And you think we have crazies in this country... dear God, what the heck is going on in England

[NanaCat]

45. I'm not so sure that pareidolia is all that outside of the norm.

Our brains are literally wired to extract patterns from visual information, and with good reason. It's our ability to find the pattern of a frog in the seemingly random midst of similar shapes and colours of leaves in a bush that let us see him as a unique thing at all. Without pattern recognition, everything would be random lines and colours before our eyes.

Visual artists seem quite prone to a heightened state of pattern recognition similar to Pareidolia, else they wouldn't be able to 'see' what others don't and then transfer that to another visual form. So maybe Pareidolia is more like a hyperactive form of pattern recognition, more than it is a genuine anomaly.