Wellness

NEW CLOUDS ARE EXPANDING OUR MINDS

Our minds love to play with abstract things, like clouds. Sometimes they love to play tricks on us. Why? It serves both as an escape valve and as a growth stimulant. Playing releases stress and diverts our attention from current areas of focus. It allows us to relax our bodies and our notions.

Pareidolia is the psychological phenomenon of ascribing significance to random or vague patterns in nature. Think: Man-in-the-Moon or zodiac signs.

Remember the last time you looked up in the sky and saw a familiar image in the clouds? Was it a face, an animal, or a UFO? Was it a castle, a dragon, or an angel? Perhaps it was a multi-stranded pearl necklace like the image of the Mammatus clouds above?

Photo: Ginger Teixiera Richmond. Angel Shaped Cloud

Was it because Ginger Teixeira Richmond was hoping to meet a pink angel that she saw one in the sky over south Florida this past March (03.14.13)? Well, if so, she wasn’t the only one. This cloud was seen looming over Royal Beach just hours after Pope Benedict XVI’s successor made his first appearance in front of waiting throngs in the Vatican courtyard.

Some, on the other side of the spirituality spectrum, saw this image as a firey devil. So, what you see in the clouds is very much dependent on who you are, what’s in your mind to begin with, and what you believe.

News channel WPTV posted the image to its Facebook account and it quickly went viral.

Photo: Courtesy of Yankee Skeptic. Cloud Pareidolia

Young minds tend to spend more time in a state of pareidolia. They have more fun with it too. Teacher Kitty Lapin Agile uses cloud pareidolia exercises to relax and teach her students. “Every child knows about pareidolia,” she says in her blog, Two Different Girls, “it’s just that sometimes, as adults, they forget.” Her recent photo of the “dolphin” cloud above is one of many beautifully shaped cloud formations that engage her kids’ imaginations.

Photo: Don Sampson. Bearded Flying Dragon

Agile also finds this kind of cloud gazing as an exercise that helps those with restless minds to chill out. “One favorite afternoon restful ‘activity’ was simply reclining outside and looking at the clouds," she explains. "Soon enough, those that were able to stay awake, were pointing out 'oh look a duck, a dragon, a horse…look THERE!' It was enough to just keep them on the sleep mats we had pulled outside, and soon most of them were snoozing so as to be rested for late afternoon playground fun. As a teacher, it was often hard for me to stay awake myself.”

Photo: Neil Usher. Pareidolic Robot

If you are too lazy, or too time-crunched, to let your own head drift with the clouds and find cool images, there is a new robot who can do it for you. The Nimbus MkIII Robot, designed by Neil Usher, is programmed for automated pareidolia. It scans the clouds, using facial recognition technology, and takes pictures of all pareidolic phenomena. Its mission is to optimize our leisure time.

Photo: Neil Usher. Pareidolia.

Usher asks, on his Design Interactions 2012 website: ".... could these robots be deployed to improve the efficiency of our leisure time by performing tasks we enjoy?" We wonder if that’s antithetical to the point of leisure time???

Usher wonders, "Could intelligent machines bird watch for us or look for four-leaf clovers? Could they optimise our pastimes, searching for patterns and spectacle in nature that would be imperceptible or too time-consuming for us to find for ourselves?"

Photo: Courtesy of NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration, NOAO/AURA/NSF, JPL-Caltech/UCLA. Jelly Fish Nebula

Our minds play with dust and gas clouds in space too. Nebulae are especially provocative. One of the newest nebulae discovered is a Jellyfish Nebula, an HFG1 nebula created by two neighboring aging V664 stars. One of the stars was a super-hot white dwarf. (90,000 – 110,000° F) The other star is more like our sun.

Photo: T.A. Rector and H. Schweiker. Jellyfish gas cloud in space.

According to Phil Plait, of the Bad Astronomy blog, “Images like this are more than jaw-droppingly pretty; they tell us a lot about the way stars die—for example, the length of the tail and the speed of the stars’ motion tell us the nebula is probably about 100,000 years old. The part of the downwind tail is older, so we can puzzle out the history of the stars over time, too.”

Photo: Courtesy of NASA. Eskimo Nebula

The NGC 2392 planetary nebula looks like a cosmic eyeball to me, although it is nicknamed the “Eskimo Nebula.” X-rays submitted in July (2013) from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory show super-heated, million-degree gas (pink) “pupil” around the dense, hot core of the star. Our sun will become a planetary nebula about 5 billion years from now. Data from the Hubble Space Telescope show the multi-colored “iris” — the intricate pattern of the outer layers of the star that have been ejected.

Photo: Courtesy of Chandra X-ray Observatory. Cat’s Eye Nebula

A composite image of NGC 6826 was included in a gallery of planetary nebulae released in 2012. A paper describing these results is available online and was published in the April 10th, 2013 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

Read about the beauty of Clouds all this week, as it relates to Arts/Design, Nature/Science, Food/Drink, Place/Time, Mind/Body, and Soul/Impact including Head in Clouds, Feet on Ground,The Wild Beauty of Clouds, New Clouds, New Life, New Beauty, New Tastes as Light as Cloud, The New Art of Clouds, and Cloud Trip are a Trip!