By Aditya Shukla, Psychologist, Cognition Today, EdTech Consultant
By Aditya Shukla, Psychologist, Cognition Today, EdTech Consultant
Pareidolia
We see faces & human forms in innocent stimuli. This tree ant nest for example.
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Examples
Jesus in a cloud.
Shiva in a cappuccino. Ghosts in a furniture corner with differently shaded objects.
Smiling cars.
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Apophenia
The larger phenomenon is Apophenia - we tend to find patterns in meaningless and neutral arrangements of stimuli.
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Interpretation
Our brains are wired to find patterns. Our brain also has neurons dedicated to finding patterns similar to human faces, the human body, natural objects like trees, etc. It's an interpretation game.
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Ambiguity
Ambiguous cues (dim lighting), eye-mouth arrangement, etc., are interpreted based on the meaningful templates we have already acquired. And the Face templetate is a powerful template to patternize stimuli.
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Metaphors & Analogies
The same circuitry helps us come up with great analogies and metaphors, too.
Read more for "neural re-use"
the whole idea behind the question "What is meaning?" comes down to something as simple as recognizing a relevant pattern. Then, it's only a question of how complex the pattern is.