The Word Pareidolia comes from the Greek ‘Para’ – beside, with or alongside, and ‘eidos’ meaning image, form or shape. Pareidolia is the term used to describe the psychological phenomena involving a vague and random stimulus, typically a sound or image, being perceived as significant.

Pareidolia is a type of Apophenia – a term coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined Apophenia as ‘Unmotivated seeing of connections accompanied by a specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness’.

Simulacra, (from the Latin Simulacrum which means ‘Likeness, similarity”) is the term used to describe ‘A representation of another thing, such as a statue or painting, esp. of a god’ and therefore refers to an object or likeness that has been deliberately created to resemble something else.

Pareidolia include EVP or electronic voice phenomena. In 1971, Klaus Raudive wrote ‘Breakthrough’, detailing the discovery of EVP, which is described as auditory Pareidolia, as indeed is ‘backmasking’ in popular music. Typical examples of visual Pareidolia include ‘seeing’ the shapes of animals in clouds and faces in orbs and other random objects
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Carl Sagan hypothesized that humans have the ability to identify the human face from birth, and there is evidence to suggest an innate tendency to pay attention to faces from infancy and by two months of age the child’s face perception skills have developed to such a degree that specific areas of the brain, namely the fusiform gyri and lesser temporal gyri are activated by viewing faces.

The face is an important site for the identification of others and conveys significant social information, such as moods etc. which suggests our ability to recognize faces from such a young age is part of our fight or flight system.

This ‘Hard-Wired’ ability allows us to use basic details to recognize faces from a distance and in poor visibility, but can also lead us to misinterpret random images or patterns of light and shade as faces.

A common theme of Pareidolia is the perception of iconic religious imagery in ordinary objects, most commonly the image of Jesus, The Virgin Mary and the word ‘Allah’, although the simplicity of letter forms in the Arabic alphabet, and the flexibility in Islamic calligraphy (and the particular shape of the word Allah’) make it easy to read into many formations of parallel lines and lobes on a common base.