Pareidolia

“Para” – a Greek word meaning faulty, wrong, instead of, etc. and edolon – meaning image, shape.

Pareidolia is the psychological phenomenon that causes some people to see a random image of something (most commonly a face, or an animal, or an object) onto another image of something that has nothing to do with it and is completely different. You can see a face on your toast, an animal in the sky, a grumpy old man that the foam on your cappuccino has shaped, the stain spots on your blouse, the happy face in your food, or even something in your own artwork of splattered paints from when you were a toddler. Most people don’t realize how astounding this is and don’t think of it as an art form, which it actually is.

Starting with the most simple example that could be given, this is an image of two small circles and a line within one big circle. The human mind will immediately subconsciously associate it with a human face, although it does not resemble one that much.

For people who are religiously inclined pareidolia is considered to be a something that is not random, but a miracle.

There isn’t just one type of pareidolia. One is the more realistic images you see from natural objects. Another type is the Rorschach Inkblot test which uses pareidolia with an attempt to understand and identify a person’s mental state.

The Rorschach Inkblot

Another type of pareidolia is seeing images of simple (illustrative) faces on everyday objects. I have also taken some photographs of those – fences doors, etc, around the University of Dundee and I have drawn the exact form of face I can see from them.