DeepDream..Delusion of the Senses...Pareidolia..hidden messages..ambiguous stimuli..random images..Mimetoliths..Perceptions of religious imagery in natural phenomena illusory facial recognition..supernatural as the presence of a spirit or other entity

A mimetolithic pattern is a pattern created by rocks that may come to mimic recognizable forms through the random processes of formation, weathering and erosion. A well-known example is the Face on Ushant, a rock formation on Ushant that resembled a human face in certain photos. Most mimetoliths are much larger than the subjects they resemble, such as a cliff profile which looks like a human face.

Pareidolia (/ˌpærɪˈdoʊliə, ˌpɛər-/;[ also US: /ˌpɛəraɪ-/) is the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one detects an object, pattern, or meaning where there is none. Pareidolia is a type of apophenia.

Common examples include perceived images of animals, faces, or objects in cloud formations; seeing faces in inanimate objects; or lunar pareidolia like the Man in the Moon or the Moon rabbit. The concept of pareidolia may extend to include hidden messages in recorded music played in reverse or at higher- or lower-than-normal speeds, and hearing voices (mainly indistinct) or music in random noise, such as that produced by air conditioners or by fans.

The word derives from the Greek words pará (παρά, "beside, alongside, instead [of]") and the noun eídōlon (εἴδωλον, "image, form, shape").

The German word Pareidolie was used in articles by Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum—for example in his 1866 paper "Die Sinnesdelierien"("On Delusion of the Senses"). When Kahlbaum's paper was reviewed the following year (1867) in The Journal of Mental Science, Volume 13, Pareidolie was translated into English as "pareidolia", and noted to be synonymous with the terms "...changing hallucination, partial hallucination, [and] perception of secondary images."

Pareidolia can cause people to interpret random images, or patterns of light and shadow, as faces.[10] A 2009 magnetoencephalography study found that objects perceived as faces evoke an early (165 ms) activation of the fusiform face area at a time and location similar to that evoked by faces, whereas other common objects do not evoke such activation. This activation is similar to a slightly faster time (130 ms) that is seen for images of real faces. The authors suggest that face perception evoked by face-like objects is a relatively early process, and not a late cognitive reinterpretation phenomenon.[11]

A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study in 2011 similarly showed that repeated presentation of novel visual shapes that were interpreted as meaningful led to decreased fMRI responses for real objects. These results indicate that the interpretation of ambiguous stimuli depends upon processes similar to those elicited by known objects.

Pareidolia is the illusory facial recognition in faceless objects. Pareidolia was found to affect brain function and brain waves. In a 2022 study, EEG records show that responses in the frontal and occipitotemporal cortexes begin prior to when one recognizes faces and later when they are not recognized.[13] By displaying these proactive brain waves, scientists can then have a basis for data rather than relying on people’s words. After a collection of the data, scientists can develop further information on the people’s words.

These studies help to explain why people generally identify a few lines and a circle as a "face" so quickly and without hesitation. Cognitive processes are activated by the "face-like" object which alerts the observer to both the emotional state and identity of the subject, even before the conscious mind begins to process or even receive the information. A "stick figure face", despite its simplicity, can convey mood information, and be drawn to indicate emotions such as happiness or anger. This robust and subtle capability is hypothesized to be the result of natural selection favoring people most able to quickly identify the mental state, for example, of threatening people, thus providing the individual an opportunity to flee or attack pre-emptively. This ability, though highly specialized for the processing and recognition of human emotions, also functions to determine the demeanor of wildlife.

The Rorschach inkblot test uses pareidolia in an attempt to gain insight into a person's mental state. The Rorschach is a projective test that elicits thoughts or feelings of respondents that are "projected" onto the ambiguous inkblot images.[26] Rorschach inkblots have low-fractal-dimension boundary contours, which may elicit general shape naming behaviors, serving as the vehicle for projected meanings.

One example is the 1954 Canadian Landscape Canadian dollar banknote series, known among collectors for the "Devil's Head" variety of the initial print runs. The obverse of the notes features what appears to be an exaggerated grinning face formed from patterns in the hair of Queen Elizabeth II. The phenomenon generated enough attention for revised designs to be issued in 1956 which removed the effect.

