Facial pareidolia is the human tendency to see faces in random objects. A familiar example is seeing “the man in the moon”. To be honest, I have not spent much time in my life thinking about the phenomena of facial pareidolia, but it briefly came up as an odd and interesting topic in Vineet Vohra’s workshop in NYC. Some members of the workshop saw faces in all sorts of situations. They would see faces in buildings, in objects, in concrete. I do not think I see faces in things very often. A fair amount of the workshop was spent on skills related to “seeing”, which is actually a creative act that allows a street photographer to find those special moments on the street to photograph. I wondered, well, actually worried, that not seeing faces in things was a measure of just how little I was really seeing anything.

Let’s start with a super brief history of pareidolia as a general phenomenon, which is seeing familiar objects in random things. Starting in the mid-19th century, psychiatrists and psychologists from Germany, France, Poland and Switzerland began studying pareidolia, first as a symptom of psychosis or dementia. Alfred Binet, who pioneered work on IQ testing, suggested that inkblots might be used to study variations in “involuntary imagination”. Herman Rorschach refined the theory by developing a test that uses inkblots to investigate personality and assess psychological state. This test is still available, although it is not clear that it is reliable or valid.

This fellow skulks around the corner of my porch in the morning.

At the same time that pareidolia was being studied by scientists, the practice of “klecksography” became popular. Klecksography is the art of making images out of ink blogs. It was a popular game with children, including Herman Rorschach. To play the game, a paper was filled with ink and then folded to get interesting figures. Adults also got in on the creative fun. Writers used ink pens and sometimes the ink accidentally dropped on the paper. Literary figures of the time, like Victor Hugo or George Sand, saw images in these ink blots and embellished them so that they became artistic creations.

This fellow runs along my hall wall in the afternoon.

Research on the relationship between pareidolia and creativity is ongoing. In an article published in Psyche, “See faces in clouds. It might be a sign of your creativity,” Réne Müri and Nicole Göbel, researchers from Bern, Switzerland, describe their experiment. They tested 50 healthy participants by giving them a tablet with pictures of natural scenes and then asking them to draw in any images they could see. Their overlay drawings were evaluated for creative fluency and capacity for originality. The participants also took a battery of standard tests that measure creativity. The experiment showed that for their subjects, “greater fluency and originality of performance in the standard creativity tests were associated with greater fluency and originality of pareidolias.”

In the beginning, I was basically identifying triangles.

Maybe an individual’s inclination to facial pareidolia is a way to measure their natural creativity in seeing. Since I do not engage very often in facial pareidolia, I cannot help but wonder if I practice some on that kind of seeing, would it eventually boost my general ability to see?

This is a little bit of a stretch but maybe you get the idea here.

Here is the bottom line. It is what I call “free” to look for faces in random objects. It does not especially take up time and it certainly does not have bad side effects. Now as I am out and about, I am looking for faces in things. It possibly will never make a difference in my street photography, but it is really rather amusing. At first I only looked for faces in concrete. Now I am looking at shadows and clouds. I know I am getting better at seeing faces every day.

Dedicated to Street

Facial Pareidolia