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| Credit: NASA HiRISE |
An image captured by NASA has many people wondering if the muppet Beaker has finally been rocketed into space after a science experiment involving him and Dr. Bunsen Honeydew of Muppet Labs has gone wrong. However, as experts point out, this isn’t an image of a Muppet, just a result of something called pareidolia. It's the SAME phenomena that paranormal investigators have to be careful about, so they don't jump to conclusions about Earth bound ghosts or spirits.
Pareidolia /
parr-i-DOH-lee-ə) is a psychological phenomenon in which the mind responds to a
stimulus (an image or a sound) by perceiving a familiar pattern where none
exists. It's like seeing a face in a cloud. This means that the human brain,
when confronted with images that it can’t decipher, quite often tries to
rearrange the image into something it has seen before.
In the paranormal field, pareidolia is often also referred
to as matrixing or the matrix effect. In this instance, sometimes people think
they see images of ghosts in grainy photos when, in reality, their brain has
just assembled what they see into something resembling a person.
And, according to Live Science, this isn’t the first time a
case of pareidolia has been reported as a result of images from Mars. There
have been images taken of Mars where people have likened them to “a smiley
face, Gandhi, a spooky shrouded lady and even Jabba the Hutt.”
For more about Pareidolia, see one of my earlier blogs: http://ghostsandspiritsinsights.blogspot.com/2016/01/paredolia-and-seeing-paranormal-things.html