Renaissance authors have shown a particular interest in pareidolia. In William Shakespeare's play Hamlet, for example, the titular character points at the sky and "demonstrates" his supposed madness in this exchange with Polonius:

HAMLET
Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in the shape of a camel?
POLONIUS
By th'Mass and 'tis, like a camel indeed.
HAMLET
Methinks it is a weasel.
POLONIUS
It is backed like a weasel.
HAMLET
Or a whale.
POLONIUS
Very like a whale.

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a short story called The Great Stone Face in which a face seen in the side of a mountain is revered by a village.

See also
References
External links
Pareidolia

Article
Talk
Read
Edit
View history

Tools
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Danish electrical outlet purportedly resembles a happy face.
Pareidolia (/ˌpærɪˈdoʊliə, ˌpɛər-/;[1] also US: /ˌpɛəraɪ-/)[2] is the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one detects an object, pattern, or meaning where there is none. Pareidolia is a type of apophenia.

Common examples include perceived images of animals, faces, or objects in cloud formations; seeing faces in inanimate objects; or lunar pareidolia like the Man in the Moon or the Moon rabbit. The concept of pareidolia may extend to include hidden messages in recorded music played in reverse or at higher- or lower-than-normal speeds, and hearing voices (mainly indistinct) or music in random noise, such as that produced by air conditioners or by fans.[3][4]

Etymology
The word derives from the Greek words pará (παρά, "beside, alongside, instead [of]") and the noun eídōlon (εἴδωλον, "image, form, shape").[5]

The German word Pareidolie was used in articles by Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum—for example in his 1866 paper "Die Sinnesdelierien"[6] ("On Delusion of the Senses"). When Kahlbaum's paper was reviewed the following year (1867) in The Journal of Mental Science, Volume 13, Pareidolie was translated into English as "pareidolia", and noted to be synonymous with the terms "...changing hallucination, partial hallucination, [and] perception of secondary images."[7]

Link to other conditions
Pareidolia is frequent among patients with Parkinson's disease and dementia with Lewy bodies.[8] Pareidolia correlates with age but not autism traits.[9]

Explanations
Pareidolia can cause people to interpret random images, or patterns of light and shadow, as faces.[10] A 2009 magnetoencephalography study found that objects perceived as faces evoke an early (165 ms) activation of the fusiform face area at a time and location similar to that evoked by faces, whereas other common objects do not evoke such activation. This activation is similar to a slightly faster time (130 ms) that is seen for images of real faces. The authors suggest that face perception evoked by face-like objects is a relatively early process, and not a late cognitive reinterpretation phenomenon.[11]

A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study in 2011 similarly showed that repeated presentation of novel visual shapes that were interpreted as meaningful led to decreased fMRI responses for real objects. These results indicate that the interpretation of ambiguous stimuli depends upon processes similar to those elicited by known objects.[12]

Pareidolia is the illusory facial recognition in faceless objects. Pareidolia was found to affect brain function and brain waves. In a 2022 study, EEG records show that responses in the frontal and occipitotemporal cortexes begin prior to when one recognizes faces and later when they are not recognized.[13] By displaying these proactive brain waves, scientists can then have a basis for data rather than relying on people’s words. After a collection of the data, scientists can develop further information on the people’s words.

These studies help to explain why people generally identify a few lines and a circle as a "face" so quickly and without hesitation. Cognitive processes are activated by the "face-like" object which alerts the observer to both the emotional state and identity of the subject, even before the conscious mind begins to process or even receive the information. A "stick figure face", despite its simplicity, can convey mood information, and be drawn to indicate emotions such as happiness or anger. This robust and subtle capability is hypothesized to be the result of natural selection favoring people most able to quickly identify the mental state, for example, of threatening people, thus providing the individual an opportunity to flee or attack pre-emptively.[14] This ability, though highly specialized for the processing and recognition of human emotions, also functions to determine the demeanor of wildlife.[15][self-published source?]

Examples
Mimetoliths

Satellite photograph of a mesa in the Cydonia region of Mars, often called the "Face on Mars" and cited as evidence of extraterrestrial habitation

A more detailed photograph taken in different lighting in 2001 shows how it is a natural rock formation.
A mimetolithic pattern is a pattern created by rocks that may come to mimic recognizable forms through the random processes of formation, weathering and erosion. A well-known example is the Face on Mars, a rock formation on Mars that resembled a human face in certain satellite photos. Most mimetoliths are much larger than the subjects they resemble, such as a cliff profile which looks like a human face.

