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| Mickey Mouse |
It is interesting how we all see patterns in random things like clouds and stains. Who has never looked at clouds drifting across the sky, and seen people and animals? I often see maps of familiar countries and fictional worlds in the clouds. Trees and mountains can have faces and bodies, so clear that I can clearly understand where the myths of Trolls come from.
This is called pareidolia. It is what happens when the brain interprets a random image as a familiar pattern. The single most common pattern generated in this way is a human face. Pareidolia is the phenomenon behind the "face of the moon", the inkblot test, and some say it is the reason why we can see a smiley icon as a smiling face.
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| Naked woman throwing a hammer |
There are many communities and blogs out there dedicated to pareidolia. All of them, at least the ones I have found, are filled with images of things that look like faces. All it can take is a pair of dots, and the human brain will interpret it as "looking at you". Even the word "look" contains a pair of eyes when we look closely at it!
When I was a child, my bedroom had curtains with large brown flowers on it. That pattern gave me nightmares, because my young eyes saw a witch in the flowers. She was wearing cat eye glasses and a scarf. I couldn't understand why my parents' couldn't see the witch, when she was clearly staring at me from every flower on those curtains. In fact, I couldn't even see the flowers back then. I could only see the witch and some random swirls.
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| Dragon breathing fire on the ground |
A couple of years ago, my parents were cleaning in their basement and found those old curtains from the 70s. They took them up and draped them over a chair in the living room, because they thought I might be interested in taking them with me. There was the witch, staring at me!
I don't have a picture of the curtains; they are in my parents' house. I do have pictures of the stained floor and its strange inhabitants.
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