Set the tone
Words we love - pareidolia (am I seeing things?)
Carrie Ellis
Account Director
As a child I spent a lot of time cloud gazing, not to identify a cumulus from a stratocumulus, but to see how many faces I could find. Into adulthood, I’ve found that I get great joy from spotting faces in the wild – leaves that look to be deep in conversation, car bumpers with expressions, my camera roll is full of them.
On an evening of aimless online scrolling, I came across a collection of Memes entitled “30 things with faces for pareidolia obsessives” – there’s a word for it!
Pareidolia is “the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern”. In etymological terms, ‘para’ comes from Greek, meaning ‘beside’ or ‘instead of’, and eidolon refers to image, form or shape.
The ‘what’ is simple enough. When it comes to the ‘why’, pareidolia becomes more complex. It seems nobody is quite sure, although there are multiple ideas and research papers dedicated to it.
According to a study in the journal Psychological Science, we’ve evolved to have the ability to quickly pick out faces from a crowded visual scene. Psychologist Christopher French explains why this is useful – imagine “a Stone Age guy standing there, scratching his beard, wondering whether that rustling in the bushes really is a sabre-toothed tiger. You're much more likely to survive if you assume it's a sabre-toothed tiger and get the hell out of there - otherwise you may end up as lunch”.
But the theory I like best, is that we love pareidolia because as humans we’re wired to understand people and their experiences, and so use personification to make sense of our world. This is something we do a lot of in the creative world; the literary technique of personification in storytelling, in art such as the hidden faces in the work of Salvador Dali, or certain cues in branding and advertising, like in American Express’ “Sad Things, Happy Things” advert (it’s worth a watch).
If the pursuit of creative inspiration hasn’t convinced you to start hunting for faces, you might be tempted by the unique business opportunity pareidolia offers. In 2004, A 10-year-old grilled cheese sandwich bearing resemblance to the Virgin Mary was sold on eBay for $28,000, and a chicken nugget in the shape of George Washington reached a respectable $5,000 in 2012. Look hard enough and you might find yourself a golden goose, or at least the outline of one on a slice of toast.
