Pareidolia: a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant.

In psychology, the Rorschach test is a series of images used to invoke pareidolia to delve into the psyche of the patient. In religion and superstition, a vague stimulus is believed to be divinely sent. Here is a news story of Mary in bird shit. Notice how the people react to a random stimulus.

No matter how much I look at this picture, it looks like a face. The sink looks a bit shocked or frightened.

Carl Sagan hypothesized that detecting faces is a hard wired evolutionary advantage. This allows people to use only minimal details to recognize faces from a distance and in poor visibility but can also lead them to interpret random images or patterns of light and shade as being faces.

In 2009 a study was done to show that objects incidentally perceived as faces evoke an early (165 ms) activation in the ventral fusiform cortex, at a time and location similar to that evoked by faces, whereas other common objects do not evoke such activation. This activation is similar to a slightly earlier peak at 130 ms seen for images of real faces. The authors suggest that face perception evoked by face-like objects is a relatively early process, and not a late cognitive reinterpretation phenomenon.

Which would explain why everyone sees the following simple line drawing as a face:

This one, is of course, totally real. The Flying Spaghetti Monster is a holy visage mighty to behold! May you be touched by his Noodly Appendage!

Here’s a strange 6-legged sky pig.

This is the famous grilled cheese toast image. If you ask me, the face in there looks more like an actress from the 40′s than a religious icon.

And one more, for fun.

So, it’s nothing supernatural. It’s just the way our brains work to fill in information and make sense of the world as fast as we can.

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I’m embarrassed to say there are a few faces there I can’t name. Anyone want to list everyone from left to right? I’d rather ask for your help than get it wrong. (click the image for full size. Sorry, I don’t know the artist!)

Here is a video of Christopher Hitchens answering a question from an audience member at a debate. Why we should fight religion. (6 minutes)

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I thought I’d share some pictures from our Nature Walk.

In our conversations we talked about how people struggle when they are questioning their faith. It’s different for everyone, but some of the big things you have to give up are:

• Your consciousness living forever in heaven. Life after death.
• Someone thinking for you, telling you what your morals are, and spoon-feeding you the big answers to questions about why we’re here, etc.
• Community from your church. Sometimes this is everyone you know. Family and friends.

One thing the budding atheist community needs to do is to help people with things they miss out on from their church. This makes the transition away from religion easier and less painful.

The first one is the toughest. A person deconverting just has to come to terms with the cold hard fact that consciousness dies. But one way I’ve dealt with that is to find relief in the fact that I won’t burn in hell, since it doesn’t exist any more than heaven (which sounds extremely dull and boring).  Another way I’ve dealt with it is to really embrace science and learn about how amazing nature is.

That brings me to the second thing. What is my personal ethical/moral code? And the big questions. How did life begin? Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? What I’ve realized is that I had to reevaluate all these things. And it took time.

I’ve gone through the morals that I was indoctrinated with and carefully came up with my own reason-based code of ethics. It boils down to being good for goodness’ sake. You can see my 10 Principles here.

And I’ve realized that I have to come up with my own reason for the meaning of life. It’s individual. We all decide what that is for ourselves. A lot of this work was realizing I could throw away the garbage from religion I had accumulated. Filling in the answers for myself was much easier once I got rid of the nonsense.

When it comes to questions about how life began, I turn to science. That’s easy. The church could never answer those questions honestly, but science investigates these things every day, all around the world. It’s awesome. It certainly answers great questions a zillion times better than religion ever could.

Freethinking groups are the solution to community. We have a wonderful group here in Morgantown. Just do it. Find a group or start your own. If you want ideas for how to start your own group, let me know. I am not a group kind of person (being a bit of a hermit by nature) but I find that hanging out with my fellow atheist friends is wonderful. Give it a try. You might really like it.

And here is the sunset from our awesome day. I just caught the last bit of it.

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I had my doubts about this; I got an offer from ASPEX corporation to let people get free scanning electron micrographs of just about anything. They make a desktop SEM (Scanning Electron Micrograph), and all you have to do is fill out a form and mail it in with your sample of a dead bug or a microchip or bacon, and presto, within a few weeks they’ll have it scanned in and the image available on their website.

