pareidolia - a word for a common human activity

Last week I was looking at pictures taken by my photography class, and one person showed a shot of some rocks in a pond. The rocks looked like frogs, and we talked about whether we like to 'name' natural features by how they look to us. Some like it, some don't.

I don't find that walking around a beautiful natural place and classifying everything by some arbitrary human-based attribute is a useful exercise, probably because I often can't see what I'm 'supposed' to see. I've sometimes thought this naming of geographical features is like our anthropomorphising of animals.

The Macquarie Dictionary says of anthropomorphise:

(say anthruhpuh'mawfuyz)
verb (anthropomorphised, anthropomorphising)
–verb (t) 1. to ascribe human form or attributes to.
–verb (i) 2. to ascribe human form or attributes to an animal, a god, etc. Also, anthropomorphize.

So I guess if I say a rock looks like a frog, I could be anthropomorphising. But I must confess that this word didn't really describe the phenomenon for me.

But now I've learned a new word, from Slavenka's blog - pareidolia - which she defines as 'a psychological phenomenon where human brains see familiar objects in random shapes'.

In looking for the word on the internet I came across a Flickr site devoted to pareidolia, and so far my favorite is this one.

There's a similar Flickr site devoted to random shapes that look like faces. Here are some: