceive a hand.

root cause

Pareidolia are the result of consciously or unconsciously caused misinterpretations by the human brain: The human brain tends to complete diffuse and seemingly incomplete perceptual images and structures and to adapt familiar patterns and shapes. The type and shape of the illusions seem to depend on the expectations of the brain.

Pareidolia differ from apophenia and especially from hallucinations in that on the one hand they can be controlled voluntarily and on the other hand they do not disappear even if one observes the supposed face / object intensely. Furthermore, especially a natural pareidolia (cloud, landscape formation, etc.) can usually be perceived by several people at the same time.

Apophenia

Apophenia is a sub-form of pareidolia and somewhat more limited than this. So it is limited to the aspect of “looking into” a random structure. In contrast, the pareidolia also contains the (actively) “sought” perceptions.

Pareidolia in art

As early as the 15th century, Leonardo da Vinci spoke of how weathered, spotty or wet walls inspired him and suggested that the viewer should invent mountains, ruins, figures and entire battles when looking at them. The English landscape painter Alexander Cozens also used the same creative impulse with his blot method. His drawing students should run ink over crumpled paper - and work out landscapes from the structure that resulted from this technique. The German doctor Justinus Kerner also used pareidolia in the 19th century for his " blotchography " - he "found" figures in randomly created ink blots, mostly ghostly beings, which he sometimes highlighted more clearly with a few strokes of the pen.

literature

Christian Scharfetter: General Psychopathology. An introduction. 6., revised. Ed., Thieme , Stuttgart 2010, ISBN 978-3-13-158726-8 (22 pages, paperback).
Oliver Grasmück: An apparition of Mary in times of dictatorship - The conflict over Peñablanca, Chile: Religion and manipulation under Pinochet. (= Religious historical experiments and preliminary work. Vol. 56) De Gruyter , Berlin / New York 2009, ISBN 978-3-11-022054-4 , p. 92 (709 pages, vol. Edition).
Douglas Bernstein, Louis Penner, Alison Clarke-Stewart, Edward Roy: Psychology. 8th ed., Cengage Learning, Boston 2007, ISBN 978-0-618-87407-1 , LCCN 2007933487, p. 177 (English; 760 pages, volume).
Heinz A. Pachernegg: Pareidolia. Mysterious things in forest and wood, illustrated book, 1st edition, September 2017, ISBN 978-3-903144-20-0 , 140 pages

Web links

Commons : Pareidolia - collection of images, videos and audio files

Wiktionary: Pareidolia - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

NASA observation of object PSR B1509-58

Individual evidence

^ EH Gombrich: Art & Illusion - On the psychology of visual representation . 2nd Edition. Phaidon Verlag, Berlin 1967, ISBN 978-0-7148-9317-4 , p. 386 .

[1] EH Gombrich: Art & Illusion - On the psychology of visual representation . 2nd Edition. Phaidon Verlag, Berlin 1967, ISBN 978-0-7148-9317-4 , p. 386 .