I asked them if they knew how many readers I have, and they said no problem, they can handle it.

Huh.

Well, you heard them. Scavenge your trash cans, dig into your local sources of vermin and oddments, and send them in. I’m thinking this could be really fun for any school teachers out there — you could have the whole class looking for interesting specimens to zoom in on. You can see their current galleries for ideas.

Follow the instructions here to get your dead bugs and rotten food scanned for free.

If you do send something in to get scanned be sure to note that you found them via PZ; and be sure to come back here and share your scan with the rest of us!

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I wanted to share some great lolcats with you on my favorite holiday, while warning you of some issues that may have passed below your radar for this All Hallow’s Eve.

Don’t buy candy for today! Halloween is Lucifer’s holy day and the candy in the store has been cursed and filled with demons according to Charisma Magazine. Kimberly Daniels wantonly tells us about the horrors of this most satanic day of the year.

I know, it’s probably too late for you. You already bought your Halloween candy weeks ago. My suggestion is to eat all of the candy in one sitting while praising Lucifer as you unwrap each blasphemous piece of chocolaty evilness. If you can’t light a bonfire to dance around naked in your front yard, light a candle and roast marshmallows over it. That will suffice.

Don’t give the candy to those little kids that come begging at your door! It will fill their innocent little souls with demons! You really must eat the candy for yourself and imbibe the demons to help save our future from demonic possession. Daniels says it all in her diatribe. But I give you solutions. That’s just the kind of blasphemous, godless heathen that I am.

On another note, why not find a Judgement House to scare you onto the straight and narrow? Having trouble with your kids? This is the solution for you. Drag your kids to JH to experience a dramatic walk-through of the “truth” of people’s choices and their horrific consequences. It’s good stuff for terrifying kids with the “love” of god into their hearts.

Another version is Hell House which shows all kinds of sin and torments of the damned in hell. It might help with those uppity kids you can’t manage, and again, it will show the boundless “love” of god in all his heinous “glory”.

And last but not least, the catholic church in Africa is being destroyed by witchcraft! Experts in Kenya say witchcraft is real and is destroying the church. Scholars are upset that the church continues to dismiss the dark arts as mere superstition, thereby unwittingly helping the devil advance his reign! Oh noes!

Unfortunately, on a serious note, in the name of witchcraft, many innocent children, albinos and people are killed, mutilated and tortured in the name of witchcraft in Africa.

So have a happy unholy day today! Happy Halloween!

This is for my Hunny Bunny on our 13th wedding anniversary today. Luvz U!

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Anyhoo, this is a roundup post in which I cover several topics that are tenuously connected at best. Here’s what I’m rambling on about:

• I’m a citizen scientist now! WOOT!
  • Encyclopedia of Life!
  • My Flickr
• Moving the body affects how we think – a study
• Prayer and meditation may reshape the brain – a study

First, I want to talk about a ScienceDaily report: Massive Online ‘Macroscopic Observatory’ Of Earth’s Biodiversity To Be Created. “Wanted (soon): observations from environment-minded citizens that will allow science to study biodiversity at a planetary level in a massive, comprehensive virtual observatory of historic importance.”

This guy, Edward O. Wilson, created a website, Encyclopedia of Life (eol). His dream: “Imagine an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth…” and they are starting to do just that. A page for every species. If you read the ScienceDaily article, it will be amazing. You’ll be able to get information from the Deep Web from images, maps, classification, common and scientific names, links to research and papers, etc.

It’s already there now, and growing all the time. In the future you’ll also be able to get genome sequences and much much more. Basically anything you want to know about a species will be there, at your fingertips, all on one page, for free. My scientific geekiness is giggling with delight!

And here’s where I get to finally call myself a scientist! Uh, well, a citizen scientist, which is still cool. eol wants people to submit their pictures. I’m a photographer, and I love taking pictures of nature, but I’ve never been able to do much with them. Now I can help with this project! Can you say WOOT!? I can. Woot WOOT! (Sorry, uber-geek moment there).

