Monday, September 25, 2017

Pareidolia


Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon in which the mind responds to a stimulus, usually an image or a sound, by perceiving a familiar pattern where none exists.
Common examples are perceived images of animals, faces, or objects in cloud formations, the Man in the Moon, the Moon rabbit, hidden messages within recorded music played in reverse or at higher- or lower-than-normal speeds, and hearing indistinct voices in random noise such as that produced by air conditioners or fans.
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Pareidolia can cause people to interpret random images, or patterns of light and shadow, as faces. A study found that objects perceived as faces evoke an early activation of the fusiform face area at a time and location similar to that evoked by faces, whereas other common objects do not evoke such activation. This activation is similar to a slightly faster time that is seen for images of real faces.
Cognitive processes are activated by the "face-like" object, which alert the observer to both the emotional state and identity of the subject, even before the conscious mind begins to process or even receive the information. This robust and subtle capability is hypothesized to be the result of eons of natural selection favoring people most able to quickly identify the mental state, for example, of threatening people, thus providing the individual an opportunity to flee or attack pre-emptively. In other words, processing this information subcortically — therefore subconsciously — before it is passed on to the rest of the brain for detailed processing accelerates judgment and decision making when a fast reaction is needed.
Pareidolia can be considered a subcategory of Apophenia, unmotivated seeing of connections accompanied by a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness, Eearly stages of delusional thought, over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations. Apophenia has come to imply a universal human tendency to seek patterns in random information, such as gambling.

Rocks may come to mimic recognizable forms through the random processes of formation, weathering and erosion. Most often, the size scale of the rock is larger than the object it resembles, such as a cliff profile resembling a human face. Well-meaning people with a new interest in fossils can pick up chert nodules, concretions or pebbles resembling bones, skulls, turtle shells, dinosaur eggs, etc., in both size and shape.

The Rorschach inkblot test uses pareidolia in an attempt to gain insight into a person's mental state. The Rorschach is a projective test, as it intentionally elicits the thoughts or feelings of respondents that are "projected" onto the ambiguous inkblot images. Projection in this instance is a form of "directed pareidolia".

In his notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci wrote of pareidolia as a device for painters, writing, "If you look at any walls spotted with various stains or with a mixture of different kinds of stones, if you are about to invent some scene you will be able to see in it a resemblance to various different landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and various groups of hills. You will also be able to see divers combats and figures in quick movement, and strange expressions of faces, and outlandish costumes, and an infinite number of things which you can then reduce into separate and well conceived forms."

There have been many instances of perceptions of religious imagery and themes, especially the faces of religious figures, in ordinary phenomena. Many involve images of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the word Allah, or other religious phenomena.
Publicity surrounding sightings of religious figures and other surprising images in ordinary objects has spawned a market for such items on online auctions like eBay. One famous instance was a grilled cheese sandwich with the face of the Virgin Mary.

Pareidolia also arises in computer vision, specifically in image recognition programs, which can spuriously detect features. In the case of an artificial neural network, higher-level features correspond to more recognizable features, and enhancing these features brings out what the computer sees. These reflect the training set of images that the network has "seen" previously. Striking visuals can be produced in this way, notably in the DeepDream software, which falsely detects and then exaggerates features such as eyes and faces in any image.

Electronic voice phenomena (EVP) has been described as auditory pareidolia. Allegations of backmasking in popular music, in which a listener claims a message has been recorded backward onto a track meant to be played forward, have also been described as auditory pareidolia. A psychologist invented an algorithm for producing phantom words and phrases with the sounds coming from two stereo loudspeakers, with one to the listener's left and the other to his right. Each loudspeaker produces a phrase consisting of two words or syllables. The same sequence is presented repeatedly through both loudspeakers; however, they are offset in time so that one when the first sound is coming from the speaker on the left, the second sound is coming from the speaker on the right, and vice versa. After listening for a while, phantom words and phrases suddenly emerge, and these often appear to reflect what is on the listener's mind, and they transform perceptually into different words and phrases as the sequence continues.

Various European ancient divination practices involved the interpretation of shadows cast by objects. For example, in molybdomancy, a random shape produced by pouring molten tin into cold water is interpreted by the shadow it casts in candlelight.[citation needed]

A shadow person, also known as a shadow figure, shadow being or black mass, is often attributed to pareidolia. It is the perception of a patch of shadow as a living, humanoid figure, particularly as interpreted by believers in the paranormal or supernatural as the presence of a spirit or other entity.

Pareidolia is also what some skeptics believe causes people to believe that they have seen ghosts.











