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What happens when imagination meets perception, and ordinary objects come alive? We explore the science of pareidolia.
Summary: Our minds are wired to find meaning, even in randomness— which is why sometimes we can see faces and patterns in everyday objects. In this episode of The Science of Happiness, we explore how this phenomenon, called pareidolia, can shift how we experience our surroundings and open ourselves to more creativity, connection, and calm.
How To Do This Practice:
- Pause and settle: Take a few slow breaths and allow yourself to slow down. Let your mind soften its focus.
- Choose your space: Look around your home, your walk, or wherever you are. Everyday objects work best— walls, trees, clouds, shadows.
- Let curiosity lead: Notice shapes, textures, or patterns that catch your eye. Don’t try to find something, just observe.
- See what appears: Allow your imagination to play. Do you see a face, an animal, a tiny scene hidden in plain sight?
- Stay with it: Notice how it feels to find meaning in randomness. What emotions or memories come up?
- Reflect and return: Take a final look around. Does your space or the way you see the things around you feel any different now?
Today’s Guests:
MALIK MAYS is an Oakland-based musician who also releases music under the name Mahawam.
Learn more about Malik here:
ANTOINE BELLEMARE-PEPIN is a neuroscientist and artist, who researches the connection between pareidolia and creativity.
Learn more about Antoine here:
Related The Science of Happiness episodes:
The Healing Effects of Experiencing Wildlife:
Why Going Offline Might Save Us:
How To Tune Out The Noise:
Related Happiness Breaks:
Pause to Look at the Sky:
How To Ground Yourself in Nature:
Make Uncertainty Part of the Process:
Tell us about your experience with this practice. Email us at happinesspod@berkeley.edu or follow on Instagram @HappinessPod.
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Transcription:
MALIK MAYS: I allowed myself to take time to do something frivolous [laughs]. I walked around my house like a child looking for bugs or something. I was washing dishes, and I looked down, and there was a little bit of soap on the countertop, and I wiped the soap away, and I saw a face. I thought it maybe looked like a football player with their helmet off, but they had the shoulder pads on, but then it looked more like an astronaut that had taken their helmet off. Maybe they had just come home from a mission, or they were rehearsing for a mission. But there’s kind of like a shiny spot next to a dark spot that looked like it might be like a speech bubble for a little cartoon, and watching the reflections move back and forth in the light kind of gave it a sense of motion. And I wasn’t expecting that. It was just cleaning my house. And that was, that was really fun. It’s very freeing. Gives you something fun to do. And I think a lot of times people’s days are not necessarily fun, and this is a way for you to take some control over your time and engage yourself in play.
DACHER KELTNER: Have you ever looked into a cloud or a pattern in the wall and seen a face staring back at you? It’s called pareidolia, when our brains spot familiar patterns like faces or figures in random objects. Welcome to The Science of Happiness. I’m Dacher Keltner. Researchers say pareidolia may help prime our minds for creativity and understand more about diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. We’ll hear reflections from Oakland based musician Malik Mayes about trying pareidolia as a mindfulness practice.
MALIK MAYS: Even something as simple as a window, like a two paned window that became a cyclops.
DACHER KELTNER: And later, we’ll speak with neuroscientist and artist Antoine Bellmare-Pepin about his research on the connection between pareidolia and creativity.
ANTOINE BELLEMARE-PEPIN: I think this deep connection between creativity and nature and how pareidolia is just one door that opens us to this form of connection with nature where we reconnect with the myth and with the stories that are embedded in our environment.
DACHER KELTNER: Welcome back to The Science of Happiness. I’m Dacher Keltner, the ways our brains take in the world is surprisingly flexible. Seeing is not just about the eyes. Our brains, beliefs and experiences team up to build what we perceive. Sometimes we can see things in objects that aren’t really there, a phenomenon called pareidolia. For our show today, we’re joined by Oakland based musician Malik Mays. The music you’re hearing right now is theirs. Like a lot of us these days, Malik works from home, something that can make our space feel stale. So for our show, they tried pareidolia as a mindfulness practice. Malik, welcome to The Science of Happiness.
MALIK MAYS: Of course. Thank you for having me.
DACHER KELTNER: Tell us a little bit about your journey to becoming an artist.
