Time Created: December 2006
Have you heard about pareidolia?
It is, in many ways, an artists best friend.
Our brains, as part of how we interpret the visual data our eyes give us, keep comparing any and all shapes we see to ones we already know. If you’ve seen one apple, you recognize the next. There’s a lot of wiggle room in that interpretation, as well. It’s useful to be able to tell that apple is an apple, even if it’s larger than the first one. Or colored green, or perhaps a bit of an odd shape. But this does lead to errors. Something that mostly looks like an apple, but green, larger, and in a different shape? It might just be a pear.
Those errors are a large part of what makes art possible. Our brains keep comparing shapes, and those two dots and a curved line can all of a sudden become a face. Wouldn’t you agree? 
This means, rather than having to have photo-realism for everything, we can explore variations. Simplify forms down to the key recognition points, lengthen some aspects, shorten others, the list goes on and on. And each variation carries with it advantages that give it a place. A simplified human form is far easier to animate than a photo-realistic one; that fact alone caused several whole genres of entertainment to come into being. And that’s just the beginning of the power of pareidolia.
So if I tell you this fanciful arrangement of circles and loops is a bird, would you believe me?