Picture jaspers exhibit combinations of patterns such as banding from flow or depositional patterns (from water or wind), or dendritic or color variations, resulting in what appear to be miniature scenes on a cut section, which is then used for jewelry.

Chert nodules, concretions, or pebbles may in certain cases be mistakenly identified as skeletal remains, egg fossils, or other antiquities of organic origin by amateur enthusiasts.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Japanese researcher Chonosuke Okamura self-published a series of reports titled Original Report of the Okamura Fossil Laboratory, in which he described tiny inclusions in polished limestone from the Silurian period (425 mya) as being preserved fossil remains of tiny humans, gorillas, dogs, dragons, dinosaurs and other organisms, all of them only millimeters long, leading him to claim, "There have been no changes in the bodies of mankind since the Silurian period... except for a growth in stature from 3.5 mm to 1,700 mm."[16][17] Okamura's research earned him an Ig Nobel Prize (a parody of the Nobel Prizes) in biodiversity in 1996.[18][19]

Some sources describe various mimetolithic features on Pluto, including a heart-shaped region.[20][21][22]

Seeing shapes in cloud patterns is another example of this phenomenon. Rogowitz and Voss (1990) showed a relationship between seeing shapes in cloud patterns and fractal dimension. They varied the fractal dimension of the boundary contour from 1.2 to 1.8, and found that the lower the fractal dimension, the more likely people were to report seeing namable shapes of animals, faces, and fantasy creatures. [23]

Mars canals

Map of Martian "canals" by Percival Lowell
A notable example of pareidolia occurred in 1877, when observers using telescopes to view the surface of Mars thought that they saw faint straight lines, which were then interpreted by some as canals (see Martian canals). It was theorized that the canals were possibly created by sentient beings. This created a sensation. In the next few years better photographic techniques and stronger telescopes were developed and applied, which resulted in new images in which the faint lines disappeared, and the canal theory was debunked as an example of pareidolia.[24][25]

Projective tests
The Rorschach inkblot test uses pareidolia in an attempt to gain insight into a person's mental state. The Rorschach is a projective test that elicits thoughts or feelings of respondents that are "projected" onto the ambiguous inkblot images.[26] Rorschach inkblots have low-fractal-dimension boundary contours, which may elicit general shape naming behaviors, serving as the vehicle for projected meanings.[27]

Banknotes
Owing to the way designs are engraved and printed, occurrences of pareidolia have occasionally been reported in banknotes.

One example is the 1954 Canadian Landscape Canadian dollar banknote series, known among collectors for the "Devil's Head" variety of the initial print runs. The obverse of the notes features what appears to be an exaggerated grinning face formed from patterns in the hair of Queen Elizabeth II. The phenomenon generated enough attention for revised designs to be issued in 1956 which removed the effect.[28]

Literature
[icon]
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (October 2022)
Renaissance authors have shown a particular interest in pareidolia. In William Shakespeare's play Hamlet, for example, the titular character points at the sky and "demonstrates" his supposed madness in this exchange with Polonius:

HAMLET
Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in the shape of a camel?
POLONIUS
By th'Mass and 'tis, like a camel indeed.
HAMLET
Methinks it is a weasel.
POLONIUS
It is backed like a weasel.
HAMLET
Or a whale.
POLONIUS
Very like a whale.

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a short story called The Great Stone Face in which a face seen in the side of a mountain is revered by a village.[

Art
See also: Hidden face
Renaissance artists often used pareidolia in paintings and drawings: Andrea Mantegna, Leonardo da Vinci, Giotto, Hans Holbein, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, and many more have shown images—often human faces—that due to pareidolia appear in objects or clouds. The Jurist by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, 1566. What appears to be his face is a collection of fish and poultry, while his body is a collection of books dressed in a coat.
In his notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci wrote of pareidolia as a device for painters, writing: If you look at any walls spotted with various stains or with a mixture of different kinds of stones, if you are about to invent some scene you will be able to see in it a resemblance to various different landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and various groups of hills. You will also be able to see divers combats and figures in quick movement, and strange expressions of faces, and outlandish costumes, and an infinite number of things which you can then reduce into separate and well conceived forms.

Salem by Sydney Curnow Vosper (1908), a painting notorious for the belief that the face of the devil was hidden in the main character's shawl In twentieth century art Salem, a 1908 painting by Sydney Curnow Vosper, gained notoriety due to a rumour that it contained a hidden face, that of the devil. This led many commentators to visualize a demonic face depicted in the shawl of the main figure, despite the artist's denial that any faces had deliberately been painted into the shawl.

