Developing Critical Thinking - Seeing Patterns Where there are None [Video]

In this video I talk about pareidolia, or our tendency to find or see patterns where there are none. I drive my inspiration from the 'face on Mars' conspiracy.

In 1976 the Viking spacecraft sent a few interesting images from the Cydonia martian region, one of them resembling a human face. Many started building wild theories around those images. 20 years later, other spacecrafts sent images of the same region and...voila, the face was gone. As it turns out, there was never a face, but an interesting formation created by natural forces plus the light effects coming from the sun.

In any case, my point is that we should catch ourselves in the act, at the moment we begin falling prey to pareidolia. It is one of the first steps to overcome this biased tendency and one of the strategies to improve our psyche.

Previous in this series:

1. Baloney Detection - Part 1 [Video]
2. Baloney Detection - Part 2 [Video]
3. Baloney Detection - Part 3 [Video]
4. Baloney Detection - Part 4 [Video]
5. Baloney Detection - Part 5 [Video]
6. Baloney Detection - Part 6 [Video]
7. Developing Critical Thinking - The Hindsight Bias [Video]

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Cristi Vlad, Self-Experimenter and Author