What you see is what you get. That phrase has been around a while and probably made most recognizable by the computer industry and the now famous WYSIWYG editors. In the paranormal world though, what you see is not always what you get. I would even hazard to say that most of the time what you see is NOT what you get.
It seems our brain is very adept at taking random patterns and turning them into something that we would recognize. More often than not the pattern we see looks like a face of some kind. One theory as to why the brain recognizes faces in seemly meaningless patterns is that recognizing the faces of our parents is one of the first things we learn to do as a baby. Though a good first skill to learn, as a paranormal investigator, it can be a little cumbersome.
What this pattern recognition is called is pareidolia or matrixing. This is when the brain see’s random textures, lights and/or shadows and interprets it as something familiar to us so we can recognize or make sense of it. If you have ever seen a recognizable shape in cloud formations you can relate to this phenomenon. A good friend Ray Couch at Southern Ghosts also pointed out this interesting piece of information; only sane people have the ability to sort patterns and thus the need of the Rorschach Inkblot Test.
Here are three pictures that involve pareidolia:
Unfortunately some of the situations faced by paranormal investigators like unfamiliar surroundings, low lighting, flash photography and in some cases, our own desire to see something can heighten the pareidolia experience. Knowing that this phenomenon exists however, can only help you as a paranormal investigator.
It should make you look harder at pictures and try to find every possible explanation and shows the real importance of taking more than one shot of areas to have plenty of pictures to compare it to. Make notes as to what could possibly be reflecting back into the flash of your camera and try to get as many pictures as possible from different angles and distances.
I have talked to many a skeptic who think everything is connected to the pareidolia/matrixing phenomenon and I talked to a lot of people who believe everything is paranormal, the truth is that they are both probably right. A lot of pictures can be tossed out as pareidolia, a lot cannot, and it is ultimately up to those that choose to investigate the paranormal to do a thorough enough job to eliminate as much doubt as possible.
Remember what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said via Sherlock Holmes, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
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