I love pareidolia, the psychological effect where we see faces in otherwise random or meaningless patterns. You know: It’s when people see the face of Jesus in wood grain or the Virgin Mary in a reflection. It’s also when you see birds or dragons or faces in clouds—any time this happens.
It’s usually just a fun thing, but sometimes it can be pretty startling. The other day I walked into my bathroom and was freaked out for a moment when I saw the luminous apparition of a woman leering at me:
Photo by Phil Plait
Seriously, for a split second this got a good reaction from me. The nerve impulses from my eyes triggered the lizard part of my brain, which has way faster reflexes than the higher elitist functions of my cerebrum.
After all, it really looks like a pair of eyes and a mouth with a slightly whimsical cant. The tilt and shape of the eyes struck me as feminine, too. All together, it’s quite a strong pareidolically shaped circumstance.
Once I saw what it really was, I immediately wondered what the source was. The flat mirror you can see on the table in the picture was clearly involved in this, but what were the light sources? The lights over my sink were on, but a quick experiment in eclipsing them didn’t affect the saucy woman’s expression one bit. Then the scientist part of my brain kicked in: I looked at the angles, did a little back tracking, and it became clear that the culprits were the recessed can lights in the bathroom ceiling.
Photo by Phil Plait
Photo by USC/via Smithsonian
I held the camera near the mirror, pointed toward them, to take that shot. As you can see, the arrangement is the same, and again a quick experiment blocking them showed clearly they were the source of this photonic face.
My wife and I got a good chuckle out of this, and never ones not to share the science, we called for our daughter to come see. She took one look and laughed, and then exclaimed, “It looks like the cover of The Great Gatsby!” She had just read the book, and I have to admit, she’s right.
I don’t think there is any great and profound insight to be had from this resemblance; it’s just coincidence. Perhaps people more prone to faith are more likely to glean messages from these circumstances. I strongly suspect that’s why pareidolia so commonly leads to witnessing religious icons.
But I can’t know this for sure. As Gatsby himself said, after all, “Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.”
Related Posts:
Hubble Spies a Space Invader
Dragon Fight in the Heart of Orion (a personal favorite)
Grow a Pareidolia
Skull Flower (this one’s amazing)
