What if a sinister alien could hijack one of our brain’s fundamental shortcuts in order to hide in plain sight? In Ryan North and Humberto Ramos’ Fantastic Four #4, that shortcut is pareidolia, a type of hyperactive pattern recognition our brains rely on. As a working cartoonist and an active skeptic, I’ve developed a special interest in pareidolia. My career depends on people experiencing it, and seeing simplified cartoons as recognizable faces. Pareidolia is also at the heart of so many bizarre, mysterious cases of mistaken identity, from seeing Elvis in a tortilla to imagining an ancient, alien civilization because of a “face” on Mars.
Combining the Greek words para, meaning “beside,” and eidolon, meaning “image” or “form,” pareidolia is explained most often as a shortcut in visual perception that leads our brains to interpret patterns out of noise, especially patterns that can be seen as faces. We see a knotty tree and it looks like a wise old man. Or the front of a car looks like a whimsical chrome smile with headlamp eyes. These examples are all visual, but auditory pareidolia is a thing, too, and if you want to have your mind blown on that, check out episode 105 of Brian Dunning’s Skeptoid podcast.
Like many functions (or malfunctions) of the brain, pareidolia is not yet fully understood. Though it doesn’t take much imagination to see how the tendency to pick patterns, especially faces, out of noise would grant a survival advantage to our ancestors, researchers today are looking deeper into how pareidolia works, and even its therapeutic applications. While a high rate of experiencing pareidolia can serve as a clinical marker for Lewy body dementia, psychologists have also linked it to divergent thinking and creativity.
Spoilers ahead for the story, “Basic Obedience,” but really, the cover is a bit of a spoiler right away, depicting the Fantastic Four’s extended family smiling unawares, in the grips of a tentacled alien creature. The only one who gets a slight “uh-oh” feeling from this toothy, malevolent blob is Alicia Masters-Grimm, the blind sculptor who’s married to the large, lovable, orange rock formation named Ben. The rest of the group sees “Jellybean” as an adorable miniature schnauzer, but that’s not how Alicia perceives it — at first.
Alicia touches Jellybean’s tentacle and recoils, saying the dog feels sticky and wet. But then her brain seems to do a reset and she thinks the adorable pooch is, well, an adorable pooch. Later that night, Alicia experiences some dissonance about her first impression. “Hypothetically, if there were a creature that looked scary, like really scary, but it wanted everyone to see it as something friendly and nonthreatening,” she asked Reed Richards, “how would it do that?”
This is great framing, a version of “how could this be faked?” — the question all skeptical investigators from James Randi on down have asked when they encounter something that appears impossible, miraculous, or paranormal. Reed’s answer, that such a being could do so by “hijacking pareidolia,” is a bit of a stretch on the face of it (no pun intended). No one looking at a face-like birdhouse and experiencing pareidolia honestly thinks it’s a real, actual face, so we have to suspend disbelief a little and assume these aliens have some serious brain-control powers. The story leads into an easily digestible explanation of what pareidolia is, bundled up with a few misconceptions.
Reed explains that a creature harnessing pareidolia would have “more trouble” controlling Alicia because she’s blind, but he doesn’t mention that her artistic occupation means she may in fact have a higher level of pareidolia than non-creatives. Artists have been ahead of the curve in recognizing pareidolia and using it as a tool. Long before German psychiatrist Karl Kahlbaum first mentioned “pareidolie” in his 1866 paper “On Delusion of the Senses,” the 11th century Chinese master Sung Ti was using silk draped over a dilapidated wall to jog his pattern recognition tendency into conjuring up men, birds, plants, and trees to paint. Leonardo da Vinci found similar inspiration in staring at rock formations, ashes, and clouds, encouraging artists to look upon these things and discern “various battles, and rapid actions of figures, strange expressions on faces, costumes, and an infinite number of things, which you can reduce to good, integrated form.”
To boldly associate my lowly carnival arts with these great masters, I’ll also add that we caricature artists often loosen up by drawing a few random, intersecting squiggle shapes then turning those into stretched, bizarre faces, an exercise I’ve always thought of as pareidolia push-ups.
Marvel Comics
One aspect of pareidolia I wish North had included was how once you see the face or some other pareidolia-induced form, it’s “impossible to unsee” it. Cognitive scientists like Ed Connor, the director of the Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins University, are trying to sort out how that happens, neurologically.
“What is the extra add-on in the brain that produces that ‘aha moment’ of seeing the face in there?” Connor asked in a 2024 article. “And then coincidentally, what changes in all that processing such that you will always see that again immediately? Something happens in your visual memory.”
For our heroes in blue, overcoming this sticky visual memory was as simple as turning on a “pareidolia inhibitor” Reed constructed overnight, and then saving the world from an army of ersatz miniature schnauzers was as simple as boosting the power. It left me wondering what side effects might occur if — even for a moment — pareidolia disappeared. Comic books, along with most artwork, would become indecipherable swirls of ink. Symbols over bathroom doors would be inscrutable. We could no longer recognize a loved one in a crowded room or at a distance. New parents would be unable to pick out family features in their baby’s face. Children pointing at clouds would find themselves more bored than amazed, and our world would get a bit less wondrous as we failed to see ourselves reflected in the beauty of nature around us.
Let’s hope Reed didn’t have to keep that pareidolia inhibitor powered up for long.
AIPT Science is co-presented by AIPT and the New York City Skeptics.
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