Please read the packet at your table!

Brain Functions:

PERCEPTION

1. Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by turning the raw input of the senses into meaningful experience.

2. Sensory processing is "hardwired" into the brain, with the different senses processed in different brain regions.

Smell ------>

^ll

Hearing

<-----Sight

<------Touch

3. However, brain processing short-cuts and errors can result in misinterpretations of reality!

What is this?

In the Stone Age, assuming ambiguous stimuli had meaning and intent resulted in increased survival &

reproduction

4. Humans' brains evolved very strong pattern-seeking tendencies, especially for faces and animal shapes.  (Why these in particular?)

       

Pareidolia:(pa-ree-DOE-lia)a type of illusion or misperception involving a ambiguous stimulus being perceived as something clear and distinct.

Some pareidolia is sort of famous, like these of devils in the smoke of the burning World Trade

Center on 9/11

The "Face on Mars" got everyone stirred up in the 70's and sold a lot of books relating the "facts" of Martian civilization.

These pictures show that your brain finds more meaningful images when it has less information to go on. The picture on the left was taken with a low resolution camera in 1976, while the one on the right was taken with a higher resolution camera in 2006. Blur your vision and look at the 2006 photo. Look familiar?

1976 2006

This grilled cheese sandwich sold for $28,000 on Ebay because it supposedly contains the face of the Virgin Mary.

1930's German-American movie star Marlene Dietrich.

toast Virgin

Some pareidolia is just plain cool.

Audio pareidolia and priming

Misperception can also occur from your brain combining information

from two or more senses. 

This is called "The McGurk Effect"

http://youtube.com/v/A_B5UrI7nAI

http://youtube.com/v/EL3VYnbgL0I