Pareidolia, Seeing Faces And Figures Where There Are None
The world is a complex place, untamed, and exists regardless of our ability to recognize it. The landscapes pile up on each other, overlapping (or not overlapping) and crowding into mountain ranges, fjords and rainforests. The wind causes the canvas of clouds that cover the sky to constantly change, and beneath them their own shadows parade, trying to follow them hastily, sliding over the irregular topography of the globe.
Every twenty-four hours light comes and goes and everything that has the property of reflecting it changes its appearance completely. Even on a smaller scale, our possibilities of knowing directly through our senses do not improve.
Animal life, endowed with autonomous movement, is characterized by changing place, shape and appearance infinite times throughout a generation, and changes in light frequencies, added to the continuous change of place and position of our bodies, make that the raw data of everything we perceive is a chaos impossible to understand.
Pareidolia as a way of finding meaning
Luckily, our brain is equipped with some mechanisms to recognize patterns and continuities in the midst of all that sensory chaos. Neural networks are the perfect means to create systems that always activate the same when faced with apparently different stimuli. Hence, we can recognize the people close to us despite their physical and psychological changes. Hence we can also apply similar strategies in different contexts, apply what we have learned to different situations and even recognize plagiarism in a piece of music. However, this ability also has a very striking side effect called pareidolia
Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon consisting of the recognition of meaningful patterns (such as faces) in ambiguous and random stimuli. Look, for example, at this duck:
Once you have realized that its beak looks like a cartoonish dog’s head, you will never be able to stop having this effect every time you see a duck of this type. But not all pareidolias are as discreet as this one. Evolutionarily we have developed neural networks responsible for process relevant stimuli so that some patterns become much more evident to us than others.
In fact, at some point in our evolution the visual system with which we are equipped became incredibly sensitive to those stimuli that remind us of human faces, a part of the body that is of great importance for non-verbal communication. Later, at a point in our history we became capable of making countless objects following simple, recognizable and regular patterns. And at that moment the party began:
Fusiform gyrus: our face radar
Our brains are equipped with specific circuits that are activated to process visual information related to faces differently from other data, and the part of the brain that contains these circuits is also responsible for the phenomenon of pareidolia.
This structure is called fusiform gyrus, and in a matter of hundredths of a second it makes us see faces where there are, but also where there are none. Furthermore, when this second possibility occurs we cannot help but have the strong sensation of looking at someone, even if that someone is actually a faucet, a rock or a facade. That’s the subconscious power of the fusiform gyrus: whether we want it or not, it will activate every time we see something vaguely reminiscent of a face. It is the counterpart for having designed a brain that is prepared to face a large number of changing and unpredictable stimuli.
So, although because of these pareidolias we sometimes feel watched…
…and although sometimes we notice that we have missed a joke…
One of the many great things about the human brain
…it is good to remember that these phenomena have their reason for being in the special treatment that our brain gives to the patterns that can be read in the full comings and goings of confusing images. Our brains make us wise, but nature makes our brains useful. Starting today, when your brain detects a face where there is only one object, you will also remember this article.
