Talk:Pareidolia

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Faces

There is a techinical term for specifically seeing faces in everything. is that the same as pareidolia? or is it a different term? and either way, if we find the term, it should be included. En attendant Godot 17:52, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

Not sure. Will go and kiss Google's ass for a minute. ADK^{...I'll annihilate your deviant!} 18:08, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

Not that I can tell. See the Wikipedia article on Face perception. but generally it's all pareidolia. ADK^{...I'll reward your wizard!} 18:15, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. it's still amazing to me that the brain will necessarily make two dots and a line under them always appear as a face. the "meme" page linked is a riot, but you can see these emotions in sinks, cups, fruit... even though there is no emotion in a sink. maybe in a fruit.En attendant Godot 18:19, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

This one is my favourite as you can see even the ship is shocked and embarrassed by the movie. ADK^{...I'll negate your pool table!} 11:06, 27 August 2011 (UTC)

Birds are pretty good for this. My favorites are the shit-eating grin birds and birds flipping the bird. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 03:56, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

I'm immediately reminded of Smug Kookaburras. There's a smug Dawkins lookalike on there somewhere. ADK^{...I'll duel your alcohol!} 14:03, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

Audio pareidolia

I swear i'm hearing non distinct voices chattering when there is cacophony, as if there are people in another room. I also "hear" English words, when listening to chaotic or frenetic conversations of people who are speaking languages i do not know. is this the same phenomena?En attendant Godot 03:11, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

Could be. I've heard similar things in busy polyglot environments. Speech and electrical atmospheric noise have enough differences that they could be processed in different parts of the brain. I do not know, but I suspect one is more likely to project some meaning onto strange speech than onto faint imagined beeps. Sprocket J Cogswell (talk) 03:19, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

I imagine it's exactly the same thing at play. You can very easily be alerted if someone says something important to you in a crowd, the usual example is your own name (visually analogues of this being familiar faces, letters or words). Your brain constantly cross-references sensory input with what it knows and expects to be important. It discards the unimportant stuff. "Hearing things" is undoubtedly a side-effect of this as it tries to compare the noise with existing phenomena and generates false positives. ADK^{...I'll refill your fiddle!} 15:37, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, this is basically how backmasking works. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 18:43, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

Paul is dead.GodotThe Peyote God awaits 16:49, 26 September 2011 (UTC)

I think that one is just reading too much into things. ADK^{...I'll defenestrate your aviator!} 18:05, 26 September 2011 (UTC)

LOL - goo goo ga juoo, goo goo goo.GodotThe Peyote God awaits 18:06, 26 September 2011 (UTC)

Regarding audio pareidolia in amatuer radio - "hearing voices" is a common side-effect of listening for quiet signals amongst the noise. Likewise, with CW - it is not uncommon to experience a similar phenomenon with patterns in the noise (weak-signal morse doesn't sound like a tone - it sounds like a rhythmic changing in the noise itself - for instance noise-high/noise-low - or noise-on/noise off).

Similarly, when on the wrong radio mode (i.e single side band (SSB) trying to listen to an Audio-Modulated or Frequency Modulated (AM/FM) signal), you can hear distorted, noisy parables of human voices (and music) - this contributes to the common woo of "listening to dead through the radio" - chances are you're just hearing a ham radio operator a few miles (or even a few hundred miles) away - more likely you're hearing the edge of a radio station and just ascribing your own words to the distorted speech-rhythm of noise.

You can easily find threads on the subject on forums such as "QRZ" and "radioforums" Cprobertson1 (talk) 14:47, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

To whoever added the Big Bang Theory joke

You are awesome. Wehpudicabok (talk) 08:07, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

What was it (as it has gone)? 82.44.143.26 (talk) 17:48, 28 June 2017 (UTC)

Bayes' Theorem

Is the listed version of Bayes' theorem a correct alternative? It appears to be missing a few terms.. ^{— Unsigned, by: 169.244.25.226 / talk / contribs}

If you're talking about how you could expand the denominator into a summation, then that's not missing terms, that is just a different way to write the same thing. Nullahnung (talk) 19:05, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

p(B) == p(B|A) * p(A) + p(B|~A) * p(~A)? ^{— Unsigned, by: 169.244.25.226 / talk / contribs}

