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Satellite photograph of a mesa in the Cydonia region of Mars, often called the "Face on Mars" and cited as evidence of extraterrestrial habitation. Pareidolia (/ ˌ p ær ɪ ˈ d oʊ l i ə, ˌ p ɛər-/; [1] also US: / ˌ p ɛər aɪ-/) [2] is the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one detects an object, pattern, or ...
Haidinger's brush is a very subtle bowtie or hourglass shaped pattern that is seen when viewing a field with a component of blue light that is plane or circularly polarized. It's easier to see if the polarisation is rotating with respect to the observer's eye, although some observers can see it in the natural polarisation of sky light. [1]
Apophenia (/ æ p oʊ ˈ f iː n i ə /) is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. [1]The term (German: Apophänie from the Greek verb: ἀποφαίνειν, romanized: apophaínein) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia. [2]
The left and right eye see different, seemingly random, dot patterns; a person viewing through both eyes sees a combination of both left and right visual field disturbances. While seeing the phenomenon, lightly pressing inward on the sides of the eyeballs at the lateral canthus causes the movement to stop being fluid and the dots to move only ...
Sometimes there is synesthesia; many people report seeing a flash of light or some other visual image in response to a real sound. Proprioceptive effects may be noticed, with numbness and changes in perceived body size and proportions, [ 15 ] feelings of floating or bobbing as if their bed were a boat, and out-of-body experiences . [ 16 ]
However, it is also accessible to people involved in deep concentration for long periods of time. When lying down at night and closing the eyes, right before sleep or just before waking up, the complex motion of these patterns can become directly visible without any great effort thanks to hypnagogic hallucination.
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The phenomenon was first described by Francis Galton in 1880 in a statistical study about mental imagery. [2] Galton wrote: To my astonishment, I found that the great majority of the men of science to whom I first applied, protested that mental imagery was unknown to them, and they looked on me as fanciful and fantastic in supposing that the words "mental imagery" really expressed what I ...