CogBlog

also, would someone who believed they had an image of the Virgin Mary acutally sell it on ebay? this just makes it seem like she is using religion to earn a profit. If I were to believe that my sandwich held a sacred image I would either want to donate it to a museum or keep it for myself!

Megan Slosson makes a very interesting point about how an individuals desire to "see a sign" in order to confirm ones own belief's can be over powering. Since many religious beliefs are ultimately grounded in faith we oftentimes seek concrete evidence to back up our convictions. For that woman, "seeing" the Virgin Mary in the grilled cheese validates her belief in God, and therefore, she contorted the scattered char marks to construct a religious image. When this woman claimed this, other believers were able to see the image as well since they were probably also searching for religious validation. This "power of suggestion" is why it was so successful on ebay. As I read this story, I also thought about how it was similar to the Shroud of Turin. People are debating whether this artifact is the burial cloth of christ, because of an imprint that resembles the full body of Jesus with all the wound marks. However, before we get into whether this is authentic or fraudulent, one must wonder who suggested it was Jesus in the first place? After all, as pointed out in the article, we do not even know what Jesus looks like. At first glance, the Shroud seems like a dirty piece of cloth, but given the preconceived notion that it is Jesus, the image seems to appear. Is this because we are constantly searching for proof of our religious beliefs? Below I have added a picture of the Shroud of Turin incase anybody has any further comments on it or has never seen it before: http://www.graincon.com/sitebuilder/images/shrdbig2-600x286.jpg

One of the theories of the ways in which perception operates and which deals explicitly with why we make so much use of stored knowledge is the constructivist theory. The constructivist theory proposes that it is necessary for us to ‘construct’ our perception of what we see from incomplete sensory information, such as the scattered char marks on the bread. We use what we already know (our expectations to see Virgin Mary, and our template for what Virgin Mary looks like) to fill in the gaps and interpret the sensory information coming in and create a final coherent image. The cow example in the book is similar to the grilled cheese phenomenon. The cow picture is not all clear and appears first as a random assortment of blobs. It is difficult to perceive a picture of a cow until one knows to look for a cow. The constructivist theories thus emphasize a strong interaction between sensory information moving bottom-up and knowledge moving top-down to determine what we ultimately perceive.

PS- Grilled cheese is yummy

I like Megan's explanation of our need to see things, especially our need for religion and signs. Perception seems to be influenced by human needs to see things, perhaps not as they truly are, but as how we need them to be. I'm not sure I would have seen the Virgin Mary in the grilled cheese I didn't know what I was looking for. It takes one person to influence countless others in seeing this phenomena in a sandwich. I remember spending PE classes outside looking at clouds, and only being able to see shapes as animals or people after another classmate pointed out the features and explained how it looked similar to some animal or person. In this way, perhaps others have a major influence on perception as well?

I think that Laura makes very valid points about how knowledge affects perception and that this top-down approach of looking at the grilled cheese allows us to see a face in the burnt bread. This however does not explain how one or many people can look at an object and perceive an image within a pattern or lack thereof. I think part of this can be explained by an individual's need or desire to see something in order to either entertain him/herself or to confirm his/her faith and beliefs. In this example the woman may have seen this image of the virgin mary because she was subconciously searching for a sign that god is present in her life and that her faith is legitimate. On a more frivolous note, the same concepts can be applied to children finding animal shapes in the clouds, or seeing the markings of a face or animal in the marble on my bathroom floor. Maybe we see these things not because they are actually there, but simply because we want them to be there.

Had someone not told me that there was Virgin Mary's face in the grilled cheese I probably wouldn't have associated the grill marks as a human face, but once this idea is in my head it is impossible for me not to see the face and my perception is forever changed. In this demonstration there is a strong interaction between sensory information moving 'bottom-up' and knowledge moving 'top-down'. Because I had been giving information about the picture before I looked at the picture, I immediately saw the face in the grilled cheese; this is an example of knowledge influencing perception.If I had not been giving the information until after my first look at the grilled cheese, my second look at the grilled cheese would have revealed a totally different perception of it. No sensory aspects of the picture have changed at all, but what I know about the picture has changed, and this has changed my perception of it. The grilled cheese demonstrates how knowledge effects perception. "We see things not as they are but as we are". My perception of the grilled cheese will forever be of Virgin Mary's face.

The grilled cheese demonstrates how strong the power of suggestion is. To most people, the grilled cheese sandwich would just look like a burned piece of bread. But for some reason, the burn marks fit into this woman's schema of the Virgin Mary. Although most people may see only burn marks at first, once it is suggested to them, they can only see the outline of Mary. Just as our visual system turns the "hollow" mask of Einstein's face to the normal, convex human face because we expect to see a normal face, our brain perceives the grill marks as Mary because that is what we expect to see. This same phenomenon occurs in the circle with horizontal and vertical lines that appears to be a face and other similar illusions. Once something is suggested to us, we perceive that image, regardless of what is truly there. Our cognitive process are easily tricked and are ready to incorporate visual signals into our existing schemas.

Given what we know now about perception, to begin with, the grilled cheese sandwich is a regular grilled cheese sandwich. It happens to have markings and a texture that look a lot like what we expect a face to look like. Since the sandwich's markings look similar to our preconceived template of a face, we settle on this conclusion.
The jump to the "face" being that of the Virgin Mary is much less understandable. After looking at the "face" in the grilled cheese sandwich, I actually don't think that it looks at all like the face that I associate with the Virgin Mary's. The most likely explanation is that the sandwich's owner probably saw the face in the sandwich, decided it looked like what she considers Mary to look like, showed it to people as the Virgin Mary's face, these people, having had the sandwich face presented to them as such, readily saw the "resemblance," and accepted that the face was Mary's. In other words, since the sandwich owner's mental template of the Virgin Mary's face could be applied to the sandwich face, she decided that that was whose face was there, and everyone else followed her logic.
I think the most compelling argument here is actually from the man who wrote the "Cheesus Christ" article that says that the sandwich face actually most closely resembles Rita Hayworth.