Ah... yeah it does doesn't it. Is the form I was thinking of usually used when you know the consequent probability given either A or not A, and the listed version when you have two priors and one consequent? ^{— Unsigned, by: 169.244.25.226 / talk / contribs}

They are mathematically the same thing, so ... just switch between them at your convenience I guess. Nullahnung (talk) 20:39, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

I think I added that section a while ago. I'm no longer that happy with it... might just kill it. ^pathetic 15:51, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Critters on the underground

Does [1] fit in here? 82.44.143.26 (talk) 15:00, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

Here is a current link - there are others. Anna Livia (talk) 18:27, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

The mystery of the Mona Lisa is "solved".

I doubt there is one, but I haven't seen an interpretation more ridiculous AND pompous than that of a certain artist who claims he solved the Mona Lisa mystery with help of the "hidden messages", which are, in fact, heads of different animals he spotted (also present on any painting he looks at), similar to the practice of cloudspotting. Also,"the proof is obvious", as he states - proof being some images with highlighted silhouettes where "one can clearly see the head of a reptile – perhaps a serpent or crocodile...". The punchline of the whole thing is: "Not sure why he didn’t put a crocodile in this one...." To undermine such a brilliant discovery, no doubt.

Pictures that will make you do a double-take

Time to tease your brain (here's some more). Anyway, as you do precisely that, contemplate that this is the pattern recognition "software" that people who claim to have seen ghosts and aliens and other things that go bump in the night all blindly rely on. Now, get cracking! Reverend Black Percy (talk) 16:39, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

Why pareidolia works

• School dinners, school dinners
• Burnt baked beans, burnt baked beans
• Soggy semolina, soggy semolina
• Water quick, I feel sick.

What's the tune? 82.44.143.26 (talk) 17:53, 28 June 2017 (UTC)

Frère Jacques scans for me. Daev (talk) 08:58, 29 June 2017 (UTC)

Yes. (Someone created/repeated it at school.) 82.44.143.26 (talk) 14:40, 30 June 2017 (UTC)

Un-pareidolia

Where would [2] and the 'dog's head on the duck's beak' and similar be classified? Anna Livia (talk) 14:41, 7 September 2018 (UTC)

Yellow Face Icon is not a face

it is also not an example of pareidolia. nobody looks at the yellow smiley face icon and thinks it is a real face. rather it is recognised as a generic symbol for a face. likewise nobody looks at the skull and cross bones and thinks it is a real skull and cross bones. in different cultures and times skull and cross bones has meant different things. likewise yellow smiley face could mean different things to different people. the general human ability to associate abstract symbols and schematic forms with other objects is not evidence of our brain fooling us or us mistaking something for something else rather it is evidence of our brain working as it should. the similey face icon was designed to represent a face so it is natural that we recognize it as a representation of a face. if we are looking at an photo of mount Ararat from distance and we think we see a boat in the snow but it is actually a rock then that is pareidolia. the simley face icon and caption should be removed from the article because it has nothing to do with pareidolia and undermines this article. ^{— Unsigned, by: 2600:1000:b150:d280:e588:837:7270:f837 / talk / contribs}

amogus

A modern example of pareidolia could be the "amogus" meme that surfaced in early 2021, in which people started seeing the Among Us crewmate in mundane objects. ^{— Unsigned, by: 71.75.187.56 / talk / contribs}

Another link

Would this (or its sources) be appropriate?

As prosopagnosia/face blindness (or a peculiar interpretation of it) is an occasional trope in Korean dramas do persons with strong variants of the condition 'see' face pareidolia? Anna Livia (talk) 09:57, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

David McRaney quote

So I can't find a source for the quote at the top of the page using either Google or DuckDuckGo. That's not surprising, really, since Google has become enshittified. DuckDuckGo, while I recommend it for its privacy protections, is also inferior to an enshittified Google. However, that doesn't mean a quote isn't out there. It's a good quote, and I'd hate to see it go becuz the original editor who added it was too lazy to provide a citation. Is anyone else able to find one? Carthage (talk) 05:21, 9 October 2024 (UTC)