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| Face on Mars - Viking 1 orbiter |
When we find patterns in visual or auditory stimuli it's called pareidolia. We cannot help but do it. How many of us see the face in the image below? Does the cardboard box look surprised and unhappy?
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| A suprised and sad box :-( |
This psychological trait is probably what lies behind many paranormal phenomena: seeing ghosts, electronic voice phenomena, seeing Jesus in a frying pan or Mary in toasted cheese sandwich to name but a few.
More generally, assigning meaningful patterns to meaningless or disorderly data is called apophenia. Again it is something we all do without thinking. This perhaps explains the gamblers fallacy and is likely to be behind the conspiracy theories relating to the assassination of JFK, the attack on the twin towers and so forth. In a nutshell we're programmed to find patterns. And this can be a problem if some of those patterns will mislead us.
Why is it important to know this? Well, much of what we know of our reality comes from science. Science relies on experiment and experiments rely on interpretation of data. If we cannot completely trust our ability to identify meaningful patterns in this data we could not be sure of anything. So, experiments must be repeatable. Not just repeatable in the same way (but that's still important), but repeatable as a logical consequence of prior experiments. If we only had a single low resolution picture of the Mars face we might still think it was a face. Only by taking a higher resolution picture (repeating the experiment) can we conclude that it's just a mountain. Want proof? Here's the same area of Mars photographed by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter some 30 years later with the earlier image inset for comparison.
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| The real Mars face |
But there's also another reason why its important. Ramsey theory tells us that any sufficiently large set of data will contain a given feature of interest. That's why there are patterns in the stars. Remember that scene in A Beautiful Mind where John Nash asks Alicia to think of an object - from memory she chose an umbrella - and he finds it in the night sky? Something similar exists in statistics. When doing repeated tests at the same confidence level you increase the likelihood you'll find one that tests as significant when it's not. To account for this we need to make adjustments to our tests.
To ignore this meaning-seeking propensity that we all have is to risk jumping to erroneous conclusions, indulging in conspiracy theories and, in extreme cases, I suspect it leads to paranoia. Yet the same trait allows us to draw meaningful conclusions about survival and reproduction. If we can't work out that the tasty animals will smell us when we're up wind of them we'll go hungry and the roll of the evolutionary dice will favour another species. If we can't work out that girl is interested in us then our chances to reproduce go down. So it's a double edged sword. We need to know when we're being fooled and when we're not being fooled to make sense of the world properly.
Tools like Occam's razor can help with this. Basically, this says that simpler theories should only be traded for greater explanatory power. If I tell you that a ghost broke your favourite vase when you left it in my care, a simpler explanation would be that it was probably me that broke it. You don't have to make the additional assumption about the existence of ghosts to understand what happened. And...er...I'm truly sorry about the vase by the way.
If you're mind blown by the propensity of our minds to find patterns, think on this. Somewhere, in the digits of pi, your entire genetic code is present as 8 bit words. There is also is a full colour image of your face encoded in the digits. Was it put there by someone or something? Or is a simpler explanation that Ramsey theory and the infinity of pi make it inevitable?
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