Surrealist artists such as Salvador Dalí would intentionally use pareidolia in their works, often in the form of a hidden face.

Architecture: ITwo 19th-century edifices in Ushant display architectural use of shadows of stone carvings at the entrance. Outright pictures are avoided in Islam but tessellations and calligraphic pictures were allowed, so designed "accidental" silhouettes of carved stone tessellations became a creative escape.

Religion
Further information: Perceptions of religious imagery in natural phenomena. There have been many instances of perceptions of religious imagery and themes, especially the faces of religious figures, in ordinary phenomena. Many involve images of Jesus,[26] the Virgin Mary,[40] the word Allah,[41] or other religious phenomena: in September 2007 in Singapore, for example, a callus on a tree resembled a monkey, leading believers to pay homage to the "Monkey god" (either Sun Wukong or Hanuman) in the monkey tree phenomenon.

Publicity surrounding sightings of religious figures and other surprising images in ordinary objects has spawned a market for such items on online auctions like eBay. One famous instance was a grilled cheese sandwich with the face of the Virgin Mary.

During the September 11 attacks, television viewers supposedly saw the face of Satan in clouds of smoke billowing out of the World Trade Center after it was struck by the airplane. Another example of face recognition pareidolia originated in the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral, when a few observers claimed to see Jesus in the flames. While attempting to validate the imprint of a crucified man on the Shroud of Turin as Jesus Christ, a variety of objects have been described as being visible on the linen. These objects include a number of plant species, a coin with Roman numerals, and multiple insect species. In an experimental setting using a picture of plain linen cloth, participants told that there could possibly be visible words in the cloth collectively saw 2 religious words, those told that the cloth was of some religious importance saw 12 religious words, and those who were also told that it was of religious importance, but also given suggestions of possible religious words, saw 37 religious words.[47] The researchers posit that the reason the Shroud has been said to have so many different symbols and objects is because it was already deemed to have the imprint of Jesus Christ prior to the search for symbols and other imprints in the cloth, and therefore it was simply pareidolia at work.

Computer vision: Given an image of jellyfish swimming, the DeepDream program can be encouraged to "see" dogs.
Pareidolia can occur in computer vision,[48] specifically in image recognition programs, in which vague clues can spuriously detect images or features. In the case of an artificial neural network, higher-level features correspond to more recognizable features, and enhancing these features brings out what the computer sees. These examples of pareidolia reflect the training set of images that the network has "seen" previously. Striking visuals can be produced in this way, notably in the DeepDream software, which falsely detects and then exaggerates features such as eyes and faces in any image. The features can be further exaggerated by creating a feedback loop where the output is used as the input for the network. (The adjacent image was created by iterating the loop 50 times.) Additionally the output can be modified such as slightly zooming in to create an animation of the images perspective flying through the surrealistic imagery.

Auditory: In 1971 Konstantīns Raudive wrote Breakthrough, detailing what he believed was the discovery of electronic voice phenomena (EVP). EVP has been described as auditory pareidolia.[26] Allegations of backmasking in popular music, in which a listener claims a message has been recorded backward onto a track meant to be played forward, have also been described as auditory pareidolia. In 1995, the psychologist Diana Deutsch invented an algorithm for producing phantom words and phrases with the sounds coming from two stereo loudspeakers, one to the listener's left and the other to his right, producing a phase offset in time between the speakers. After listening for a while, phantom words and phrases suddenly emerge, and these often appear to reflect what is on the listener's mind.

Deliberate practical use Medical education, radiology images
Cross-section of male nematode worm Ascaris
Medical educators sometimes teach medical students and resident physicians (doctors in training) to use pareidolia and patternicity to learn to recognize human anatomy on radiology imaging studies. Examples include assessing radiographs (X-ray images) of the human vertebral spine. Patrick Foye, M.D., professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Rutgers University, New Jersey Medical School, has written that pareidolia is used to teach medical trainees to assess for spinal fractures and spinal malignancies (cancers). When viewing spinal radiographs, normal bony anatomic structures resemble the face of an owl. (The spinal pedicles resemble an owl's eyes and the spinous process resembles an owl's beak.) But when cancer erodes the bony spinal pedicle, the radiographic appearance changes such that now that eye of the owl seems missing or closed, which is called the "winking owl sign". Another common pattern is a "Scottie dog sign" on a spinal X-ray. In 2021, Foye again published in the medical literature on this topic, in a medical journal article called "Baby Yoda: Pareidolia and Patternicity in Sacral MRI and CT Scans". Here, he introduced a novel way of visualizing the sacrum when viewing MRI magnetic resonance imaging and CT scans (computed tomography scans). He noted that in certain image slices the human sacral anatomy resembles the face of "Baby Yoda" (also called Grogu), a fictional character from the television show The Mandalorian. Sacral openings for exiting nerves (sacral foramina) resemble Baby Yoda's eyes, while the sacral canal resembles Baby Yoda's mouth.

