Our brains are very good at seeing what they believe they should see but we’re not so great at seeing what’s actually there.
If you watch the video you’ll notice that you can’t help slipping back into ‘seeing’ whole people where there are only halves. You know that this is simply a clever example of default human perceptual mechanisms but you won’t be able to help it. It’s how our brains work.
It’s simply unrealistic for our brains to consciously consider every piece of information received every minute of the day. Our brains thus seek patterns and when we see something which represents a part of a familiar pattern, our brains merely join the dots and fill the gaps. This is how this particular illusion works.
But why do we see faces in clouds?
httpss://youtu.be/1hdi-dFd_nQ
The brain can’t bear chaos. It’s like a Sergeant with OCD. It demands that things take an orderly shape. So when we see an example of randomness our brains scramble to make sense of it. it’s a process called ‘pareidolia’ and is one of the most interesting concepts in psychology, in my opinion.
It could save your life one day. How else would you spot that leopard in the grass? Your brain seeks to identify patterns even when they’re not there. That’s why arachnophobes jump out of their skins when they see a black smudge on a wall out of the corner of an eye.
Pareidolia is a fantastic thing but it hasn’t always worked in my favour. I once attempted to demonstrate the effects of pareidolia in a presentation, utilizing all manner of phallic innuendo: visual, verbal and so on. I carefully explained the process through which they turned my innocent use of a banana and squirty cream into a phallic object and a sexual ‘event’ and still a handful of them voted me down. Bah! More fool them! They prove my next point.
Believe what you want to believe! See what you want to see!
httpss://youtu.be/m6a2Qtu3728
The tube is going both ways!
Oh no it’s not, it’s only going in one direction. Say what you like, only one direction of travel is actually taking place.
However, some people spend their entire lives telling themselves that their perception is unalterably true. Those people who come to see me for hypnotherapy in Vancouver spend their lives like this.
They see the world in their unique way and it either works for them or they adapt their lives in order to live around the distortion.
An agoraphobe may, therefore, build a life lived entirely indoors, safe from the outside world. The outside world is scary and impossibly dangerous, after all. For as long as that way of living remains tenable, the illusion stays unchallenged and, indeed, strengthens over time.