MALIK MAYS: I have been playing music since I was about eight years old, I started with the violin. Played that through elementary school up through middle school and high school, and at the end of high school, I discovered that you could make music on a computer, and I never looked back from there. Right now I am writing a score to a VR dance performance by the artist cyberspace generating about 30ish minutes of dance floor oriented electronic music to kind of build a soundscape for utopian queer experience as an alternative to drag at the club. Music is more important now than I think it has ever been. I find it soothing in a way that is bigger than just me. And now, in light of the world being on fire, in many ways, I’m using it more as a means to explore safety,
DACHER KELTNER: Yeah.
MALIK MAYS: And my ability to generate a sense of safety.
DACHER KELTNER: Yeah, Patrick Savage, who studies the deep reasons why we create music is to form community and be strong and safe. You know, in times of oppression like this, it really comes into the focus. When I look at the mindfulness world, very often it goes inward. But when we go outward and look to forms and paintings and nature, and then in particular, when we start to sense the face, and a big part of our brain is devoted to understanding faces and seeing them and deriving comfort from them. And I’m curious, Malik like, why’d you choose this practice of all the things you could have done for our show?
MALIK MAYS: I spend most of my time at home. I work from home. I take classes from home. All of my hobbies are on the computer, so I’m just at home a lot. And I thought of it as being a way for me to kind of reinterpret the space that I spend so much time in, searching for faces, searching for figures, searching for character, in a space that, that I enjoy being in, but does sometime kind of feel a little bit what’s the word? What’s the word? Adversarial.
DACHER KELTNER: Or transactional or task oriented?
MALIK MAYS: Very much that task oriented. It kind of transformed my apartment for me in a way that I wasn’t really expecting. My partner is a really avid gardener. There are house plants. They’re everywhere. We have like a really beautiful, vibrant garden. But even so, because I spend so much time at home, it all feels a bit static after a while.
DACHER KELTNER: Yeah.
MALIK MAYS: And looking for the faces kind of revitalized my relationship to the space. It was difficult at first to find the faces, but as I found faces, I found more faces.
DACHER KELTNER: Wow, that’s fascinating. You know, our spaces around us become so human, in some sense or so alive. Can you walk us through the practice? How would you recommend your friends to do this? What would you say to them?
MALIK MAYS: So you take that deep breath, you look around, you find the pattern. You ask yourself, what is it that I’m actually seeing here? Are there any alternatives? Could this be more than one thing? And then you ask yourself, How does this make me feel that I have found this pattern, this caterpillar, this space, this rocket ship, whatever it is. How does it make me feel? Just give yourself a moment to look at the space around you and see how the chaos kind of organizes itself into patterns. I think if there’s a routine or a space that you spend a lot of time in, this would be a good way to free yourself from what could potentially be a very monotonous experience. Maybe you have an hour long commute every day and you kind of zone out, but it’s gonna allow you to tap into the experiences that you’re having, that you’re maybe filtering out, to engage with the world around you in a way that you’re probably not allowing yourself to in order to just move from point A to point B. It’s very freeing.
DACHER KELTNER: We know when you think about how important the face is. I mean, you come into the world and a baby’s looking at face most of the day. And you know, we know, with eye contact, you get oxytocin release, and we imitate smiles and laughs. It just becomes part of our emotional life to look at a face. When we see faces, there are large parts of the brain that are activated. It’s one of the most important things we look at, like the fusiform gyrus, and then also other regions of the brain that are involved in even when we see illusions of faces, like you, you know you’re not seeing a face literally, but just the patterns. And those parts of the brain are involved in, sort of almost like social communication, like understanding what people mean to me or saying to me, did these faces that you were seeing give you messages or things to reflect on?
MALIK MAYS: You know, I don’t know that I would say they necessarily spoke to me in that sense, but the stories that I was able to make up for them did. There’s some saw horses that we have in our driveway. It’s like a little makeshift workstation. And I’ve been looking at those saw horses for months, but doing this practice, all of a sudden they were handlebar mustaches, for you know, for a cowboy who was lounging in my driveway and being able to personify and anthropomorphize these objects. Those stories brightened up my day. It wasn’t just junk that was in the way anymore. It was someone who was smiling at me. You know, I was having a relationship with these objects that I didn’t have previously.
DACHER KELTNER: Pareidolia often involves seeing more masculine faces. And I’m just curious, you know, our way of looking at things comes out of our identities. I’m curious if you have reflections, given this historical moment about the relationship between queerness and this thing in pareidolia of seeing masculine faces.
