Look for shapes in the clouds

_Elsa_

‘Seeing shapes in the sky has nothing to do with meteorology and everything to do with the mechanics of the human brain. If you spend enough time looking at the sky, you will start seeing shapes in the clouds — a hippo, a dragon, a human face. The phenomenon is so common that it has its own hashtag: #cloudsthatlooklikethings. 

The reason we see animals, monsters and people in the sky has nothing to do with meteorology and everything to do with the mechanics of the human brain. We are just as likely to see familiar objects in trees, toast or Cheetos. This tendency is called pareidolia, and it’s a byproduct of the peculiar way we process visual information. 

“I think sometimes people imagine that the way vision works, say, is that there’s a stepwise process,” said Kara Federmeier, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Illinois. Such a process would work this way: You see a white, fluffy mass. You identify this shape as a cloud and then retrieve any relevant information about clouds. 

But that’s not actually how it works, Federmeier said. Rather, when you lay eyes on an object, you search your memories for anything that might resemble that object. If you spy a cloud, you will recall memories of clouds, but you might also gather memories of marshmallows, cotton candy or whipped cream. You will then sort through those memories to determine that you are looking at the sky and not dessert.’ (Source) 

“This is too much for me to know,” Tiffi thinks to herself. “If I want to look for some shapes in the clouds it might come in handy knowing why we see them but I’d rather just look at them without knowing the reason why. 

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