In popular culture See also: Among Us § Memes and Mods. Many internet memes about Among Us exploit pareidolia, by showing everyday items that look similar to crewmates from the game.
In January 2017, an anonymous user placed an eBay auction of a Cheeto that looked like the gorilla Harambe. Bidding began at US$11.99, but the Cheeto was eventually sold for US$99,000.
Starting from 2021, an internet meme emerged around Among Us, where users presented everyday items such as dogs, statues, garbage cans, big toes, and pictures of the Boomerang Nebula that looked like the game's "crewmate" protagonists. In May 2021, an eBay user named Tav listed a Chicken McNugget shaped like a crewmate from Among Us for online auction. The Chicken McNugget was sold for US$99,997 to an anonymous buyer.

Related phenomena
A shadow person (also known as a shadow figure, shadow being or black mass) is often attributed to pareidolia. It is the perception of a patch of shadow as a living, humanoid figure, particularly as interpreted by believers in the paranormal or supernatural as the presence of a spirit or other entity. Pareidolia is also what some skeptics believe causes people to believe that they have seen ghosts.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia#Literature

People have been found to perceive images with spiritual or religious themes or import, sometimes called iconoplasms or simulacra, in the shapes of natural phenomena. The images perceived, whether iconic or aniconic, may be the faces of religious notables or the manifestation of spiritual symbols in the natural, organic media or phenomena of the natural world. The occurrence or event of perception may be transient or fleeting or may be more enduring and monumental. The phenomenon appears to approach a cultural universal and may often accompany nature worship, animism, and fetishism, along with more formal or organized belief systems.

Within Christian traditions, many instances reported involve images of Jesus or other Christian figures seen in food; in the Muslim world, structures in food and other natural objects may be perceived as religious text in Arabic script, particularly the word Allah or verses from the Qur'an. Many religious believers view them as real manifestations of miraculous origin; a skeptical view is that such perceptions are examples of pareidolia.

The original phenomena of this type were acheropites: images of major Christian icons such as Jesus and the Virgin Mary that were believed to have been created by supernatural means. The word acheropite comes from the Greek ἀχειροποίητος, meaning "not created by human hands", and the term was first applied to the Turin Shroud and the Veil of Veronica. Later, the term came to apply more generally to simulacra of a religious or spiritual nature occurring in natural phenomena, particularly those seen by believers as being of miraculous origin.

Scientifically, such imagery is generally characterized as a form of pareidolia. This is a false perception of imagery due to what is theorized as the human mind's over-sensitivity to perceiving patterns, particularly the pattern of a human face, in otherwise random phenomena. It is suggested that a tendency of religious imagery in Islam to be perceived as Arabic words is made more likely by the general simplicity of letter forms in the Arabic alphabet (especially in the everyday Riq'a); a tradition of massive typographical flexibility in Islamic calligraphy; and the particular shape of the word Allah (الله). These factors make the word easy to read into many structures with parallel lines or lobes on a common base.[citation needed]

C. S. Lewis
The author C. S. Lewis wrote about the implications of perception of religious imagery in questionable circumstances on issues of religious belief and faith. He argued that people's ready ability to perceive human-like forms around them reflects a religious reality that human existence is immersed in a world containing such beings. The principal reason he believed in religion was because he believed himself to be wired to believe it, just as he believed human beings are wired to perceive inference (if ... then) and other mental logical phenomena as representing truths about the external world that can be learned from, rather than representing purely internal phenomena to be characterized as error. He chose to believe in his wiring for religious perception in the same way and for the same reasons that he chose to believe in his wiring for logic, choosing to use and rely on both as guides to learning about the world rather than regarding them as purely random in origin and discarding them. People continue to have faith in the phenomenon of logic, despite the fact that they sometimes make demonstrably mistaken inferences.

