Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

nlightn, that video should be patented as a mental health remedy. I could only see Trump as toast. Umm, which
reminds me of an image, F6, had in one of his long ones - 10 min. search was fruitless, but anyway here we go

It's "Perfectly Normal" to See Jesus in Toast, Study Says

By Olivia B. Waxman May 7, 2014

IMAGE
Fred Whan, of Kingston, Ont., shows off a fish stick he
cooked that he claims shows the likeness of Jesus Christ.
Iam Macalpine—AP

Every now and then, there’s a viral news article about someone claiming to see religious imagery on a Goldfish cracker, a power meter, a turtle shell, or–more commonly–a piece of toast.

According to a new study .. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945214000288 .. published in the journal Cortex, that’s “perfectly normal .. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-05/uot-uot050614.php ” because of a phenomenon called “face pareidolia, the illusory perception of non-existent faces” caused by the interaction between the frontal cortex, the part of the brain that helps produce “expectations” of what an object should look like, and the posterior visual cortex, the part that processes the image.

Researchers at the University of Toronto — in partnership with Chinese universities — performed brain scans on 20 participants and showed them computer-generated pictures made up of indiscernible shapes. Some were told in advance that they were going to see images of a face, while others were told they would see a letter of the English alphabet. In both instances, about 35% saw an illusory image where there wasn’t one.

“Our findings suggest that it’s common for people to see non-existent features because human brains are uniquely wired to recognize faces, so that even when there’s only a slight suggestion of facial features the brain automatically interprets it as a face,” the study’s lead researcher Kang Lee of the University of Toronto’s Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study said in a statement .. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-05/uot-uot050614.php .

The CBC reports .. http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/see-jesus-in-your-toast-it-s-perfectly-normal-new-study-says-1.2633549 .. that Lee also said people who see Jesus or the Virgin Mary in food or other objects may see them because religious beliefs can dramatically impact how they want to see the way life works.

New York University researchers Ana Gantman and Jay Van Bavel recently discussed similar findings (available online .. http://www.psych.nyu.edu/vanbavel/lab/documents/Gantman.VanBavel.MoralPopoutCognition2014.pdf ) in an April New York Times editorial .. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/opinion/sunday/is-that-jesus-in-your-toast.html . In a few experiments, they “flashed strings of letters” across a computer screen and asked participants whether they could see a word. Some of the words shown contained “moral content (virtue,steal, God) and others did not (virtual, steel, pet).”

They “found that participants correctly identified strings of letters as words more often when they formed moral words (69 percent accuracy) than when they formed nonmoral words (65 percent accuracy),” and have dubbed this phenomenon the “moral pop-out effect” — comparing it to the experience of food seeming especially pronounced to people who are hungry.

http://time.com/90810/its-perfectly-normal-to-see-jesus-in-toast-study-says/

See also:

International Cloud Atlas Recognizes 11 New Kinds Of Clouds
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a volutus giant sky roll!

[ ... 3rd down ]
Tornado Town, USA
[...]
This is why the infamous Tornado Alley of the Plains states is Tornado Alley. It’s the place where the Gulf air and the mountain air meet. “The central part of the U.S. is incredibly well designed to produce tornadoes,” said Harold Brooks, senior scientist at the National Severe Storms Weather Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma — a suburb just south of Moore. There are a few other places on Earth with similar profiles, but they have limitations the Plains states just don’t have, such as a mountain range like the Andes, which is thinner and can’t dry or cool air as well as the Rockies. The central U.S. is the most likely place for tornadoes to form, on this continent and anywhere in the world. Insomuch as it sits right in the middle of that, yes, Moore is at a higher risk.
[...]
The second problem is that tornadoes are pretty rare. One thousand a year, scattered across the continent, does not produce many data points at the scale of an individual city. Most days, there aren’t tornadoes anywhere. That problem is exacerbated by the third issue: Scientists really only have about 50 years of really good tornado documentation. Essentially, Brooks told me, scientists can’t tell us whether what’s happened in Moore is abnormal because they don’t know what a “normal” amount of violent tornadoes is. With all of that, Brooks said, there’s not a good way to clearly tell the difference between patterns and pareidolia [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia ]. After all, the human brain is primed to find significance in the random. In the creaky corners of our neural pathways, a jumble of rocks can become an old man, a coat hanger can become a drunk octopus [ https://www.pinterest.com/dannybirchall/drunk-octopus-wants-to-fight-you/ ], a bunch of craters on the moon give us a friendly smile. It’s so easy for a few random events to make one small town look like a tornado magnet. It would be harder not to see it.
* * *
And Moore, itself, facilitates that pareidolia.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=130770636