I see them.
In blankets all ruffled up. In bushes, trees, paintings — anything where there are patterns. I see faces, usually smiling but sometimes projecting some other emotion like fear or concern or, even anger.
This is going to be tricky to explain but what I suspect is my Lewy body dementia is supercharging a condition called pareidolia. Most dictionary definitions of this call it a ‘psychological phenomenon’ in which persons see an image, usually a face, in random objects.
Nearly everybody has this to a degree. Puffy white clouds often prompt viewers to see faces, animals or anything the mind can imagine. Famously many people thought they saw Jesus on a piece of toast.
That is not unusual. It’s the brain’s way of giving you information that might be helpful — like autofill in a document producing app.
But I think my situation is unusual. I believe it is connected to my Lewy body dementia which last year sent me deep into mind boggling hallucinations. These faces, I’ve been calling remnants of that full immersion hallucination.
These faces and sometimes entire figures with legs, a torso, arms and a head strike my vision sometimes when I walk in a room. The coat on the couch with a hat nearby and shoes on the floor all connect into a visual human-like figure.
It doesn’t bother me because since finding the right balance of medications and adding NuPlazid, an anti-psychotic, those days where I was ‘living’ inside the hallucination have been absent (going on at least three months now).
But I definitely see faces. Some of the faces are of the same people — people I met when I was hallucinating big time. They are so planted in my memory that I’m positive a sketch artist could draw them based on my memory.
Another part of my pareidolia: I can make the images change. For example if I see a pareidolia person’s head and face staring at me, I can look away and it does turn away. Although I don’t see it moving. Looking closer, shaking the pillow out or ignoring it makes it go away, as well.
Scientists are studying this phenomenon for clues on how the brain works.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22649179/
I believe our memory and imagination fill in the blanks of random visual stimuli, initiated by a prompt: three rocks in a Frisbee suddenly becomes two eyes, a mouth and the head. This is accelerated — or accentuated — in some people through an imbalance in the brain, I believe.
One would naturally link the abnormal proliferation of alpha-synuclein protein — the suspected cause of my kind of Lewy body dementia — to pareidolia.
More science is needed. I think a direct study on just Lewy body patients and Parkinson’s with psychosis patients would be in order as these neurodegenerative diseases seem to be a hotbed of hallucinations.
NOTE: Since posting Friday I came across a few more articles discussing this through the Lewy body lens.