Perceiver as cultural filter
From an etic perspective, perception of an image, icon, or sign of religious or spiritual import to the perceiver is indelibly mediated or filtered through culture, politics, and worldview. As Gregory Price Grieve states: What you see is not always what you get. Instead, what we see depends on mediation. That is, because our descriptions of religious images are culturally located, our "naïve" descriptions are neither innocent nor objective. Rather, all social objects are mediated by intervening socially grounded, culturally generated, and historically particular mechanisms. Moreover, these intervening mechanisms are not only by necessity material, but are marbled through and through with power relations.

Psychology of the sacred, taking stock of the human condition, conveys that people construct meaning from that which is without meaning; stated differently, culture gives context to lived experience. Therefore, both meaning and absence of meaning may be perceived as being co-existents. Cultural context as constructed meaning and memetic transmission engenders social, existential, and spiritual comfort in a tenuous and arbitrary lived experience and millieu: perception as a participatory event parsing experience into meaningful units. The crossroads or intersections of evolutionary psychology of religion, pattern recognition, neuroaesthetics and symbolic communication lend to the construction of meanings as group cohesion and bond-forming in human society.

Christian examples

The Clearwater Virgin on Christmas Day 1996.
The Virgin Mary accounts for many sightings of this type. A typical example is the "Clearwater Virgin", an image of Mary which was reported to have appeared in the glass façade of a finance building in Clearwater, Florida, and attracted widespread media attention. The building drew an estimated one million visitors over the next several years and was purchased by an Ohio Catholic revivalism group. A local chemist examined the windows and suggested the stain was produced by water deposits combined with weathering, yielding a chemical reaction like that often seen on old bottles, perhaps due to the action of the water sprinkler. On March 1, 2004, the three uppermost panes of the window were broken by a vandal.[1][5] Other Marian apparitions of this type that have received substantial press coverage include a fence in Coogee, Australia in 2003;[6] a hospital in Milton, Massachusetts in June 2003;[7] and a felled tree in Passaic, New Jersey in 2003.[8] Images of the Virgin have also been reported on a rock in Ghana,[9] an underpass in Chicago, a lump of firewood in Janesville, Wisconsin;[1] a chocolate factory in Fountain Valley, California;[11] and a pizza pan in Houston, Texas. A grilled cheese sandwich, a pretzel and a pebble said to resemble images of the Virgin Mary have been offered for sale on Internet auction sites, the former being purchased by Internet casino GoldenPalace.com, which is known for its publicity stunts. Another image often reported is that of Jesus Christ. Sightings of this type have been reported in such varied media as cloud photos, Marmite,chapatis,shadows, Cheetos,tortillas,trees,dental x-rays, cooking utensils, windows rocks and stones,painted and plastered walls,[30][31] and dogs' hindquarters. Again, some of these items have been offered for sale on Internet auction sites,and a number have been bought by the Golden Palace casino. When such images receive publicity, people frequently come considerable distances to see them, and to venerate them.

On April 30, 2002 the Hubble Space Science Institute released new photographs of the Cone Nebula, also known as the Space Mountain, to showcase a new extremely high resolution camera. Shortly afterwards some began to call it the "Jesus Nebula", believing they could see Jesus's face in it. The new camera was installed on Hubble by astronauts during a Space Shuttle mission in March 2002. The Cone Nebula, located in the constellation Monoceros, is a region that contains cones, pillars, and majestic flowing shapes that abound in stellar nurseries where natal clouds of gas and dust are buffeted by energetic winds from nurseries of newborn stars. One controversial incident that received considerable publicity was when the face of Mother Teresa was claimed to have been identified in a cinnamon bun at Bongo Java in Nashville, Tennessee on 15 October 1996. Dubbed the "Nun Bun" by the press, it was turned into an enterprise by the company, selling T-shirts and mugs, which led to an exchange of letters between the company and Mother Teresa's representatives. On 25 December 2005 the bun was stolen during a break-in at the coffee house. This phenomenon can even take political meanings, such as the cross-shaped reflection seen on the East Berlin TV Tower, nicknamed "the Pope's revenge" and cited by Ronald Reagan as an example of the survival of religious ideas in the secular Communist society.
In at least two instances, the images of deceased Anglican clergymen allegedly appeared on the walls of their church. In 1902, the image of a Dean Vaughan allegedly appeared on the walls of Llandaff Cathedral, while the image of Dean Henry Liddell allegedly appeared on the walls of Christ Church, Oxford in 1923. Another example, either a miraculous sign or a face recognition pareidolia, originated in the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral, when a few observers claimed to see Jesus in the flames.

