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Post subject: Having fun with Pareidolia
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I noticed this on the bedroom wall the other day. It's the sunlight hitting a patch of wallpaper paste and reflecting. Took me bloody ages to get the settings on the digital camera to actually capture it... There's another one that's only visible at night when the lamp illuminates it at a certain direction but it's even more difficult to photograph than this one. I'll keep trying though.
I won't tell you what I see it as just yet, I was just curious as to what other people see this as and didn't want to influence anyone 
Full image for size reference (the flowers are about 2 inches across)
A few words on Pareidolia
| Quote: | Pareidolia , first used in 1994 by Steven Goldstein[1], describes a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being mistakenly perceived as recognizable. Common examples include images of animals or faces in clouds, seeing the man in the moon, and hearing messages on records played in reverse. The word from Greek para- amiss, faulty, wrong + eidolon, diminutive of eidos appearance, form.
Human beings are apparently "hard-wired" to identify the human face. One possible explanation for this is that unresponsive infants tended to be ignored or abandoned, as Carl Sagan speculated in The Demon-Haunted World.
Skeptics assert that sightings of religious or iconic figures in everyday objects, such as Marian apparitions, are examples of pareidolia, as are electronic voice phenomena. The Face on Mars is a phenomenon that succeeded the Martian canals, both eventually attributed to pareidolia, when the "seen" images disappeared in better and more numerous images. Many Canadians thought they saw the face of the Devil in the Queen's hair on a dollar bill in the 1954 series, adapted from a photograph (illustration, right). The bills were not withdrawn from circulation, but the image was altered in its next printing.
The "devil's head" illusion on the 1954 Canadian dollarA similar phenomenon is the clustering illusion.
The Rorschach inkblot test uses pareidolia attempting to gain insight into a person's mental state. While this test is still widely employed, its scientific basis is disputed, and no studies have shown empirical confirmation of success.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia |
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 Tue Jul 11, 2006 12:30 pm |
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