Word for the Day: Pareidolia

Tuesday, 7 May, 2013

I came across the word Pareidolia at 500px yesterday which I didn’t know, so looked it up on Wikipedia. This is what it had to say:

a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant…. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon or the Moon rabbit, and hearing hidden messages on records when played in reverse.

Perhaps one of the most famous remote sensing examples (below) is the face on Mars….. we’ve all seen them and the WIkipedia page has some great examples.



<img src=”https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Martian_face_viking_cropped.jpg” width=300 align=center”>

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