What you see and what you get

The next time someone says you have your head in the clouds and they don’t mean it in a good way, smile cheerfully and tell them you do, and they should try it. Maybe not while crossing the street or operating heavy machinery, but they should.

There exists, to this day, an unfortunate, woodgrain-type laminate on an old cupboard in the ancestral home. I have feared it all my life. I do not believe my parents looked at it and thought, “Ah, what a fine thing with which to torture our girls.” It scared the bejesus out of me nonetheless.

Ages ago, I told somebody that I used to know about the horror cupboard. It didn’t come up in the context of childhood trauma, but rather in the way in which we were not very bored as children. She told me about life with neighbours and bikes, skateboards and hiking and all that good stuff.

I too did stuff. Honest.

But. But one of the things I really liked to do was look at patterns. That’s how the cupboard came up. I was saying I could look at clouds or tiles, rocks or the light on glass and see patterns and I could do that all day. I still do.

She said it was amazing I could still do it. She thought everyone lost the ability to see things like that – to imagine like that – when they were still young. And then it was my turn to be surprised. How would that happen? And why? And would you want it to? And if so, why? Don’t you want to look at the clouds and see an alligator?

It’s called pareidolia. Para as in “beside, alongside, instead.” The rest of the word is about shape or form. It’s all Greek to me.

Pareidolia is how people end up seeing religious figures in a piece of toast (a lot of religious figures end up on toast) or in the bark of a tree. If you’ve spent enough time looking up at clouds (or down, say, if you’re on a long dull flight) have you really not seen shapes, patterns, still life with fruit?

Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum is said to be the first person to start slinging the term around. He used it in his 1866 blockbuster On Delusions of the Senses. I’m absolutely paraphrasing here, but he seems to have cast it in the light of what I categorise roughly as “not too good.” The “you must not be sane,” and “you be seeing things” variety of not good. Harsh words like “imperfect perception” may have been used.

Now, you can see immediately how this is much worse than earlier this week, when I was washing my face with my glasses on and thought: Oh my God, I look like Robert Downey Jnr. In Oppenheimer.

In my case, lack of sleep, the tyranny of cats, and the sudden discovery that my frames and my bathroom décor blended to camouflage perfection, somehow made me the stuff of the bad guy in a movie about a more famous bad guy (all oversimplifications acknowledged).

But what Karl was saying was when we see shapes and patterns, it’s because something is wrong with the way we do our thinking. He was going somewhere with that, but he’s not going there today. (Pareidolia is not next door to dementia.)

Happily for me and other pattern-lovers, cool people, before and after Karl, thought sunnier thoughts about pareidolia and were not fazed when someone identified a teddy bear on the surface of Mars (real: March 2023). Pareidolia can happen with sound as well. I need so much time to investigate what this means about my overactive tendency to mishear song lyrics and conversations.

An article in Psyche magazine talks about da Vinci describing walls covered with stains or perhaps flecked with stones, and saying if we looked at them for long enough, we were sure to see mountains and streams and trees.

Some tests measure creativity according to how much you see and what you see when given a set of images. An important note they make is that people with some mental conditions see more, some see fewer.

Mr Rorschach of the Rorschach test gave us the opportunity to focus our attention on patterns and look for things. I know a lot of people think it’s just a blob, and think it’s a waste of time. Including many clinicians.

But forget not, some of us can look at the plastering on walls and see the whole blinking market. And I don’t know if that’s bad.

Remember to talk to your doctor or therapist if you want to know more about what you read here. In many cases, there’s no single solution or diagnosis to a mental health concern. Many people suffer from more than one condition.