Eli5: Why do/did (not sure if it’s still in practice) therapists hold up black and white splatter looking images and ask the client “what do you see?” What could their answer say about that person?
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The brain is good at seeing patterns in noise. When you look at a cloud, you might see shapes. When you close your eyes at night, you see clouds of blackness that sometimes take shape and then begin to influence your dreams.
It’s possible to “prime” pattern recognition in your brain. For instance, if you just had a random pile of peas on your plate, you might not notice a pattern to them. But if you started a game where you identified letters in your peas, then suddenly the same patterns that you use to read Reddit let you find letters in your peas that you wouldn’t have noticed before. Your pattern matching ability has been primed based on your state of mind at the moment.
The theory here is that when you look at abstract ink blobs, in the absence of any specific prompting, the patterns that you’re most likely to see are ones more associated with your current mental state. Someone who has recently fantasized about a person or a place might be more likely to pattern match on shapes related to that person or place, and that’s what they will say they see in the ink blot. Someone who has recently spent a lot of time thinking about a recent trauma might be more likely to see patterns related to their trauma. It’s whatever unconscious associations that might exist in the brain that are connected to what’s on your mind.
It’s basically at about the same level of usefulness as dream interpretation, since dreams evolve in similar ways, which is to say it’s not very useful.
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