MALIK MAYS: As a queer person myself, I would say that I’m experiencing more masculine faces when I’m experiencing pareidolia, I do tend to see men, more masculine oriented shapes. But I think what’s interesting is that I tend to see smiling figures. And I think we associate masculinity with stoicism, with seriousness, with violence, even, and we don’t expect men to smile. And I think it’s interesting that when I do see these masculine faces in a cloud or in a wooden fence, that it’s a smiling face, it’s a masculine figure that is expressing joy. I do think that there is. Maybe a queer sensibility about the experience of pareidolia. I think it’s what I want to see. I think it’s what I want men to be able to express. It’s what I want from them. I think, like I said, the stoicism is what’s expected of them. But what I personally want when I go out into the world and I meet a friend or a new acquaintance or a complete stranger, is I want to smile. I want the warmth.
DACHER KELTNER: Yeah, and do we ever need more joy from masculinity? Right now, studies show that this pareidolia experience and your examples illuminate this, just seeing figures and faces and patterns of things out in the world makes us creative. We get beyond what we see. Did you feel the experience with pareidolia influencing or weaving into your music?
MALIK MAYS: I would say yes, in the sense that it primed me to look for a pattern, so I was able to find them more readily than I would have if I was just starting from zero and having to get up to 60. Yeah, definitely. Prime the pump in a way.
DACHER KELTNER: That’s fascinating. Somebody might look at it and say, well, that’s frivolous. How do you think about that practice? What does it give to people today when we know we work too hard and the economic pressures are tough and the digital media kind of controls our time in some sense. What’s important about this?
MALIK MAYS: I think foremost, is that it allows you to create something that you don’t have to spend. I think we’re generally in our day to day lives, at work, even in our hobbies, which we have transformed to side hustles or whatever. We’re trying to build something that we can transform into money pretty much in all of our waking hours. And I think with a practice like this, you’re making something that is not currency, that you’re not trading for goods, you’re not trading for time. You’re making something for the purpose of making something, and it doesn’t have to be any more than that. It doesn’t have to have any further value than the fact that you made something and you enjoyed it. And I think that’s important. Engaging in this practice reminded me to slow down. I tend to move from task to task, trying to optimize my time so I can be as productive as possible. And while that’s fine, I think that there is an equal amount of value in moving slowly and allowing yourself to just kind of dally a little bit, have a moment for some fun to enjoy yourself. You don’t always have to be maxing, as the kids call it, now, you don’t have to be maxing all the time. You can just sit down for a moment and turn your bookshelf into teeth or whatever it is, you know, and that’s just as useful for recharging yourself. I think we all live very fast lives. Our phones are always barraging us with distractions, and it gave me a moment of rest in between intensive tasks where I’m doing a lot of thinking, making a lot of decisions, and giving myself these moments to walk around my house and see that a window looks like a cyclops gave my brain a break from having to be correct, having to be precise. I could see anything, you know, it’s just a granite countertop, and now there’s an astronaut in it, or whatever. But there was no wrong answer. And I think having an opportunity, even if it’s only for a few minutes or a few seconds, to not have to have the right answer is very freeing.
DACHER KELTNER: I’m almost tearing up over here. No, it’s so well put Malik Mays, thanks so much for being on our show,
MALIK MAYS: Of course. Thank you.
DACHER KELTNER: What does science tell us about the link between pareidolia and creativity?
ANTOINE BELLEMARE-PEPIN: It tells us as well that we construct our reality in some way. You know, that we have a power over what we perceive and that we can change that voluntarily and consciously.
DACHER KELTNER:
We’ll hear from Antoine Bellemare-Pepin, a neuroscientist who works at the intersection of creativity in the brain after a short break.
DACHER KELTNER: Welcome back to The Science of Happiness. I’m Dacher Keltner. Pareidolia is a phenomenon that many of us have probably experienced, and it goes at least as far back to an ancient astrologers saw stars through the lens of pareidolia, creating a world of myths and stories through constellations. Antoine Bellemare-Pepin is an artist and researcher, someone who is curious about how neuroscience helps us understand perception. His lab studied pareidolia. Showing people images and asking them to come up with as many shapes and forms as they could.
ANTOINE BELLEMARE-PEPIN: So if you see a face, you see a cat, you see a dragon, anything that you can identify in these images, and you try to find the highest number of these meaningful forms in the images.
