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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Drrake (talk | contribs) at 18:43, 10 May 2014. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Constelations

I thought constelations were a mneumonic device for navigation. Drrake (talk) 18:43, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Archive

Talk page archived as of September 29, 2007. JFlav 20:07, 29 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

foto

I think there is an incorrect foto posted. it concerns the picture of the fire that, so it is said, looks like the the written Allah yet it does NOT. I read arabic every day and there is no distinctive appearance to Allah. So I' take it out.

if you need to refer to Allah, please take note of this url: www20.brinkster.com/yyasir/moa/clouds.jpg

the fire is anyway not een correct example, making questions raised up about the person which want necessarly like to connect a negative event (explosion fire) to a religion(ous content) the person doesn not like.

thank you for your understanding

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.198.201.157 (talk) 17:40, 30 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Plagiarism?

The text on this article is a direct copy from here: http://www.reference.com/search?q=Pareidolia 150.254.181.174 (talk) 14:00, 3 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

That page indicates that Wikipedia is the source. WTucker (talk) 14:08, 3 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Italian Peninsula

By the way the Italian Peninsula looks like a high heel boot.. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.98.145.96 (talk) 09:44, 26 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

IPA

Is /pærɪˈdoʊliə/ really how this is pronounced? æ is the sound in the beginning of "apple", and pærɪ would seem pretty unnatural in English...I had always assumed the first vowel in "pareidolia" was pronounced similarly to the vowel in "pAranormal", etc. Anyway, maybe this IPA is right, who knows, I just figured I should check to make sure it's not an error. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 02:47, 4 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Real science?

It seems somwhat bizarre that Okamura's work is covered in a sub-section headed Scientific whereas the Rorschach test is not. But these two examples clearly do need separation. Martinevans123 (talk) 12:25, 12 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I guess it depends on your opinion on whether or not the Rorschach test is scientific or not. As you can see in the Rorschach test article, there is a large body of evidence that questions the scientific validity of the test, and even whether it is really scientific, or rather pseudoscience. Given this debate within the Rorschach test world (and article) if we did not separate it, then we would be backing the position that the Rorschach test is indeed scientific, which would violate WP:NPOV Edhubbard (talk) 22:24, 12 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Yes certainly separation required. Was more thrown by the Scientific sub-section heading which seems ambiguous. It may be read as an "example type", but because the Rorschach is not given any adjectival type, but merely its name, it seems to suggest that the Rorscharch is definitely NOT scientific, or even not science. Perhaps a sub-heading Personality assessment or Projective psychological test might redress the balance? Or replacing Scientific with Fossils? How does Mr. Okamura's work count more as scientific than the Rorscharch? To me it certainly doesn't look like science, and thus can't be "scientifc", certainly no more than the Rorschach can. Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 22:56, 12 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I think you're right there. Perhaps something like Fossils and Projective tests would keep the two clearly separate, and maintain them at an equal level of how even great minds can be fooled by the human brain's ability to impose structure on the world around us. I think that Okamura's work may have been scientific before this episode, but this certainly was not the brightest day for scientific thinking. Edhubbard (talk) 23:07, 12 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
OK. But I think some great minds might have raised WP:NPOV questions about the applicabilty of the term "fooled"? Were they still with us, of course. Martinevans123 (talk) 23:15, 12 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
:-) Point taken. Cheers, Edhubbard (talk) 01:00, 13 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
New headings a big improvement! Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 23:18, 12 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

pareidolia can be used deliberately in art, in a positive way

the overall tone of this article is negative: in most of the examples given, people who experience pareidolia are presented as fools.

what about deliberate artistic use of suggestive, incomplete forms: inkblot art, marbling, certain other types of abstraction?

if pareidolia is a widespread, human phenomenon, why does this article slant it so strongly towards skeptics of psychic phenomena?

numerous recording artists deliberately include backwards speech in their recordings, sometimes to take the mickey out of people who are afraid of backmasking. some cursory research into heavy metal music (as well as other genres) will reveal many examples.

suggested articles to link to: abstract art surrealist automatism ink painting (in particular, splashed ink painting or broken ink painting) paper marbling noise music (in particular, the aesthetics of noise)

124.182.251.47 (talk) 01:06, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

That's a good idea. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 01:20, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Should this article link intelligent design? I am not one who takes reverting well but I am curious if this phenomenon can contribute to ID and related articles.--Kencaesi (talk) 16:37, 14 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

this speaks for itself

http://fireside.designcommunity.com/topic-19642-0-asc-0.html 74.196.22.125 (talk) 04:11, 25 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe it does speak for itself, but I'm not sure it speaks about Pareidolia, unless it could be proved that these are natural geographic features that are being mis-interpreted as something else; or that they "look like" something they are not, e.g. facial features, guitars, runways, whatever on a giant scale. Even with the help of Google Global Imaging, it seems we are some way away from that proof yet? Martinevans123 (talk) 12:34, 25 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I would say that there there should be some reference to the concept of ID. There has been a lot of speculation that the entire concept of intelligent design rests on a projection of nothing more than the evolutionary advantages bestowed on animals that utilize search imagery, in the classic ethological sense.

example:

http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2006/08/our-innate-tend.html —Preceding unsigned comment added by 60.234.139.47 (talk) 21:21, 23 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Untitled

