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Showing posts with label patternicity. Show all posts

Thursday, August 11, 2011 ~ Have your say...

Face In The Clouds - A Great Example of Pareidolia

YouTube user "denisfarmer" took a fantastic video of a rapidly approaching storm front in Grand Falls, New Brunswick, Canada.  As the clouds twist and churn in the sky, they eventually take upon the shape of a face - and it really does look like a face!  However, this is not God, or Zeus, or anything other deity for that matter - it is simply a great example of us humans finding a pattern we are very familiar with (faces) among random noise (quickly moving clouds)... otherwise known as "pareidolia".

Since the clouds change shape so quickly and frequently, it increases the probability that some combination of bumps, puffs and wisps will emerge to look like a face.  Also, it looks as if the face might be composed of multiple layers of the cloud front that come together to look like a face from only his vantage point.

Watch the video - it's worth it.


Wednesday, July 13, 2011 ~ Have your say...

Michael Shermer: On Patternicity

Patternicity:  The tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise.


 "Why do people see faces in nature, interpret window stains as human figures, hear voices in random sounds generated by electronic devices or find conspiracies in the daily news? 


A proximate cause is the priming effect, in which our brain and senses are prepared to interpret stimuli according to an expected model. UFOlogists see a face on Mars. Religionists see the Virgin Mary on the side of a building. Paranormalists hear dead people speaking to them through a radio receiver. Conspiracy theorists think 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration. 


Is there a deeper ultimate cause for why people believe such weird things? There is. I call it “patternicity,” or the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise."


Such patternicities, then, mean that people believe weird things because of our evolved need to believe nonweird things.


Read all about this fascinating subject on Michael Shermer's post for Scientific American:
http://www.michaelshermer.com/2008/12/patternicity/ 

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