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Hey everyone – I’ve been looking through the site and found a high number of postings related to pareidolia – for obvious reasons. I found this interesting given that it is something I frequently deal with in my career, just in different ways. Pareidolia arises from a complex mix of psychological but also neurological factors. I won’t go into details of the psychological factors (there are many, perhaps a different post?) but a cursory mention of top-down-processing and suggestibility factors is warranted. Although admittedly this falls within perhaps a “softer science” there are reliable and valid personality inventories and questionnaires that objectively measure these factors to some degree. But perhaps more importantly, in the spirit of consilience, there is harder, more biologically driven evidence that helps explain the phenomenon of pareidolia. I help run a neuropsychology evaluation service in a busy metropolitan hospital. One of the more common patient demographics we see is the elderly, typically with concerns of some form of dementia. In one form of dementia, dementia from what is called Lewy-body disease (LBD- abnormal deposits of a protein called alpha-synuclein in the brain) a hallmark sign is visual hallucinations (VH), usually well-formed, with colors and even frequently three dimensional. Although VH are frequent in many psychological disorders, in this form of dementia they are notable because they reflect not a psychological demise as much as neurological (biology) one. Such happen in individuals with no psychological history whatsoever (prior to the onset of their disease), and are correlated with LBD in visual cortex and other areas of the brain used for processing of visual information (found in post-mortem studies). In fact, kinda a novel but brilliant advance in the field are pareidolia tests that try to illicit VH from varying degrees of neural stimuli. Perhaps the most well-known is called the noise pareidolia test https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0154713 This test is frequently used to evaluate for dementia thought to be caused by LBD. Really interesting test. I will not publish it here, but it can be found (public domain). Essentially what it is - is a series of pictures with varying degrees of unstructured, neutral visual information pitted against pictures with structured, non-neutral information (identifiable images). Respondents have to not only correctly identify the real images but also not be duped by the foils. Studies have been fairly consistent in that patients with LBD correctly identify the real images on par with others, but incorrectly “see” something in the foils. As mentioned, such findings correlate with LBD is visual and associated brain cortices. Functional neuroimaging studies also show the same response pattern on noise pareidolia tests is correlated with hypoperfusion (in living subjects) in the same cortical areas. As a reminder, these findings occur in individuals with no known mental health history prior to the onset of their disease. No, I don’t post any of this to suggest that those who fall prey to pareidolia effects (all of us fall for it at some point) have brain damage. So, lets avoid any of those comments (in fact, after an intense day of shark tooth hunting I figurately see them EVERYWHERE). But, I do think it is an interesting analog to what has been discussed already, and perhaps can add to the pareidolia literature and musings that have already been posted. As all good scientists do, we shouldn’t be afraid or deny our biases; whether they be psychological or even neurological, but rather be open to embracing them and learning about them. This allows for a degree of predictability and pattern-recognition, which ultimately will help us from being prey to the vicious jaws of pareidolia effects. TB