ALGORITHMIC PAREIDOLIA

From Paradise Lost, 1667“The mind in its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven”.

There is an inherent human desire to find patterns amongst randomness. This phenomenon is categorized as Pareidolia.

The word derives from the Greek words pará (παρά, "beside, alongside, instead [of]") and the noun eídōlon (εἴδωλον, "image, form, shape"). [1]

According to Joel Voss, a cognitive neuroscientist at Northwestern University, Chicago, it is believed to be a side effect of evolutionary biology:

"Although we see the world as this very structured, object-containing environment, it's really just a bunch of random lines and shapes and colors," he said. "The reason why it's so easy to see meaningful things in nonsense shapes is that those nonsense shapes have a lot of the same features as meaningful things." [2]

Perhaps due to the self-importance and ego of humans, we utilise this methodology extensively when training Machine Learning models in the conquest of attaining ‘Computer Vision’. [3]

This work explores whether this intrinsic human yearning to distinguish visual patterns is merely a biological side effect of evolutionary survival, or whether by the mere act of assigning meaning to the images we believe to see; we create our own justifiable connotation and importance.

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