APOPHENIA, PAREIDOLIA, ACHEROPITES, ILLUSION, and HALLUCINATION
APOPHENIA is the tendency to see connections and relationships between two unrelated things or events. It's the tendency to see patterns where none exists. Confirmation bias (discussed in volume 1 of this series) is a type of apophenia. An example is a popular Yoruba saying that goes like:
"A witch screamed yesterday. The child died today. Don't you know it was the witch that killed and ate the child?"
It may be true (assuming witchcraft is real) but you need much more evidence to show that it wasn't a mere coincidence. He failed to pay his tithe last month but that was when his daughter fell ill. In reality, failure to pay tithes is unrelated to one's child falling sick but someone suffering from apophenia will erroneously connect the two events.
When apophenia is related to vision and sound, it is referred to as PAREIDOLIA. Pareidolia is the tendency to recognize non-existent patterns in images or sounds. As children, we believed there was a woman cuddling a baby in the moon. The shape looks like it but it's not it. When I was in UI, a student pastor said he was sure that God would use Africa to affect the whole whole world and that Nigeria would be the trigger point. If you look at the map of Africa, it looks like a pistol and Nigeria occupies the location of the gun trigger. This is pareidolia. People see human faces in trees, rocks, and clouds while people hear nonexistent words in regular sounds.
People look at the clouds, see something that looks like a winged creature, and conclude it must be an angel. Or if it looks like an old bearded man, they conclude it must be God. People do hear sentences in the chirping of birds. People put their two hands together to make a triangle (I remember Di Maria does this when he scores a goal) but to people suffering from pareidolia, this is a sign of Illuminati. Someone once played a 2 Pac's track backwards and heard "I am the Lucifer that fell from heaven". These are all instances of pareidolia.
Pareidolia may occur in other instances but it is commonly related to religious and paranormal beliefs. There's a whole Wikipedia article on the different scenarios where people saw different imageries that are of personal or religious meaning. People have recognized the faces of Virgin Mary and Jesus on different objects from rocks to sandwiches and water melon slices (never mind there was no photography when Mary and Jesus supposedly lived). Such cases have meanings like being the sign of the end of the world or God trying to tell humanity something.
Faces are particularly interesting. Science has confirmed that the eyes and the mouth are the most important things that register the face. Thus all you need to see a face anywhere is three spots arranged in a triangle. After all, this was how we invented emojis and emoticons. People who are suffering from pareidolia can easily pick faces that are not there.
It is also important to note that pareidolia may be transient or permanent. If it is transient (like clouds), only an individual or a few people will experience it while if it is permanent (like a rock or a tree), many people who are suffering from pareidolia will be able to experience it. This is how pareidolia leads crowds to a single site for worship.
In 2004, there was an Asian tsunami. On its satellite image, Muslims saw something that looked like "Allah" scripted in Arabic and thus they believed the tsunami was a punishment from Allah. In 2007, Hindus recognized, on a tree, the image of Hanuman, one of Hindu's deities. These things are regarded as miracles to the believers but to someone with a critical mind, they are instances of pareidolia.
Sometimes the image is not just an interpretation but a vivid image of the icon and it's believed to have been created, not with human hands, but miraculously. This is exclusive to Christianity though. Many examples of pictures and statues of Jesus and Mary exist all over the world and it is claimed that those things were not created by humans. The latest example happened in Ghana recently where a whole country worshipped a beautiful image of a cross in a rock. To anybody else, someone has gone to design the cross on the rock. To believers, the cross is a miracle. These images are called ACHEROPITES.
Don't confuse pareidolia with ILLUSION and HALLUCINATION. An illusion is an object that has the tendency to deceive the human visual sense. You are definitely looking at something but you're seeing something else. Almost everybody with a normal set of eyes and a functioning brain will be deceived equally. A hallucination is the perception of sight or sound that's totally nonexistent. Like someone hearing sounds in a perfectly quiet room or seeing someone standing in front of you when no one is in front of you. The only person that will be able to hear the sound or see the object is you. Pareidolia is seeing an image or pattern on an object or hearing a nonexistent sound from another sound. Illusions are expected to occur in perfectly normal people, hallucinations occur in people with serious mental illnesses or people under the influence of drugs, while pareidolia occurs in normal people who are suffering from the effects of beliefs or certain expectations.