How come ive seen faces everywhere for 11 months? I wake up one day and suddenly: Cars, houses and other objects do expressions... I also see faces in any pattern... tree's, walls, floors, rugs etc... Been to 4 doctors and no one know whats wrong with me... Anyone? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.239.111.66 (talk) 12:11, 23 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think what is going on here is simply that once you have noticed that one everyday object happens to resemble a face, then you suddenly start seeing other examples of the same kind of thing almost everywhere you look. Any random object that can be construed to resemble a face automatically has an expression of some sort. I think that kind of thing happens to a lot of people. It does not sound pathological to me if that is the whole extent of it. Invertzoo (talk) 00:50, 26 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The article mentions pathology only in relation to loss of face-recognition ability (in fact seems a little misplaced here). But has an increased level of pareidolia ever been shown to be an indicator of any deeper pathology, apart from the single case study cited? Martinevans123 (talk) 09:27, 26 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Mostly Faces

It seems that human beings (and perhaps animals) have some image pre-processing going on that alerts us, for example, to faces staring at us, including in our peripheral vision. (I don't have a source on this, but studied vision systems in the 1980s at Arizona State University and recall this.) This phenomenon aids our social interactions, and is also a defense mechanism (if an animal or a person is looking at you from behind a bush, you might want to know). If this is true, this would be a physiological factor that would help explain why pareidolia is so common, and especially regarding faces. Bob Enyart, Denver radio host at KGOV (talk) 17:13, 15 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

fake face

Recognition of the fake face (two circles + line inside circle) is quoted as being a good example of Pareidolia. Is this really true? Do we recognise it because it "Looks like a face", or do we recognise it because it looks like "the well-known symbol for a face". Not certain this is the best possible example. RichardNeill (talk) 02:27, 17 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

And if that is an example of pareidolia, when does an image stop being pareidolia and become just an image? Is it pareidolia to think that this arrangement of pigments looks like a face? Wardog (talk) 19:57, 9 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Depends if we see Leonardo's work as "a vague and random stimulus"? But more generally. I think the idea is that the stimulus has not been created, by a person, to look like anything in particular, and certainly not to look like a human face, for example? Knucklehead-McSpazatron (talk) 20:07, 9 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Personally I think the fake face is unnecessary in the article - the concept is quite clear without it. I'd be happy to see it gone. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 20:17, 9 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The problem with the face is that it apparently was designed to look like a face, it is in no way random. Perhaps we could replace it with another easily recognizable non-martian face. There are many examples of objects and even chemical structures which look like faces. --92.26.33.243 (talk) 10:20, 15 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
This strikes me as (maybe) a kind of paradox. The arrangement of 3 circles and a line was (I'm assuming) "designed" as an example of the phenomenon, therefore perhaps shouldn't be used as a "real" example of it. However, a chemical structure or photograph of a rock that evokes the phenomenon can be said to be a "real" (i.e. "not obviously designed") example of it. But couldn't the very fact that the image was selected by a person (a human, I assume one without severe prosopagnosia) selected the image in a way itself a kind of 'non-randomness'?
I suppose this gets back to the old philosophical question (I'm not a philosophy major, so this is probably rather inaccurate): what exactly is "an object" (or "a picture" in this case): is it the arrangement of pigment atoms on a substrate, or is it the perception of that image that is formed "inside" a person's consciousness? What exactly does "random data" mean? Is the image of "the face" on Mars really "random" - I can after all identify what contours seem to be the eyes, mouth, nose, etc. Doesn't the very fact that I can do that mean the data isn't truly "random"?
An interesting experiment might be to see if you could very the probability that a person would or wouldn't perceive a face or whatever in an image - and then do the same test on people both with and without varying degrees of prosopagnosia. Then see if there were a correlation between the "percentage of recognizability" and brain activity.
Some of the examples given (specifically the images of Galle Crater, Daluis France gorge, and "Old Man of the Mountain") I could just barely see the illusion - although I do have (I think) a mild-moderate degree of some form of prosopagnosia. Jimw338 (talk) 03:34, 16 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I completely agree with the argument that the symbol widely known to represent a face is not a good example of pareidolia. We don't perceive a face in that image, we recognise it as a representation of a face because we were told at some point (in kindergarten or wherever) that it was supposed to represent a face. As such, we recognise it as the symbol for a face but that's not pareidolia. A good example of pareidolia can be seen in the pictures Example1 Example2 of the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb detonated over Nagasaki. Goscuter1 12:09, 22 January 2014 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Goscuter1 (talk • contribs)

It seems that wikipedia is supporting the idea that the face on Mars is a trick of the light because subsequently provided WORSE images show a blurry cliff that doesn't look like a face. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.13.53.93 (talk) 23:41, 6 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Mars' little Bigfoot?

What is the licensing on that photo from a Mars rover where people spotted a silhouette matching very closely one of the frames of the famous shaky blurry alleged bigfoot spotting film; except that the if you see the rest of the picture you realize the shape is very small, not even close to human sized, much less taller like the cryptozoologic primate? If the license isn't gonna be an issue i think it would be nice to have that photo in the article too. --TiagoTiago (talk) 07:29, 13 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]


Or maybe the so-called "rat" on Mars that was just photographed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.159.194.78 (talk) 02:20, 6 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

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