Have you ever seen a cloud shaped like an animal? What about a car or a potato with a face? If so, you’re not alone.

 

The Phenomenon

Seeing faces and familiar shapes in inanimate objects is a phenomenon called “pareidolia” (par·​ei·​do·​lia). The word comes from Ancient Greek. It’s a combination of “para” (beside or beyond) and “eidos” (images, appearances, looks), and translates to “beyond form or image.”

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the definition of pareidolia is “the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern.” Simply put, it’s the way humans often see familiar patterns (faces, animals, etc.) in things around them.

Pareidolia is normal. It’s not paranoia or delusions.

Did You Know…

• Pareidolia isn’t just with sight. It happens with our other senses, especially hearing and touch.
• Many cultures in the northern hemisphere see a man’s face on the moon’s surface, thus the lunar pareidolia of “Man in the Moon.”

 

The Why

Humans are hardwired to see familiar patterns, especially faces, in things around us. Scientists believe seeing faces in inanimate objects was our ancestors’ survival mechanism. Quickly recognizing perceived threats, often meant the difference between life and death.

Did You Know…

• Long before they recognize other objects, babies recognize faces.

 

The Uses

People with pareidolia tend to be more creative. Renaissance authors and artists were especially interested in the phenomenon. In Hamlet, William Shakespeare alludes to it when he has Hamlet and Polonius discussing what Hamlet thinks a specific cloud looks like. First a camel, then a weasel, and finally a whale. Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his notebooks about how painters could use pareidolia in their work. Many did, hiding faces in clouds and other objects.

Today, pareidolia is also used in medical training. Medical students and resident physicians are sometimes taught to recognize human anatomy in radiology imaging with it. For example, the normal bony anatomic structures seen on spinal radiographs (x-rays) look like the face of an owl. But spinal fractures and cancers change the owl’s face.

Did You Know…

• Pareidolia is used in the Rjorschach inkblot test to try and understand a person’s mental state.
• Skeptics believe pareidolia is what causes people to think they’ve seen ghosts.
• Religious imagery is often the theme of pareidolia. During 9/11, many people watching on television thought they saw Satan’s face in the smoke. On the other hand, some who saw Notre Dame Cathedral burn thought they saw the face of Jesus in the flames.

 

Not Priceless

Over the years, many common and relatively worthless objects have been sold for large amounts of money because of the faces seen in them. In the case of the 1954 Canadian dollar banknote, a grinning demon seen in Elizabeth II’s hair cost the government the unexpected expense of redesigning and reissuing the banknote in 1956.

Did You Know…

• A ten-year-old grilled cheese sandwich, with what appeared to be the face of the Virgin Mary on it, sold for $28,000 in 2004.
• In January 2017, a Cheeto that looked like the Cincinnati Zoo’s gorilla, Harambe (1999-2016), sold on eBay for $99,000!

 

Final View

Interestingly, the phenomenon of pareidolia demonstrates how strongly our imagination influences perception. In other words, what we see is a combination of a physical object and our imagination’s expectations.

This ability to find faces and animals in normal objects may indicate our brains process the outside world differently than what has conventionally been thought. Some scientists believe our mind may actually be telling our eyes what to see, meaning many of the things we “see” come first from our brains and not our eyes.