I wrote about pareidolia for the first time almost exactly a year ago. It was about an image that I generated with DeepDream.

Pareidolia is the tendency to see an object, pattern or meaning where in fact is none.

At one time pareidolia was considered a symptom of psychosis, but it's now seen as a normal human tendency.

Scientists have created convolutional neural networks. Those are computer programs that recognize patterns in the same way as with pareidolia. One example of such a program is DeepDream. But also the reverse image search is based on such a neural network.

I find it stimulating to let my imagination run wild. As I zoomed into the cloudy sky, I was delighted to see a Thalattoarchon hunting its prey. The Thalattoarchon was an ichthyosaur which lived eight million years after the Permian-Triassic extinction event. It's the oldest known marine reptile that has been an apex predator and probably one of the first marine macropredators capable of eating prey similar to its own size.

I also see letters. My attempt to decipher this results in "Jucy Puzy". But I won't go into that in more detail. 😳

Just rediscovered one of my Deepdream experiments from 2015.😁
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DeepDream is an open-source computer vision program created by Google engineer Alexander Mordvintsev which uses a convolutional neural network to find and enhance patterns in images via algorithmic pareidolia, thus creating a dream-like hallucinogenic appearance in the deliberately over-processed images. ⠀
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Pareidolia is the tendency for incorrect perception of a stimulus as an object, pattern or meaning known to the observer, such as seeing shapes in clouds, seeing faces in inanimate objects or abstract patterns, or hearing hidden messages in music.
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