Go Retire Psychiatrist

So, yesterday, Sena was sure she saw a robin perched and pressing itself against a tree in the outlot past our back yard. This was after a rainfall. I couldn’t see it. She had to guide me to look where she saw it. I didn’t see a bird, and thought it was an irregular patch on the tree where the bark had been torn off. To me, it was a scar that looked a little red because the wood was wet.

But she was so sure she saw a bird; she got the camera out and shot over 2 minutes of video. We looked at the clip and then she could see it was a scar on the tree.

One thing that tripped me up a little was that when I looked through the camera viewfinder, the little motion icon was activated, which usually means there’s a moving object in the area. I think it probably was a fine mist left over after the rain shower. But it did make me wonder if there was something there.

We both laughed about it. She pointed to the clip and said, “See there’s the head and the beak….” The longer we looked, the less it looked like anything but a patch of missing bark on the tree.

I thought of the several paranormal TV shows on nowadays. One of them I like is The Proof is Out There, hosted by Tony Harris. He tends to be a bit more skeptical than other hosts but did miss one which seemed to show a photo with a person looking into a mirror, but her reflection was very different from her, including posture and facial expression.

I looked this up on the internet and found out the trick was done by using the panorama mode on a cell phone camera. It’s not that hard to do and I blogged about it. The instructions are in a post I wrote in 2021.

The other phenomenon Tony pointed out was pareidolia, which is our brain’s tendency to see familiar shapes in random images. We think that’s what Sena was doing when she thought she saw a bird on the tree. It’s like seeing faces in clouds or in pizzas.

Have fun with pareidolia!