At the meeting last week, I talked about pareidolia and how our minds are hardwired to see faces in randomness. Many of the pictures were taken from an entertaining website called “Faces in Places” where inanimate objects seem to appear almost human.
While these pictures are funny, few people would associate anything particularly miraculous about them. There is a class of visual illusions that dominate the media however, and this is religious pareidolia. Some of the most widely reported examples of pareidolia are situations where the object or picture resembles a religious figure, such as Jesus or the Virgin Mary. The following examples are taken from the website “Nothing to do with Arbroath“, which keeps a tab on such things.Keep in mind that these examples have been reported in just the last two months alone.
I’ll put up more examples of pareidolia as I find them. Meanwhile I’ll close with my favourite example from the meeting: Buzz Lightyear.
via (The Telegraph)
Cork Skeptics 
October 5, 2011 at 2:30 am
Too many of the images have a cartoon look to them. The really good images come from seeing stained features on rocks, walls, painted and scraped areas. I see images everywhere. i did an exercise in pattern recognition which sensitized me to the issue. Yes, the imaes are suggestive, but if you look and let your
brain do its thing, images are everywhere. One of the most interesting exercises is looking at the detailed images of proples faces in the 9/11 smoke images while the building s were burning. It is somewhat scary.
Look at large boulders or rocks that are stained. There are many “continous tone ” images looking like real faces in a black and white photo.