Pattern invention

We’re still in the season of 2007 predictions. What’ll be hot. What new trends will emerge. To the extent that I have anything to say about future trends, I said it in the column about phads a few weeks ago.

Still, skimming list after list of predictions has me thinking about an article I read in the L.A. Times the other day. It was about why people see, for instance, the face of Jesus in a fried tortilla, or the Virgin Mary in a grilled-cheese sandwhich, and so on:

From a scientific perspective, the phenomenon is so common that it has been given a name: pareidolia, the perception of patterns where none are intended. And according to Stewart Guthrie, one of a handful of professors who have studied it, such perceptions are part of the way human beings are “hard-wired.”

“It’s really part of our basic perceptual and cognitive situation,” said Guthrie, a cultural anthropologist, retired Fordham University professor and author of the book “Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion.”

“It has to do with all kinds of misapprehensions that there is something human-like in one’s environment, when really there’s not.”

At the root of the phenomenon, he said, is is the survival instinct.

“It’s a built-in perceptual strategy,” Guthrie said, “of better safe than sorry. In a situation of uncertainty, we guess that something is caused by the most important possibility.”

There was no particular news in any of this, I guess, but I’d never come across the word pareidolia before. It’s kind of a useful idea. I do know enough about psychology to know that this business of “spotting patterns where non exist” is in fact something we’re all susceptible to. I think about it a lot when I’m trying to decide what to write about. Not that I write about trends, per se. But it’s worth keeping in mind as you peruse the prognistications:

Which ones are based on spotting real patterns of change?

And which ones are the trend-watching equivalent of seeing a religious icon in the clouds?