So what you do, what I did, was to open a Flickr account. I’m ZeNeeceC on Flickr now. I got some older pictures posted yesterday. Then here’s the tough part. You need to machine tag them with their scientific names. This is so that when you send them to the eol Flickr group, eol’s computer can get those images and put them on the right pages.

My friend Jeff said that eol sounded like a Wikipedia kind of thing for science. In a way, he’s right, because we get to contribute our images. But eol is serious about science, so the images will get authenticated. Until that time, they have a yellow box around them so people can see that they are contributed but might not be scientifically accurate like the rest of the info on the page.

Even further, though, if you just want high end science info, eol lets you set that up so that you don’t even see the citizen science stuff. It’s a very well done site.

Anyway, I am having trouble finding out what things are called. Flickr has a group called ID Please, which I joined. And I joined BugGuide.net  as ZeNeece to help me ID bugs. But the flowers and plants, I will need to find an online source to identify those more readily.

So that’s that. I wanted to share it with you because it’s so exciting to me, but also in case you or someone you know might be interested as well.

Onto some studies!

Our Bodies, Our Brains: a recent study shows that moving your body in certain ways can improve your ability to think. Published in Psychological Science.

Working with 38 subjects, the scientists confirmed that either a step forward (a typically positive movement) or a step backward (usually negative) significantly changed one’s ability to perform a mental task.

Taking four steps back improved a subject’s accuracy and timing on the task, whereas taking four steps forward led to longer processing times and more errors.

How cool is that? Now, if you follow the link, you’ll see that this was on 60 second science on Scientific American, so there are no links to studies. But they list the publication, Psychological Science, if you want to look into it further.

Prayer May Reshape Your Brain… And Your Reality: This is interesting. I’ve told you about some studies (see below) in the past in this field, which this article calls “neurotheology”.  The article from NPR is about Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at University of Pennsylvania who has written several books and studies very religious people and their brains. Newberg says: “The more you focus on something — whether that’s math or auto racing or football or God — the more that becomes your reality, the more it becomes written into the neural connections of your brain.”

He also tested a doctor who meditates for an hour a day. He had him meditate in a brain scanner.

As expected, his frontal lobes lit up on the screen: Meditation is sheer concentration, after all. But what fascinated Newberg was that Baime’s parietal lobes went dark. Newberg said, “This is an area that normally takes our sensory information, tries to create for us a sense of ourselves and orient that self in the world,” he explains. “When people lose their sense of self, feel a sense of oneness, a blurring of the boundary between self and other, we have found decreases in activity in that area.”

The article goes on to suggest that you can benefit from meditation and prayer as well, even if you don’t devote 1 or 2 hours a day to it. I find this interesting and compelling, and it goes along with the other studies listed below. I would have liked some studies referenced and linked to in the article, but I guess I’m not that lucky.

Here are the other posts I’ve done about other relevant brain and mind studies recently:

• Church: No brain activity required- study showed how experiencing transcendence basically shut down the right parietal lobe.
• More differences in the brains of believers and non-believers: A recent study that found religious people were less anxious about mistakes they made than non-believers.
• Knowledge and Beliefs are stored differently in the brain: this wasn’t a specific study. Dr. Steven Novella mentioned it in passing on his podcast.
• Religion is the path of least resistance: This was about an article in New Scientist where people are born believers. I strongly suspect the way they conducted the studies mentioned.
• Superstitious? It could be your lack of control: This was a neat study about people who were basically put into a situation where they felt a lack of control found patterns more readily in random information.

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“Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.”  I love this bus slogan. It’s brilliant. This is my favorite so far.

“That’s right sweetheart; dreams and goals are satan’s way of distracting you from making dinner.” My comments all involve swearing so I’ll just let it stand as is.

oh JESUS! This is just too freaking much, this cake. I had to show it to you.

Happiness is submission to GodZILLA! LOL!

This is my favorite Russell’s Teapot. Get the drano!

Ceiling Cat guides the hand of man to write LOLbible.

Satan Cat: He’s going to kill you and your family once he gets outta there. LOL!

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