RE: Seeing Things: Pareidolia in My Collage for LMAC #128
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Wow… I am totally puzzled here.
If the relationship between my collage and @shaka's photo is not immediately evident, that may be because you don't see what I saw in @shaka's picture.
I have tried and tried to get the connection, but finally resigned and decided to read the rest of the post to understand the relation between your collage and the original picture.
In addition, I didn’t know anything about pareidolias (I didn’t know this was even a word ;) ). That’s quite an interesting concept, especially when we raise the potential relationship with psychosis and creativity. What puzzles me most is that in (almost?) all these studies, the size of the sample is very small. The results are therefore subjected to large error bars.
We should hence be careful when raising any conclusive statement. As you wrote, maybe we should just focus on our feelings here ;)
Hi @lemouth. I'm so glad you are on the mend.
I appreciate your visit and am amused by your comment. I went back to the demonstration sheet and outlined what I imagined when I first saw the cloud. Look at the first image in each series (1, 2, 3) under the cloud. Does that help? What's funny is, once I see it, I can't 'unsee' it 😄
After reading your comment about the size of the studies I went back and did some more reading (looking for larger studies). There really doesn't seem to be much we can dependably conclude from any of the readings. It seems to me that people find what they are looking for (mostly) in these studies. I found a bunch that address pareidolia in people with Parkinson's and Lewy Body dementia. These people are inclined toward experiencing hallucinations generally. There was one study (500 people) that found differences in gender and age. It seems time of day (according to this study) also influences the likelihood of experiencing pareidolia.
I think the inclination to see shapes and images that aren't there is merely a curiosity, unless an underlying pathology exists.
Fun concept, though, isn't it?
So glad you are feeling better.
Cheers, indeed.
I definitely understand how you extracted the components from the main image. Unfortunately, as long as I only look at the original image, my brain refuses to see those components :D
Hmmm.... 500 people is still what I would classify as a small sample (7%-8% as a statistical error). That's some issue I have with many studies related to "softer science" (in contrast with basic or fundamental science; please don't be offended by the term): error propagation to the results. Doing so correctly would in fact often allow us to conclude to anything as well as to its contrary :)
I agree with this :)
Have a nice week!