What does it mean when people see faces of Jesus or the Mother Mary in random stuff?

Question

Is this a form of insanity?
Is it dangerous?
I mean, even I have seen faces or partial facial patterns in puddles, in wood of furniture, or in clouds… but I never thought they were real.
Why do our brains do that?

Answer 1

There is no intrinsic “meaning” to these visions. They are caused by a natural and necessary tendency to recognize faces. It is a genetic trait, passed on to all surviving generations that is part of survival and hence, evolution.

It usually is NOT dangerous and usually does not indicate mental derangement.
It has a name too!

Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness".

If you ever notice certain numbers that seem to show up repeatedly during the day, or if you buy a new car and suddenly notice many of the same model car… THAT is Apophenia.

Pareidolia is a type of Apophenia involving the finding of images or sounds in random stimuli.

People who see faces in clouds, smoke, wood grain or other random stuff, are experiencing Pareidolia.

Usually, this is a benign side-effect of human pattern recognition.

Humans need pattern recognition to survive and evolve.

There is no question, (at least among those who know the facts) that evolution is real. Obviously, we need the ability to recognize faces for our survival. That ability, like most survival traits, is specialized and over-developed to a degree. When we see faces in places where there are no faces, just random spaces, that over-developed ability can lead to strange beliefs and behaviors.

Curiously, the only people who try to make lame arguments that evolution is not real, are the same ones who find faces of religious icons in wood grain, window reflections or even (and I’m NOT kidding) a cheese sandwich.

Yes, that’s right. There is a famous toasted cheese sandwich that some people believe shows the face of the Blessed Mother of Jesus; Mary. ( it was even auctioned on EBay for thousands of dollars. I seem to recall a casino owner bought it with his winning bid of about twenty thousand…)

Christians crazies seem to think that these visions have some significance, although no one can say WHY Mary’s face has any significance, or what that significance might be. This is pareidolia of the BAD kind. It is not benign and it is dangerous. Believing that it has meaning definitely IS a form of insanity.
It is curious that ONLY Christians see Christian icons, and that ONLY Muslims see Islamic Icons… Maybe they don’t eat enough cheese sandwiches?

Instead of simply recognizing that they are recognizing patterns, and that this pattern recognition is a crucial skill that promotes survival and evolution, religiosos believe they are ACTUALLY seeing something. Then they set about trying to convince gullible ignorant fearful brainwashed idiots that these images are meaningful and not random. They try to impose their personal insanity on others.

Stupid people do not comprehend the nature of randomness or the laws of probability. Because they WANT to believe, they choose to believe these things have meaning.

They can’t understand that, given enough time or enough samples of any particular thing (like a toasted cheese sandwich) sooner or later there must be some kind of image in those numerous things.

They can’t understand that water vapor from a sprinkler system will refract prismatic colors from mirrored glass windows and that the curvature of that glass may (from certain angles) look like a hooded woman, i.e., the virgin Mary.

They can’t understand that if you listen to random noise or nonsense sounds (like white noise or backward recordings) your brain will try to make sense of it by constructing patterns, even though those patterns are purely coincidental.

Here’s another important correlation they apparently can not or refuse to see..
…Any deity that would choose to “prove” his existence through such trivial contrivances, must himself be trivial and contrived.

Search Google video for “Michael Shermer, why people believe weird things.” You can find a short video of him at the TED talks, debunking several common myths, including some the pattern recognition myths perpetuated by religious nuts.

Pattern recognition IS important.
It is also very important to realize why we have pattern recognition;
…to enhance the probability of our survival.

Therefore, it is absolutely crucial to know when the patterns are real, or just the product of an over-active evolutionary trait. When people fail to understand this phenomenon, they can believe ridiculously weird things, (superstitions, i.e. religion) and THAT can be dangerous!

Answer 2

I saw the same Mother Mary vision in my dream too.She had long brown hair sort of thick and her face was like burry...no detail. But I heard her voice clearly.She said only take half deposit from Hispanics because they don't have much money. I was thinking well okay in dream. But it bothered me too like on Close Encounter movie. I kept looking at Mother Mary pictures and I'm not even Catholic. Then a week or so later I was getting into some legal trouble and ended up dealing with someone who had a shady past. She was maybe warning me about this person. Don't know if I will turn Catholic but yeah there's something too all of the Mary sightings. God Bless Her.(now carry a Rosary with me)

Answer 3

Since human being are social creatures, a very large portion of the brain is dedicated to face identification and recognition. One only has to look at political cartoonists of famous people to realize how just a few very simple yet exaggerated strokes can convey the likeliness of someone.

So, when seeing a weird pattern, it is normal to try to see someone hiding in there. What is not normal is to "recognize" this as a supernatural manifestation.

Insanity? To a degree. Saying "hey it looks like so and so" is OK, but insisting that this is god's will, and going on national TV claiming that god is henceforth giving you direct priviledged guidance that you must share with the world is insane.

Answer 4

The mind likes order and it will make order out of randomness. Additionally, people will see what they want to see.

People who see the face of mary or jesus in random stuff WANT to see Jesus or mary. They have a longing to be closer to Jesus and Mary and they recognize what they believe to be his or her face.

Answer 5

I do not understand this either, but my mom had a picture she cut out of a newspaper in Oklahoma way back in the early 1950's. This was long before any technology to touch up pictures came along. This picture was of clouds, and I swear you could see an image that depected Christ's face and it was huge. I was very little when I saw it, and I'll remember it the rest of my life.

Answer 6

It is religious zeal. For straters, there is noone alive today that even knows what Jesus or Mary even looked like. What they see, sort of matches some icon they have seen and they become transfixed with it. There are also many out there who will present something as religious just to make a buck.

Answer 7

What does it mean when you see a Dog in the formation of clouds, it just happens
What the problem is, is when people set aside time to go to places or buy these things because of the face of Jesus
It is an idol, and there is no need for them

Answer 8

True Christians see the face of Jesus in the Bible all the time.

Answer 9

It's because they want to see it, and in some cases it does look like what they believe Jesus or Mary looked like.

Answer 10

Most people assume that what you see is pretty much what your eye sees and reports to your brain. In fact, your brain adds very substantially to the report it gets from your eye, so that a lot of what you see is actually "made up" by the brain.Lateral inhibition helps to explain a number of "optical illusions" that we see.

We construct such images unconsciously and very rapidly. Our brains are just as fertile when we use our other senses. In moments of anxiety, for instance, we sometimes "hear things" that are not really there.