Nervous but Normal Brains See a Demon in This Picture

In more benign eras, people have seen Jesus in toast and Elvis in a potato chip. But this is 2017, and when people see things that aren’t there, they see the Devil himself.

Over 80,000 people have shared a photo uploaded to Facebook by Richard Christianson, an Arizona resident who snapped a photo of what appears to be a huge winged demon hanging out by a curb under a streetlamp, Thrillist reports. Among the 9,000 or so comments are conjectures that the photo is evidence of a “dark lord,” Yu-Gi-Oh’s Obelisk the Tormentor, or a Babylonian wind god named Pazuzu. It is, however, most likely just a really symmetrical palm tree. But we can’t criticize speculators for having overactive imaginations. They’re just seeing what they are wired to see.

As psychologists who study pareidolia explain, the brain is accustomed to visual patterns, and thus it wants to see what it is accustomed to seeing in context. When a brain receives a visual suggestion that doesn’t make sense, like a shadow that suggests both a vague palm tree and a winged humanoid, it tends to “fill in” the information that’s needed to match up with what it expects. This reasoning, which is referred to as a “top-down” approach to visual processing, explains why we see spread-open butt cheeks in indistinctly shaped mittens on a McDonald’s cup and images of the Virgin Mary in a spotty flour tortilla. The particular prevalence of face pareidolia — that is, seeing faces when they are not actually there — suggests that humans are hardwired to seek out faces even in the vaguest circumstances.

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