DACHER KELTNER: These images had a high fractal dimension, which basically means they had a lot of repeating patterns. Imagine a broccoli crown. If you cut one of the stems off, it looks like a mini version of itself. We’re surrounded by fractal images all the time, but there’s one place in particular where we tend to find a lot of them.
ANTOINE BELLEMARE-PEPIN: When we walk in nature, trees have fractal structures. When you look at almost anything that come up from nature, it’s made of fractal structures.
DACHER KELTNER: After viewing these images and talking about what they saw, participants were asked to come up with a list of 10 words that have zero association with one another.
ANTOINE BELLEMARE-PEPIN: And this task is super simple, but can be highly complex as well, because if I tell you I don’t know, like hummus, fire and entropy and then, oh, actually, entropy and fire are somewhat related.
DACHER KELTNER: This task was a way to measure creativity.
ANTOINE BELLEMARE-PEPIN: Then we show a really high correlation with the propensity to find meaningful pattern in ambiguous images. This means, like in other words, if you’re highly creative, you’re able to experience pareidolia in more complex or more ambiguous images.
DACHER KELTNER: And neuroscience shows us that there’s a part of our brain that helps us recognize faces really fast, the fusiform face area, or FFA.
ANTOINE BELLEMARE-PEPIN: The area in the brain that is activated when you perceive faces will be activated when you experience pareidolia.
DACHER KELTNER: Antoine’s work shows creativity is not just about making things. It’s about our ability to work with ambiguity and seeing things in new ways, revealing our own powers of perception.
ANTOINE BELLEMARE-PEPIN: And what neuroscience tell us now is that our perception is not only a bottom up phenomenon, it’s not only a passive phenomenon. We’re filtering information. There’s a bunch of different subconscious decisions that are taken in our brain when we receive information before we get to conscious experience. So simple example is, if I have different beliefs about the world, definitely this will change the way I will experience the world and the type of information I will focus on. So in the same visual scene, depending on what is my background or what is your background, we will not attend to the same element in the signal, while actually the information that come into our brain might be the same.
DACHER KELTNER: Our brains don’t just receive information from the world. They help create what we see.
ANTOINE BELLEMARE-PEPIN: When we’re studying neuroscience, this is really important, because we’re trying to understand how perception emerged from our interaction with the world. I think it matters, because it tells us as well that we construct our reality in some way. You know, that we have a power over what we perceive and that we can change that voluntarily and consciously. It opens the door to, okay, I’m not just a passive viewer, like if I’m in a certain environment, I have no control over that environment, and no actually, you can change your way of seeing the world, and this is the lens that you put in front of you when you see the world.
DACHER KELTNER: Earlier in the show, Malik talked about how practicing pareidolia gave them a way to take control over their time, infusing fun and wonder into daily life, but it also renewed their perception of their environment, and that’s something we can all tap into.
ANTOINE BELLEMARE-PEPIN: I think that anything can be learned. So definitely, some people might have a higher propensity to experience pareidolia naturally, but I think for a lot of people, they’re just not aware that pareidolia is something that this mechanism of interacting with ambiguity. So I think that from the moment you learn about it, and then if you seek pareidolia, you will find it. You know, it’s just, I think, an effort to put of like in the really the best way of doing it is in nature.
DACHER KELTNER: The experience of pareidolia, especially in nature, is connected to the experience of awe. We think of nature as being wild, but it has a remarkable way of showing us symmetry, complex patterns and meaning.
ANTOINE BELLEMARE-PEPIN: When you walk in nature and you find a tree that looks like a dragon, I mean, you can tell yourself, Oh, that’s funny. Look, there’s a tree that looks like a dragon, but you can also go a step further and say, Okay, there’s a story behind it. There’s like, there’s the spirit of the dragon in the forest and so on. And I think this is how, also, indigenous people are experiencing their connection to nature through these different signs and through this way of speaking with nature in some way. And I think pareidolia is a door towards that.
DACHER KELTNER: Next time on our show, we’ll talk about forgiveness, how we can do it, and why it could be good for us.
Speaker: I don’t want people to feel like they’re being coerced to forgive in some way. What we find is that very often, people naturally forgive when they experience a sense of restoration and reconciliation.
DACHER KELTNER: Thanks for joining us on The Science of Happiness. Our research assistants are Emily Brower and Dasha Zerboni. Our producer is Truc Nguyen. Our sound designer is Jennie Cataldo of Accompany Studios. Our executive producer is Shuka Kalantari. I’m Dacher Keltner. Have a great day.