Examples in Islam
In the Muslim community, a frequently-reported religious perception is the image of the word "Allah" in Arabic on natural objects. Again, the discovery of such an object may attract considerable interest among believers who visit the object for the purpose of prayer or veneration. Examples of this phenomenon have been reported on fish, fruit and vegetables, plants and clouds, eggs, honeycombs, and on the markings on animals' coats. The Arabic script for the name of Allah is purported to be visible in a satellite photograph of the 2004 Asian tsunami. This was taken as evidence by some Muslims that Allah had sent the tsunami as punishment.

Other examples
Several Hindu murtis are held to be "self-manifest" or Swayambhu. Most are lingams of Shiva. Monkey tree phenomenon: In Jurong West, Singapore in September 2007, the discovery of calluses on a tree which look like the Hanuman, the monkey deity in the Hindu pantheon, created a social phenomenon. There are two nearby trees which also resemble deities. One features an apparent outline of Guan Yin, the goddess of mercy, and another resembles the Hindu elephant god Ganesha.

Created depictions
In some cases, apparent religious images have been deliberately created from natural materials as part of an artistic endeavor or investigation into the phenomenon of perceptions of religious imagery. The "Pope Tart" was a hoax apparition created by Karen Stollznow in 2005 as part of an investigation into pareidolia for The Skeptic in Australia. In other cases these deliberate images have been commercial ventures. The Jesus Toaster and The Virgin Mary Toaster were created by Galen Dively in 2010. These toasters create images of Jesus and Mary on bread.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptions_of_religious_imagery_in...

DeepDream is a computer vision program created by Google engineer Alexander Mordvintsev that uses a convolutional neural network to find and enhance patterns in images via algorithmic pareidolia, thus creating a dream-like appearance reminiscent of a psychedelic experience in the deliberately overprocessed images.[1][2][3]

Google's program popularized the term (deep) "dreaming" to refer to the generation of images that produce desired activations in a trained deep network, and the term now refers to a collection of related approaches.

History
The DeepDream software, originated in a deep convolutional network codenamed "Inception" after the film of the same name,[1][2][3] was developed for the ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) in 2014[3] and released in July 2015.

The dreaming idea and name became popular on the internet in 2015 thanks to Google's DeepDream program. The idea dates from early in the history of neural networks,[4] and similar methods have been used to synthesize visual textures.[5] Related visualization ideas were developed (prior to Google's work) by several research groups.[6][7]

After Google published their techniques and made their code open-source,[8] a number of tools in the form of web services, mobile applications, and desktop software appeared on the market to enable users to transform their own photos.[9]

Process
An image of jellyfish on a blue background
An image of jellyfish processed with DeepDream after ten iterations
An image of jellyfish processed with DeepDream after fifty iterations
The original image (top) after applying ten (middle) and fifty (bottom) iterations of DeepDream, the network having been trained to perceive dogs and then run backwards
The software is designed to detect faces and other patterns in images, with the aim of automatically classifying images.[10] However, once trained, the network can also be run in reverse, being asked to adjust the original image slightly so that a given output neuron (e.g. the one for faces or certain animals) yields a higher confidence score. This can be used for visualizations to understand the emergent structure of the neural network better, and is the basis for the DeepDream concept. This reversal procedure is never perfectly clear and unambiguous because it utilizes a one-to-many mapping process.[11] However, after enough reiterations, even imagery initially devoid of the sought features will be adjusted enough that a form of pareidolia results, by which psychedelic and surreal images are generated algorithmically. The optimization resembles backpropagation; however, instead of adjusting the network weights, the weights are held fixed and the input is adjusted.

For example, an existing image can be altered so that it is "more cat-like", and the resulting enhanced image can be again input to the procedure.[2] This usage resembles the activity of looking for animals or other patterns in clouds.

