GurtTractor wrote:

Yeah until I have such an experience it's hard for me to say definitively what I would think in such a scenario, but I think I would ascribe it to something not-yet-understood or my mind tricking me, based on what bits and pieces I've learnt so far about how our minds work.

My current rough understanding of our minds is that we recognise patterns and our brain basically continually predicts everything, which feels counter-intuitive when you first hear about it but I think it makes a lot of sense. Lisa Feldman Barret talks about this -

For instance, consider the fourth lesson, You Brain Predicts (Almost) Everything You Do. “Neuroscientists like to say that your day-today experience is a carefully controlled hallucination, constrained by the world and your body but ultimately constructed by your brain,” writes Dr. Barrett, who is a University Distinguished Professor at Northeastern and who has research appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. “It’s an everyday kind of hallucination that creates all of your experiences and guides all your actions. It’s the normal way that your brain gives meaning to the sensory inputs from your body and from the world (called “sense data”), and you’re almost always unaware that it’s happening.”

People tend to feel like we’re reacting to what’s actually happening in the world. But what’s really happening is that your brain is drawing on your deep backlog of experience and memory, constructing what it believes to be your reality, cross-referencing it with incoming sense data from your heart, lungs, metabolism, immune system, as well as the surrounding world, and adjusting as needed. In other words, in a process that even Dr. Barrett admits “defies common sense,” you’re almost always acting on the predictions that your brain is making about what’s going to happen next, not reacting to experience as it unfolds. (Michael Pollan details the same neurological process in his book How to Change Your Mind.)

“Predictions transform flashes of light into the objects you see. They turn changes in air pressure into recognisable sounds, and traces of chemicals into smells and tastes. Predictions let you read the squiggles on this page and understand them as letters and words and ideas,” Barrett writes. “They’re also the reason why it feels unsatisfying when a sentence is missing its final.”

https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/lifestyle/article/how-your-brain-works

I think this is relevant because when you have a predisposition to believe in the supernatural, it means that in situations where you are presented with a phenomena that doesn't fit into any current understanding, your mind will tend to rapidly build or predict an explanation for it. Like how we often see faces in things, we've built up an understanding and a pattern for what a thing looks like and when we see something that happens to match that pattern we can't help but see it as a face.

GurtTractor wrote:

That illusion seems to work better if it's smaller actually -

Spoiler: