Have you seen the rabbit on the moon? Maybe an old lady?
We have now landed on the dark side of the moon and have come a long way from believing in such folk tales. Yet we cannot help but see patterns on the moon if we look for them.
Our brain is wired to find patterns and meanings in random things. The human brain is constantly scanning the environment for patterns. This helps us to make sense of the world around us and to make predictions about what might happen next. This is a survival mechanism that helps us to make sense of our environment and to anticipate danger. When we see something that looks like a face, for example, our brains automatically try to make sense of it by interpreting it as a potential threat or ally. Even if that face is made of random garbage.
We used to think that the brain was creating an approximation of the real world based on our sensory stimulus. But new experiments suggest that the brain is creating a simulation of our internal and external world, a kind of controlled hallucination, based on what it thinks it should be, rather than what it is. Then it uses the real-time data from our sense organs to check for errors or deviations from the model and update the model. The model is still biased by what the brain expects the model to be.
The brain is not trying to make a perfect model of the real world, but a predictive model that is useful enough for us to survive. It is not creating the model or expectation based on sensory input, but trying to match the sensory input to the expected model. There is a huge difference between the two. Brains that made models that were not useful, no matter how realistic, were eliminated by natural selection.
So, the way we perceive the world is more biased by our prejudices and stereotypes … the same input would be interpreted differently by different people…. This is true not only for subjective things like morality, likes and dislikes, but everything, including colour and shape.
It is natural for people to see a spaceship in a temple as in the picture. This is called Pareidolia, a psychological phenomenon in which people perceive familiar patterns in random or ambiguous stimuli.
Our experiences, beliefs, and expectations can all influence the way we see the world. If we are expecting to see a pattern, we are more likely to see it, even if it is not there.
Here are some examples of pareidolia:
• Seeing a face in a cloud
• Seeing animals in rocks
• Seeing religious symbols in everyday objects
• Seeing a hidden message in a song or poem
• Seeing a conspiracy theory in a series of unrelated events
Other examples for finding meaning in ambiguous things.
• Apophenia: This is the tendency to see connections between unrelated events or things. For example, you might believe that a series of random coincidences is a sign of something more meaningful.
• Conspiracy theories: These are beliefs that a secret group of people is controlling events or manipulating the world in some way. Conspiracy theories often rely on apophenia and pareidolia to create the illusion of meaning where there is none.
While it is important to be aware of our tendency to see patterns and meaning in things that are not real, it is also important to remember that this is a natural part of being human.
Pattern recognition is essential for many different cognitive tasks, such as language understanding, object recognition, and social interaction.
Our brains are wired to find patterns and to make sense of the world around us. We have a cognitive bias to prefer meaningful explanations as per our brains stimulated model, over randomness or uncertainty that do not fit the model, and we use our imagination and creativity to fill in the gaps.
This can be a helpful tool, but it can also lead us to believe things that are not true. It is important to be critical of our own beliefs and to be open to the possibility that we might be wrong.
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