From Mystical Underwear to Pareidolia and Apophenia

My post yesterday about Blaugustine’s mystical underwear was my take on the face she saw in her brassiere. However, it was not a mystical experience to her, darn it. In her comment she says, “I didn't see my 'apparition' as anything mystical or even mythical! It was just one of many such illusion that I often see in objects or surfaces such as a carpet. I've just learned (via some of the commenters on my post) that Flickr has a site devoted exclusively to photos of things people have 'seen' in all sorts of places and objects. And that the phenomenon is known as pareidolia. Google has a lot of interesting info on it."

My vocabulary is pretty good, but thanks to Natalie and a little Google research, I now know that the term pareidolia (pronounced /pæraɪˈdoʊliə/) describes a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing hidden messages on records played in reverse. The word comes from the Greek para- —"beside", "with" or "alongside"- meaning, in this context, something faulty or wrong (as in paraphasia, disordered speech)—and eidolon—"image" (the diminutive of eidos—"image", "form", "shape"). Pareidolia is a type of apophenia.

Say, what? I don’t know what apophenia means either. See, blogging is definitely a way to get smarter or to at least think you are smarter. Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness".

Did you know that?

This is a photo I recently took inside the Redondo Beach Power Plant which I think might be pareidolia because I see a naked woman just about to blow off steam. What do you see?