Pareidolia Games

‘If you cast your glance on any walls dirty with stains or rock formations of different types … you will be able to discover there diverse landscapes, adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, extensive plains, valleys, and hills. You can even see different battle scenes and movements made up of unusual figures, faces with strange expressions, and myriad things which you can transform into a complete and proper form.’ Treatise on Painting, Leonardo Da Vinci 

OK, but you want to improve your imagination without spending hours staring at a dirty wall? 

We can look for recognizable shapes in the clouds, or rocks, or stalagmites and stalactites in an underground cavern, or form mandalas from sensory data scrambled by ascetic privations or hallucinogenic excesses, or make pictures out of the iridescent rings that oil makes on a river, as they do on the Seine in Julio Cortazar’s game-filled novel, Hopscotch (1963).

We take pleasure in using our imagination to find order in disorder, which we have evolved to do to help our brains to cope with what would otherwise be information overload. Pareidolia is the innate tendency we have to recognize patterns, and reduce complex data to simpler forms. Taking it too far by reading too much meaning into patterns and links where there is none (apophany) has been linked to schizophrenia, and is the shaky territory of conspiracy theorists, religious zealots, gamblers and jealous lovers. The opposite tendency, not being able to recognize legitimate patterns and resisting reasonable conclusions from objective data (randomania) is the deceptively certain territory of deniers of all kinds (climate change, holocaust), skeptics and unknowing cuckolds.  

Somewhere in between is the beautiful para-science of synchronicity, an openness and alertness to ‘syncs’ which can enrich our individual and collective experience of a possibly meaningless universe.