Pareidolia

Understanding Pareidolic Illusions

Pareidolia is a normal phenomenon (especially in children) that does not disappear when attention is focused, and the images are recognized as unreal by the individual.

Pareidolia occurs in a considerable proportion of normal people. It may also be provoked by psychomimetic drugs. Typically, images are seen from shapes in pareidolic illusion.

Pareidolic illusions are created out of sensory percepts by an admixture with imagination. The percept takes on a full and detailed appearance:

The person experiencing it, like someone seeing a photograph, knows that it is not truly there as an object but that it is pictorial. However, s/he cannot dismiss what s/he sees.

Completion and affect illusions occur during inattention; they are banished by attention, which will, if anything, increase the intensity of pareidolic illusions as they become more intricate and detailed.

Pareidolic illusion occurs in children more than in adults. It should be distinguished from the following conditions:

• Functional hallucination, which occurs when a certain percept is necessary for the production of a hallucination, but the hallucination is not a transformation of that perception. For example, the patient hears voices when the tap is turned on; he hears voices in the running water, but the voices and the noise of water are quite distinct and can be heard separately and synchronously like any other voice that is heard against a background noise. The perception of hearing running water is necessary to produce the hallucination, but the hallucination is not transformation of that perception.

• Perceptual misinterpretation, that is, simply making a mistake as to the nature of perception without that perception being particularly influenced by emotion mixed with fantasy.
• Fantastic interpretations or elaborate daydreaming can be very similar to pareidolic illusions and, as we have already discussed, there is a large admixture of fantasy in such illusions.