Why Do People Believe Weird Things?... Pareidolia

Ever wonder why people see the virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich? How about the giant human face on the surface of mars? What about electronic voice phenomena, where people hear ghosts talking behind white noise? Believe it or not these things are all related by a common mistake of perception called Pareidolia.

Pareidolia is the tendency humans have to perceive patterns in vague and random stimuli. This happens when you look up at the clouds and see shapes. This happens when you make shadow puppets on the wall. This also happens a lot during what people perceive as a paranormal experience. It's a well known, well understood, well documented phenomenon.

Evolution has rewarded those who were better able to recognize patterns in the wild. Being able to make out a human face in near darkness, for example, offers an advantage over someone who can't. Recognizing patterns is part of learning, and those who can recognize better, tend to learn better. As a result our ability to see patterns sometimes leads us to see one where none exists.

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The above is just a series of dashes, but your brain recognizes it as the number 7. Your mind immediately and without effort, fills in the blanks. Indeed, you couldn't prevent it if you wanted to. You've just experienced pareidolia.

Now lets think about that grilled cheese sandwich. Does it seem likely that the virgin Mary wants to appear there? What purpose does it serve? Should we believe that Mary wanted to be there, her reasons being her own, and ignore the obvious questions? Or is it more likely pareidolia is at work, something we understand very well. If the sandwich had a blotch that resembled Pee Wee Herman, would it have still been special?

The face on mars is a great example. For many years the picture was studied and proclaimed real by some, a hoax by others. If you look at the image, it does indeed look very much like a human face. It also seems that it was built with the intentions of being seen from space. Should we take this as evidence of an alien colony as many did, or should we recognize yet another example of pareidolia? Well turns out years later we have much clearer images of the very same spot where the face is located, and it's now obvious that it was nothing but hills and shadows.

One of the most convincing occurrences of pareidolia in my opinion is electronic voice phenomena. This is when people leave an audio recorder in an old house that's suppose to be haunted, or an abandoned mental hospital, or even a graveyard. When the audio is played back and dissected, there are sometimes unexplained voices that can clearly, or sometimes not so clearly, say phrases. Sure, often these phrases make no sense. "she's in the mustard" "Laundry tuesday applecart" But still, there are voices saying these things and we can play it back over and over as proof! Ghost hunters have speculated that spirits use an enormous amount of energy to manipulate sounds in an effort to speak to us. The easiest to manipulate is white noise, and because it takes so much effort the spirits often get words wrong, or get cut off, in any case they can't do it for very long. If it takes so much 'energy', Why they would do it in an empty basement of an abandoned house is beyond me. I guess it's pretty easy to see the explanation which makes more sense, audio pareidolia.

Often the pareidolia is made worse by front loading. Front loading is when you are told what you are going to hear before you hear it, and so of course...that's what you hear. People who are front loaded often hear the same phrase as the original listener. People who aren't may still hear a voice, but each person hears slightly different words.

Another example of audio pareidolia is back masking. When you play records backwards it sometimes sounds like phrases. In the 80's thousands of parents actually thought this was a threat. They never stopped to ask, even if the phrases were constructed by a musical genius, what harm do they cause? Another case is when people hear words coming from the mouths of animals. I have heard some recordings of jackals, wolves and dogs and some of them made my neck hair prickle. Really spooky shit! I have heard a wolf howling quite clearly, "Sooo Alooooonnneee" and a dog when asked "how come you can talk?" easily say, "I learned".

When you think about it, pareidolia is probably responsible for many other weird beliefs, like mermaids, leprechauns, lake monsters, ect. Mistakes of perception are the first and most prolific reason people believe strange things. Mistakes of memory would be the next most responsible, and mistakes of logic are unfortunately the most convincing. You can see how pareidolia triggers all three.

So anyway, I hope this poorly constructed post from a recluse stoner does you some good. The world can be intimidating, but it's a little less scary when we understand what is actually going on out there.