11:58 p.m
Sunday, April 30, 2023
Cairo – Masrawy:
Many times, the senses deceive us, and among the manifestations of this deception is a phenomenon that science calls (the Pareidolia face), that is, seeing faces in everyday things. It is a very human condition related to how our brains work.
So sometimes we see a moon with a rabbit on it, a cloud in the shape of a horse, or a tree branch that looks like a ballerina.
According to Live Science, Pareidolia is derived from the Greek words para, meaning something wrong, and eidōlon, meaning image, shape, or shape.
There are a number of theories about the cause of this phenomenon. Experts say pareidolia provides psychological identification for many illusions involving the senses. They believe pareidolia could be behind many UFO sightings.
Scientists analyzed this phenomenon scientifically and philosophically (psychologically). Scientifically and neurologically, there are several reasons for the formation of the phenomenon of paridolia:
The part of the brain responsible for interpreting faces is called the fusiform gyrus, and it has two main aspects. Each of them is responsible for a specific function, the right side issues slow commands and needs a specific time to recognize faces and interpret them accurately.
As for the left side, it performs a quick judgment on the face that the eyes caught, and here the human mind may interpret the quick glimpse of the face to give wrong results and correct it after that.
The brain is scanning or imaging inside our brains as it is constantly examining lines, shapes, surfaces and random colors; After he matches it with a picture, and then an image is produced that merges these two images, for example, you may glimpse the full moon, and a person comes to your imagination to see this person’s face on the moon.
Pareidolia often has religious overtones. A study in Finland found that people who are religious or strongly believe in the supernatural are more likely to see faces in lifeless objects and landscapes.
Carl Sagan, an American cosmologist and author, explained that Paridolia was a survival tool.
In his book, The Demon-Haunted World – Science as a Candle in the Dark, he says that this ability to recognize faces from a distance or in poor vision was an important survival technique. While this instinct enables humans to instantly judge whether an incoming person is friend or foe, Sagan noted that it can lead to some misinterpreting random images or patterns of light and shadow as faces.
And Leonardo da Vinci wrote about pareidolia as an artistic device. “If you look at any walls stained with different stains or with mixtures of different kinds of stones, if you are about to devise a scene, you will be able to see a similarity between various different landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and different combinations of hills.”
