Pareidolia is not psychodelia. The word I encountered today was pareidolia. This word is not in your everyday vocab? Not surprising.
It’s the idea that you, for example, look at a cloud and see a figure, face, a shape you can identify. But it’s just a cloud, and the figure is something that your brain came up with.
This word surfaced for me in an online article titled “Conversations with Caves…” by Izzy Wisher and others (here) The discussed pareidolia related to how the painted figures were placed on the concave and convex shapes of the rugged surface of cave walls. This happened a long time ago in the period archaeologists call the Upper Paleolithic.
Anyway, going forward…I’ll be trying to remember the word pareidolia. Relevance to today? Today, we had a relatively even overcast, so shape identification would have been…difficult.