Perception does not take place in the eyes

At first, pareidolia (seeing shapes in clouds and in other inanimate objects) was seen negatively rather than a sign of creativity. It was even considered to be a symptom of psychosis or dementia.

In 1895, French psychologist Alfred Binet - known for his work on IQ tests - suggested that inkblots could be used in psychological research to study differences in involuntary imagination. This idea was further developed, resulting in inkblots to investigate people's personality and assess their psychological state.

The creative aspect of pareidolia became known in the 19th century with the practice of 'klecksography' - the art of making images from inkblots.

Writer Victor Hugo experimented with folded papers and stains by holding his quill upside down to use the feather-end as a brush. Another practitioner of klecksography, German poet Justinus Andreas Christian Kerner, published Kleksographien (1890), a collection of inkblot art with accompanying short poems about the objects that can be noticed in the images.

It is the idea that we see what we want to see.

It’s similar to another concept — motivated reasoning, where we come to conclusions we’re predisposed to believe in.

It is the feeling that our perception of the world reflects the truth.

Of all our senses, we tend to trust our eyes the most. And we believe that the way we see the world is the way that the world really is.

The groups we identify with provide a sense of identity and belonging. Once we have identified our place in the group, we are motivated to enhance the status of this group. Patriotism is a form of identity.

Scientists explain that the instincts that drive patriotism can express humanity’s best and worst sides.

In an experiment, subjects consistently discriminated against those in other groups and acted in ways that benefited their own groups.

The feeling that the benefits of the group are beneficial to the individual is innate.

One common characteristic of a group is that emotions appear to be contagious. A shared emotional experience occurs when one person feels a similar emotion to another due to perceiving the other's state. Conversely, xenophobia can be attributed to a dissimilarity in perception that creates an empathy gap.

According to research in the field, people have the tendency to associate happiness with circles and anger with triangles.

This seems to find its meaning in individuals' attraction to the roundness of a child's face, as, involuntarily, we associate innocence and honesty to round-shaped items.

Taking into account that our own eyes function based on the existence of spheres, such as the iris or the pupil, there is no wonder that we all are, as individuals, prone to choose circular lines over straight ones.

It states that the world is uncertain and full of surprises. Our brain, through perception, beliefs and action are trying to remain stable by minimizing the spikes, triggers and surprises.

We live inside our brains, and each of us has a unique perception of the outside world. Anything we say or document is just our way to explain the world we have lived. It has nothing to do with reality.

• Our mind is programmed to sample the world so that the immediate future can be predictable, as a way to survive it with minimum surprises and disruptions, and as a way to conserve energy.
• Free energy, outside the mind, maybe incomprehensible and even impossible to grasp fully, but our mind filters and curates much of the information and presents it to us in palpable format.
• Our mind, when seen neurologically, is infinitely vast, much like the universe, which it even resembles visually.

The central concept of creativity is that some people are open to examine things from all angles and visualize more possibilities.

The part of our personality that seems to drive our creativity is called openness to experience. Openness best predicts performance on varying thinking tasks, on real-world creative achievements, as well as engagement in daily creative pursuits.

Research found that open people don't just bring a different perspective; they really see things differently.

The research findings suggest that open people's creative tendencies are ingrained in their basic visual perception. Open people may have inherently different experiences to other people.

The steady appeal of the lottery is due to various psychological tricks by the marketers: suspension of logic and reason and the dreams that it sells.

Using the variable rewards concept of psychology, the marketers ensure that people keep buying their tickets for years, by introducing smaller wins with much better odds. This helped lottery buyers experience the thrill of a win.

The odds to win are so small that winning does not even feature in our decision matrix of buying a ticket. The game of lottery isn’t played on logic, or for investment, but for entertainment.

For as little as two dollars, a person dreams of getting a chance to win thousands of dollars, and that dream is worth the price of the ticket. The bigger the jackpot is, the more the dreams are fed.

When stories are done well, they are like artificial sweeteners - they fool the mind into thinking we're consuming the real thing.

For example, children sometimes really believe that puppets are alive. Even animals sometimes react to pictures as if they are real things.

The rational part of our mind knows that what we're looking at, or reading, isn't real. However, the perceptual areas of our brains are very closely connected to our emotions.

Emotions force us to interpret the world differently. Research reveals how fear can affect vision, moods can make us more or less susceptible to visual illusions, and desire can change the apparent size of goal-relevant objects.

We tend to assume that our perceptions of sights, sounds, textures, and tastes are an accurate portrayal of the real world. But when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion, we realize that what we perceive, is our brain's best guess at what that world is like.

No-one will ever view us as we view ourselves.

We should consider if we are entitled to be seen by others the way we see ourselves.

Humans are different from animals in that we don't sense time only as passing. We dice time into units or think of time to go beyond our lifespan, such as millennia. We rely on time concepts that allow us to make plans, follow recipes, and discuss possible futures.

Recent research suggests that across all cultures, the concept of time depends on metaphor, known as a conceptual metaphor. We build our understanding of duration and sequences of events out of familiar spatial ideas such as size, movement, and location.

But the "time is like space" metaphor takes on very different forms from one culture to the next.