Monday 🌕 OT - Tell Me What You See

Tonight's a great night to take lousy pictures of the full moon on your phone. (Just try and explain that last sentence to your childhood self) Let's talk about apophenia, or specifically pareidolia, which is a subcategory of apophenia.

from r/pareidolia - probably my fave reddit if I had to choose https://www.reddit.com/r/Pareidolia/comments/14e9w3e/has_anyone_posted_the_racecar_tree_yet/

Basically apophenia can be simply defined as the tendency to find significant patterns and meaning from random data. The larger the amount of data, the easier to establish a semblance of pattern. You see it in economic forecasts and conspiracy theories. Global predictions and brainwashing. Palm reading, astrology, phrenology, etc. Most likely it's linked to our survival instincts, depending on how seriously you take evolutionary psychology. From the wiki article, "There Is a Sanity Klaus":

The term[...] was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia.^[2] He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness".

I think "unmotivated" is the important part. You can't help it if you're suffering a mental illness. I mean. I'm really good at it, and it helps when I'm figuring out text or art, but I know when to draw the line and discontinue a false line of inquiry. Less capable are Q and MAGA cultists, paranoid schizophrenics. 

But that's enough about apo-whatever. There are thousands of articles on the web. Let's find cool examples of pareidolia, the visual aspect:

And of course the man in the moon, which doesn't carry into all cultures:

When I was small I had a dresser which looked fine in the day, but at night the wood grain turned into a sinister image. At some point I was so upset by it I scratched it off with a pen knife and got in trouble. Didn't matter. The face remained. Looked a bit like this in the moonlight, but I can only see it with my eyes closed now. When I open them, the image is gone. It's a poor representation, but it's the best I can do:

Spot anything weird and inexplicable in the wild lately? Tell me about it and the rest of your day too.