Pareidolia -or- Do you see what I see?

[Editor’s note: This post comes perilously close to violating the Gazette’s longstanding policy of publishing only Content Free® material. The writers have been warned. Proceed at your own risk.]

I recently read a review of so-called ghost hunting gadgets like those that appear on paranormal TV shows such as Ghost Hunters (which, I confess, I’ve never watched). These pieces of equipment are supposed to detect unseen presences — aka ghosts or spirits — and alert the user to their proximity via audible or visual feedback (see also, steganography for a semi-related concept).

Depending on your belief system, you will either be skeptical of or unsurprised by the findings of the reviewer: those gadgets don’t work. Or, more to the point, they do detect something, but there’s always an explanation that doesn’t involve denizens of the spirit world.

One of those gadgets is called a spirit box. You can buy an SB7 spirit box from Amazon for less than $100, or an Ovilus 5 ghost box for $600 from GhostStop. Those prices seem high for something which the review described as a really bad radio. The way they purport to work is by scanning AM and FM frequencies and alerting the user to signals or messages that “entities” slip into those frequencies.

I’m not writing about this to debunk the paranormal, or debunk those who debunk it. Instead, it’s just a long-winded introduction to the phenomenon of pareidolia, whereby people seek out the sight (or sound) of patterns in random things. It’s [very] likely that when people detect messages while using a spirit box, they’re responding to ambiguous stimuli and assigning meaning and significance to it: pareidolia at work. You may have done the same thing in the Sixties when you played that Frank Zappa record backwards on your dad’s turntable, not that I would know anything about that.

Pareidolia is a well-studied psychological phenomenon (here’s one study published in the National Library of Medicine), and you and I experience it in multiple ways and in a myriad of things. Seeing the face of Jesus Christ or Elvis on a piece of toast is an example; so is spotting a puppy or a gorilla in a cloud formation. There’s a Facebook group called Things With Faces where its 933,000 members post photos of soap suds, knot holes (as in the photo at right), and body parts not typically associated with facial features (and generally for good reason).

You may be wondering why I chose this topic for a blog post, and I trust that you’re not naive enough to think that I think that anyone else cares about it, but the truth is that I’ve recently experienced my own example of pareidolia and I feel it’s important to document the phenomenon for posterity. Here’s the scoop.

After years of doing post-workout stretching in our garage, often in temperatures approaching 100º, I wised up and now unroll my yoga mat (upon which yoga has never been inflicted) on the cushiness of our living room rug. I’ve been doing so for at least a year, and I just now noticed something odd in the pattern of the rug, to wit…

Tell me I’m not the only one to see man wearing shades and a fedora, and giving me a judgmental stinkeye while I stretch on a [non]yoga mat in the mornings.

This pattern repeats on the rug a few times but this one is by far the clearest — or least fuzziest — image.

My perception of this image was probably reinforced by our Halloween get up, where we reprised our roles as the Blues Brothers.

If nothing else, at least now you know what to call it when you detect a malevolent spirit in the noise your washing machine is making, and perhaps you’ll make a better decision when you’re conflicted about calling an exorcist or an appliance repairperson. Not that there’s that much difference.