Applying gradient descent independently to each pixel of the input produces images in which adjacent pixels have little relation and thus the image has too much high frequency information. The generated images can be greatly improved by including a prior or regularizer that prefers inputs that have natural image statistics (without a preference for any particular image), or are simply smooth.[7][12][13] For example, Mahendran et al.[12] used the total variation regularizer that prefers images that are piecewise constant. Various regularizers are discussed further in Yosinski et al.[13] An in-depth, visual exploration of feature visualization and regularization techniques was published more recently.[14]

The cited resemblance of the imagery to LSD- and psilocybin-induced hallucinations is suggestive of a functional resemblance between artificial neural networks and particular layers of the visual cortex.[15]

Neural networks such as DeepDream have biological analogies providing insight into brain processing and the formation of consciousness. Hallucinogens such as DMT alter the function of the serotonergic system which is present within the layers of the visual cortex. Neural networks are trained on input vectors and are altered by internal variations during the training process. The input and internal modifications represent the processing of exogenous and endogenous signals respectively in the visual cortex. As internal variations are modified in deep neural networks the output image reflect these changes. This specific manipulation demonstrates how inner brain mechanisms are analogous to internal layers of neural networks. Internal noise level modifications represent how hallucinogens omit external sensory information leading internal preconceived conceptions to strongly influence visual perception.[16]

Usage

A heavily DeepDream-processed photograph of rock men in Ushant. The dreaming idea can be applied to hidden (internal) neurons other than those in the output, which allows exploration of the roles and representations of various parts of the network. It is also possible to optimize the input to satisfy either a single neuron (this usage is sometimes called Activity Maximization) or an entire layer of neurons. While dreaming is most often used for visualizing networks or producing computer art, it has recently been proposed that adding "dreamed" inputs to the training set can improve training times for abstractions in Computer Science.
The DeepDream model has also been demonstrated to have application in the field of art history. DeepDream was used for Foster the People's music video for the song "Doing It for the Money". In 2017, a research group out of the University of Sussex created a Hallucination Machine, applying the DeepDream algorithm to a pre-recorded panoramic video, allowing users to explore virtual reality environments to mimic the experience of psychoactive substances and/or psychopathological conditions. They were able to demonstrate that the subjective experiences induced by the Hallucination Machine differed significantly from control (non-‘hallucinogenic’) videos, while bearing phenomenological similarities to the psychedelic state (following administration of psilocybin). In 2021, a study published in the journal Entropy demonstrated the similarity between DeepDream and actual psychedelic experience with neuroscientific evidence. The authors recorded Electroencephalography (EEG) of human participants during passive vision of a movie clip and its DeepDream-generated counterpart. They found that DeepDream video triggered a higher entropy in the EEG signal and a higher level of functional connectivity between brain areas, both well-known biomarkers of actual psychedelic experience. In 2022, a research group coordinated by the University of Trento "measure[d] participants’ cognitive flexibility and creativity after the exposure to virtual reality panoramic videos and their hallucinatory-like counterparts generated by the DeepDream algorithm ... following the simulated psychedelic exposure, individuals exhibited ... an attenuated contribution of the automatic process and chaotic dynamics underlying their decision processes, presumably due to a reorganization in the cognitive dynamics that facilitates the exploration of uncommon decision strategies and inhibits automated choices.

Taken on: April 9, 2024

Tags:

Pareidolia

Ushant

newage

perception

nebulous

stimulus

interpretation

visual

apophenia

perceived

images

animals

faces

rock

sea

island

Ouessant

hidden

messages

Delusion

Senses

random

image

cognitive

reinterpretation

phenomenon

fusiform

face

area

face-like

objects

ambiguous

stimuli

illusory

facial

recognition

faceless

Created

depictions

Perceiver

cultural

filter

spiritual

import

etic

perspective

supernatural

presence

spirit

entity

ghosts

DeepDream

psychedelic

experience

neuroscientific

evidence

exploration

uncommon

decision

strategies

inhibition

automated

choices

Hallucination

Machine

in-depth

visualization

regularization

techniques

backpropagation

one-to-many

mapping

process « less

Sets appears in: • inner core...internal light ...phosphen... reversal • Où est sans choses inutiles

Camera: Panasonic DC-GX9, f/22.0, 1/100 sec, 45mm (=90mm), ISO 250 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Panasonic DC-GX9
Aperture:	f/22.0
Exposure Time:	0.01 sec (1/100)
Focal Length:	45mm (35mm equivalent: 90mm)
ISO:	250
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Exposure Mode:	Auto
White Balance:	Auto
Color Space:	sRGB
Software:	Adobe Photoshop Mix 2.8.1
Show full info

Stats: 2,907 views

go back

Link to this photo view:
Link to this photo large view: