Understanding pareidolia: seeing faces everywhere you look

Smiling buoyPhoto byTracy Carbone

When you look around, do you see faces smiling at you? Grins and smirks in clouds or cookies? For me, this has always been a pleasant part of my personality, a creative gift that amuses me to no end. For others, it can be overwhelming. Humans like to define everything, so for your edification this perceptive ability is called pareidolia.

smile in a kitchen sinkPhoto byTracy Carbone

Per Wikipedia, common examples are seeing a man on the moon, faces in any inanimate objects, or can extend to hearing indistinct voices in “random noise” like the white noise of air conditioners or fans.

“The word derives from the Greek words pará… ‘beside, alongside, instead’ and the noun eídōlon …’image, form, shape." The word as we know it was printed as the German word Pareidolie in several “articles by Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum…” including “his 1866 paper "Die Sinnesdelierien" ("On Delusion of the Senses").” When his paper was reviewed in 1867 in The Journal of Mental Science, Volume 13, Pareidolie it was “translated into English as pareidolia.”

smiling rock at Corriganville, Simi Valley CAPhoto byTracy Carbone

Though pareidolia is frequent among patients with Parkinson's disease and dementia with Lewy bodies a healthy, creative mind can also experience this.

smiling cookiePhoto byTracy Carbone

A 2009 magnetoencephalography study of people’s responses to faces and face-like objects, helps explain “why people generally identify a few lines and a circle as a ‘face’ so quickly and without hesitation. Cognitive processes are activated by the ‘face-like’ object which alerts the observer to both the emotional state and identity of the subject, even before the conscious mind begins to process or even receive the information. “

A simple stick figure face “can convey mood information, and be drawn to indicate emotions such as happiness or anger.” This is theorized to “be the result of natural selection favoring people most able to quickly identify the mental state, for example, of threatening people, thus providing the individual an opportunity to flee or attack pre-emptively.”

If you see faces everywhere, consider yourself among great company. “Renaissance artists often used pareidolia in paintings and drawings: Andrea Mantegna, Leonardo da Vinci, Giotto, Hans Holbein, Giuseppe Arcimboldo.”

Leonardo da Vinci wrote of pareidolia as a device for painters. “If you look at any walls spotted with various stains or with 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.”

Collective Consciousness-Oil on canvas board by Tracy L. CarbonePhoto byTracy Carbone

In the modern day, “publicity surrounding sightings of religious figures and other surprising images in ordinary objects has spawned a market for such items on online auctions like eBay. One famous instance was a grilled cheese sandwich with the face of the Virgin Mary.”

“During the September 11 attacks, television viewers supposedly saw the face of Satan in clouds of smoke billowing out of the World Trade Center after it was struck by the airplane.”

Whatever you see, enjoy it for what it is: a tool of a sharp mind, a creative ability, or a little reminder to see joy in everything.