Seeing religious figures on toast and other food items has spawned a bit of an industry, with few stopping to even consider that they don't know what Jesus may have actually looked like. It is highly unlikely that he would have looked like an Italian youth with blonde hair and blue eyes, as many Italian painters of the Renaissance seemed to think. And it is equally unlikely that a picture of him would appear on a piece of factory-produced bread.
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| A rock that appears like a face |
Carl Sagan saw pareidolia as providing an evolutionary advantage related to differentiating a friend from enemy. Psychology has made use of pareidolia with the Rorschach inkblot test, where the patient is asked to interpret "ambiguous designs" and the psychologist accesses the personality of the patient based on what the patient claims to see. Thankfully, this flunky practice is dying out.
Some extremely wacky and embarrassing things have also resulted from paradolia. For example, Chonosuke Okamura, a twentieth-century Japanese palaeontologist claimed that he had discovered ancient fossils showing "mini-species" of animals ranging from humans to dinosaurs, which were each less than 0.25 mm in length. He then claimed that: "There have been no changes in the bodies of mankind since the Silurian period ... except for a growth in stature from 3.5 mm to 1,700 mm."[6][7]. Okamura had looked at his fossil specimens under the microscope and also seen, "Two totally naked homos, facing each other, are moving their hands and feet harmoniously. We can only think of dancing in a present-day style."
Oh my! Some people will simply believe anything!
Books To Read
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, by Carl Sagan - learn critical and skeptical thinking.
