Pareidolia and Apophenia: Why We See Faces, Signs and Omens

Pareidolia is the perception of a meaningful image, most often a face, in a random or vague stimulus, such as a face in a cloud, a socket or a slice of toast. Apophenia is the broader tendency to perceive meaningful connections or patterns between unrelated things, such as reading a run of coincidences as a sign. Both are normal features of human perception, and psychologists see them as one of the main sources of omens, superstitions and divinatory practices, as well as of art, discovery and some psychiatric symptoms.

Pareidolia and Apophenia Defined§

The word pareidolia combines the Greek para, "beside" or "instead of", and eidōlon, "image". It entered nineteenth-century German psychiatry to describe vivid images that people see in indistinct shapes, and Karl Jaspers discussed it in his General Psychopathology (1913), distinguishing such fanciful images, which the viewer knows are not real, from true illusions and hallucinations. The term is now used mainly for faces and figures seen in natural objects, wood grain, rock formations, buildings and food.

Apophenia is wider. Klaus Conrad coined the term in his study of the onset of schizophrenia, Die beginnende Schizophrenie (1958), for the experience of seeing connections everywhere, each charged with an abnormal sense of personal meaning. In popular and scientific use it has since broadened to cover ordinary errors of pattern detection: the feeling that a series of events is linked, that a number keeps recurring for a reason, or that a chance remark was a message. The writer Michael Shermer called the general tendency "patternicity". The repeated-number experiences discussed in Angel Numbers are a modern example.

Neither tendency is a sign of illness in itself. Most people see faces in clouds and notice coincidences; what matters, psychologists stress, is how strongly the pattern is believed and how it is acted upon. The broader research on the psychology of superstition places these perceptual habits alongside conditioning, anxiety and the wish for control.

Faces Everywhere: The Science of Face Pareidolia§

Faces are the most common pareidolic image, because faces matter more to social animals than almost anything else. Newborn infants turn more readily towards simple face-like patterns than towards scrambled ones, and the adult brain contains regions, notably the fusiform face area identified by Nancy Kanwisher and colleagues in 1997, that respond strongly to faces. Studies using brain imaging have shown that objects perceived as face-like trigger early face-related responses within a fraction of a second, before the viewer consciously decides what they are looking at.

The system is tuned to err on the side of detection. In a 2014 study, researchers led by Jiangang Liu and Kang Lee showed volunteers pure visual noise and told them that half the images contained a face or a letter; many reported seeing faces, and their brain activity resembled that of real face perception. The study, "Seeing Jesus in Toast", won an Ig Nobel Prize. Experiments by Jessica Taubert and colleagues in 2017 found that rhesus monkeys also look longer at face-like objects, which suggests that face pareidolia is not a product of human culture alone.

The cultural history of such faces is long: the man in the moon, faces on rocks and mountains, and images of saints in wood, clouds or food. In 1976 a NASA Viking orbiter photographed a mesa in the Cydonia region of Mars that looked like a human face under low sun; later high-resolution images from the 1990s and 2000s showed an eroded hill. In 2004 a ten-year-old toasted cheese sandwich said to bear the image of the Virgin Mary sold on an online auction for about 28,000 dollars.

Faces in the Clouds: Agency Detection and the Roots of Belief§

Why should the mind be so ready to see faces and intentions? The anthropologist Stewart Guthrie argued in Faces in the Clouds (1993) that religion itself grows from a systematic tendency to anthropomorphise, to interpret ambiguous things as the work of persons, because the cost of mistaking a rock for a bear is small, while the cost of mistaking a bear for a rock may be fatal. The psychologist Justin Barrett described a "hyperactive agency detection device" that leads people to sense agents behind rustling grass or unexplained events.

Evolutionary modelling supports a version of this view. In 2009 Kevin Foster and Hanna Kokko showed mathematically that natural selection can favour superstition-like associations whenever the cost of believing a false pattern is lower than the cost of missing a true one. Such theories do not show that religious or magical beliefs are false; they explain why certain kinds of belief come easily. They have been widely discussed in the study of magic, summarised in Theories of Magic.

Pareidolia also has an auditory form. People hear words in noise, in reversed music and in the hiss of tape recordings, the basis of the "electronic voice phenomena" that the Latvian psychologist Konstantīns Raudive claimed in the 1960s were voices of the dead. Researchers in psychical research and acoustics have shown how expectation shapes such hearing; the context is covered in Ghosts and Hauntings.

Reading the Formless: Divination, Art and the Inkblot§

Many methods of divination deliberately present the mind with ambiguous material and invite it to find patterns. Tea leaves, coffee grounds, molten wax or lead dropped into water, smoke, clouds, the cracks in a heated bone and the flight of birds all offer shapes to be read, as surveyed in What Is Divination?. The New Year custom of pouring lead into water, described in New Year Superstitions, is a familiar example, and scrying in a dark mirror or bowl of water, described in the spellbook entry on scrying, uses the same faculty.

Artists have exploited it consciously. Leonardo da Vinci advised painters in his notes on painting to look at walls stained with damp or stones of mixed colours, in which they might discover landscapes, battles and strange faces to stimulate invention. Shakespeare has Hamlet tease Polonius by asking whether he sees "yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel", then a weasel, then a whale. The English landscape painter Alexander Cozens published a method of composing landscapes from accidental ink blots in 1785, and the German poet Justinus Kerner made pictures and verses from inkblots in the nineteenth century.

The Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach turned the inkblot into a clinical instrument in Psychodiagnostik (1921), arguing that what people see in standard blots reveals their perceptual and emotional habits. The test remains in use, though psychologists continue to debate its validity.

Patterns in Chance: Streaks, Clusters and the Gambler's Fallacy§

Apophenia operates in time as well as in space. Truly random sequences contain more runs and clusters than people expect, so randomness often looks patterned and patterned-looking events seem to demand explanation. During the Second World War, Londoners believed that V-1 flying bombs were targeting particular districts; a statistical analysis by R. D. Clarke, published in 1946, showed that the distribution of hits was consistent with chance.

The gambler's fallacy is the belief that a run of one outcome makes the opposite more likely, as if chance kept accounts. Its most famous illustration is the night of 18 August 1913 at the Monte Carlo casino, when black is reported to have come up twenty-six times in a row at roulette while gamblers lost heavily betting on red. The opposite belief, in a "hot hand" or lucky streak, was challenged in a 1985 study of basketball by Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone and Amos Tversky, although later statistical work has suggested that small genuine streaks may exist. The rituals that gamblers build around such beliefs are described in Superstitions of Sailors, Actors and Gamblers.

When Pattern-Seeing Becomes Belief§

Most pareidolia is recognised as play: people photograph faces in buildings and laugh. It becomes superstition when the pattern is taken as a message, an omen or a reason to act, as in the long history of signs described in Luck, Omens and Portents. Research by Peter Brugger and others has found that people who report paranormal beliefs tend to see more meaningful patterns in noise and to detect "signals" more liberally, and one experiment found that a drug increasing dopamine made sceptical volunteers behave more like believers. These findings are statistical and do not mean that believers perceive poorly in general.

At the extreme, as Conrad saw, apophenia is part of psychosis, in which everything appears to refer to the self. In ordinary life the same faculty underlies scientific discovery, which begins with noticing a pattern and continues by testing it. The difference between superstition and science, on this view, lies less in perception than in what is done next.

Frequently asked questions§

What is the difference between pareidolia and apophenia?§

Pareidolia is seeing a meaningful image, such as a face, in a vague or random stimulus. Apophenia is the broader tendency to perceive meaningful connections or patterns among unrelated things, of which pareidolia is one visual form.

Is pareidolia a mental illness?§

No. Seeing faces in objects is normal and common, and it reflects the brain's highly sensitive face-detection system. Only the strong conviction that random patterns carry personal messages can be a feature of psychiatric illness.

Why do we see faces in objects?§

Faces are socially vital, so the brain detects them quickly from minimal cues such as two dots above a line. It is tuned to accept false alarms rather than miss a real face, and the same tendency is found in monkeys.

Sources and further reading§

• Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion — Stewart Guthrie, 1993
• Die beginnende Schizophrenie — Klaus Conrad, 1958
• General Psychopathology — Karl Jaspers, 1913
• Psychodiagnostics — Hermann Rorschach, 1921
• Why Would Anyone Believe in God? — Justin L. Barrett, 2004
• How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life — Thomas Gilovich, 1991
• The Believing Brain — Michael Shermer, 2011