Sunday, September 24, 2017

Planet Venus


Orbiting at an average distance of 67 million miles (108 million kms), Venus is the second planet from the Sun, and other than the Moon, our closest neighbour in space. At its nearest, Venus is only 26 million miles from us, a mere stone's throw in astronomical terms. With a diameter of 7,600 miles (12,040 kms), Venus is almost exactly the same size as Earth, and has often been referred to as Earth's sister planet. Venus is also the only planet in the solar system besides Earth and Saturn's moon, Titan, to possess a significant atmosphere, so it has always seemed a natural assumption that Venus must be very similar to Earth and could quite conceivably be home to some form of life. But the cloud cover on Venus is so thick, it's impossible to see the surface of the planet, and for most of human history we could only gaze up at those beautiful, bright white clouds, and wonder if there was indeed a vast tropical paradise beneath them, teeming with life.

It wasn't until 1962 that we developed the technology to send a spacecraft to Venus to find out for sure what might be lurking beneath those impenetrable clouds, and when NASA's Mariner 2 spacecraft finally visited Venus, it discovered something shocking. Despite its closeness and apparent similarity to Earth, Venus was about as different as it could possibly be.

It seems the same greenhouse effect that makes life possible on Earth, has made life seemingly impossible on Venus. The greenhouse effect is the result of certain greenhouse gases in a planet's atmosphere absorbing infrared radiation, and keeping the planet warm, like a blanket. Earth's atmosphere has just the right amount of greenhouse gases, mostly in the form of carbon dioxide and water vapor, to keep the planet just the right temperature for life to thrive. It is, however, a delicate balance, and Venus is an example of this balance being upset. Sometime in the planet's past, widespread volcanic activity saturated the atmosphere of Venus with greenhouse gases, and the planet began to heat up. The increased temperature created even more greenhouse gases, creating a positive feedback loop that resulted in Venus having a surface temperature of 482 ° C (900 ° F) - hot enough to melt lead.

And the story gets worse. The atmosphere on Venus has become so thick and heavy, the pressure on the surface of the planet is 92 times that of Earth - as crushing as the pressure one kilometer beneath the sea. And Venus has no magnetic field (as Earth does) to ward off the lethal radiation from the Sun, making the planet even more deadly. As a final indignity, the clouds are composed of sulphur dioxide, so that when it rains on Venus, it rains sulfuric acid.

Many scientists point to Venus as an ominous example - a warning if you will - of what could happen to our very own Earth if the current trend towards increased greenhouse gases and global warming is not properly addressed. In 1991 NASA sent its Magellan spacecraft to Venus, equipped with a radar imaging system that was able to map the surface features of Venus beneath the clouds, giving us a detailed look (shown below) of a brutally hostile world.

In a Universe so full of ironies, both physical and philosophical, there is surely no greater irony than those lily white clouds of Venus conjuring up images of love and beauty for almost all of Human history, in reality hiding a lethal hothouse of molten metals, crushing pressures and poisonous gases that make Dante's Inferno look like Disneyland.
















Saturday, September 16, 2017

Sacred and Magical Places

An Exploration of Their Mysterious Powers 

What is the actual nature of the sacred sites? How can we explain the extraordinary - and often miraculous - phenomena that occur at them?
Hundreds of millions of pilgrims journey to these power places each year. The momentum of both religious tradition and modern tourism is commonly suggested to explain this astonishing movement of people. 
Yet much more is going on than mere religious custom or vacation travel. How do we account for the enormous popularity of these places? What makes them sacred, and what do people hope to gain from their visits to the sites?












Friday, September 15, 2017

From Sacred Geography to Geopolitics

Geopolitics as “intermediate” science


Geopolitical concepts became the major factors of modern politics since a long time ago. They are built on general principles allowing to easily analyze the situation of any particular country and region.
Geopolitics in its present form is undoubtedly a worldly, “profane”, secularized science. But maybe, among all modern sciences, it saved in itself the greatest connection with Tradition and traditional sciences. 

Modern chemistry is the outcome of the desacralization of a traditional science — alchemy, as modern physics is of magic. Exactly in the same way one might say that modern geopolitics is the product of the freedom from ecclesiastical control and desacralizing of another traditional science — sacred geography. 

But since geopolitics holds a special place among modern sciences, and it is often ranked as a “pseudo-science”, its profanizing is not so accomplished and irreversible, as in the case of chemistry or physics. The connection with sacred geography here is rather distinctly visible. Therefore it is possible to say that geopolitics stands in an intermediate place between traditional science, Sacred Geography and profane science.






Friday, September 08, 2017

Thursday, September 07, 2017