Pareidolia

German psychiatrist Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum coined the term in his 1866 paper Die Sinnesdelierien ("On Delusions of the Senses"); the English form first appeared in The Journal of Mental Science in 1867. The word derives from Greek pará ("beside") + eídōlon ("image") — a secondary perception alongside the real stimulus. Leonardo da Vinci had described the same tendency in his notebooks around 1490, advising artists to find figures in stained walls, though the broader concept of finding spurious patterns is called apophenia, coined by Klaus Conrad in 1958.