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Most people have never heard of pareidolia. But nearly everyone has experienced
it.
Anyone who has looked at the Moon and spotted two eyes, a nose and a mouth has
felt the pull of pareidolia.
It's "the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not
actually exist", according to the World English Dictionary. It's picking a face
out of a knotted tree trunk or finding zoo animals in the clouds.
German design studio Onformative is undertaking perhaps the world's largest and
most systematic search for pareidolia. Their Google Faces programme will spend
the next few months sniffing out face-like shapes in Google Maps.
Nun bun and Mother Teresa Mother Teresa took exception to a Nashville diner
selling "nun bun" merchandise
Google Faces will scan the entire globe several times over from different
angles. So far the programme has pinpointed an eerie profile in Russia's remote
Magadan Oblast region, a fellow with hairy nostrils next to Priory Road in
Ashford, Kent, and a mangy creature in the mountains of Alaska, among others.
Start Quote
Seeing Jesus's face in toast is telling you more about your expectations
Neuroscientist Sophie Scott
It's certainly not the first to uncover faces where they don't actually exist.
This week, US department store JC Penney sold out of a kettle thought to look
like the leader of the Third Reich after the resemblance was noted on social
news site Reddit.
A chicken nugget shaped like US President George Washington earned more than
5,000 ($8,100) on eBay last year.
A decade earlier, some 20,000 Christians travelled to Bangalore to pay homage
to a chapatti with the image of Christ burnt on it. Some visitors even offered
prayers to the glass-encased flatbread.
In 2011 a Tumblr site that specialises in finding things that look like Hitler
posted a photo of a modest terraced house in Swansea. Its angled roof resembles
a comb-over, and the moulding over the house's door is said to evoke the
dictator's trademark moustache.
Hitler (left, PA photo); house in Swansea (right, photo by Charli Dickenson)
In 2009 the Allen family of Ystrad, Rhondda, spotted the face of Jesus on the
underside of a Marmite lid. Instead of the usual mundane brown smears, they
found a "comforting" image and saved the top after finishing off the jar.
And American Diana Duyser took a bite out of a cheese toastie in 1994 only to
find herself face-to-face with what looked to her like the Virgin Mary. She
noticed the Madonna's burnt image on the bread after the first bite and saved
the rest of the sandwich for over a decade.
Diana Duyser and her toasted cheese sandwich Diana Duyser and her holy toastie
Duyser put it up for auction on eBay where it drew 1.7 million hits and
eventually sold for about $28,000 ( 18,500).
Google Faces designers Cedric Kiefer and Julia Laub were also inspired by
pareidolia.
After seeing the famous "Face in Mars" snapped by the Viking 1 Orbiter in 1976
and playing around with facial recognition technology, they became curious
about "how the psychological phenomenon of pareidolia could be generated by a
machine", Kiefer says.
Face on Mars, photographed in 1976 (left), and a more recent hi-res image The
Face in Mars photo from 1976, and a more recent close-up
They didn't expect their project to be a big deal, but soon their photos of
faces in the Russian tundra and rural Britain were spreading across the web.
"It seems like there is something fascinating about pareidolia," Kiefer says.
While some countenances resemble cartoon characters and abstract art, other
images appear almost "too real to believe it's just coincidence", he adds.
But why do people see faces in what is quite literally nothing more than a
stain, a splotch or a strange rock formation?
Some of that is our evolutionary heritage, says Dr Nouchine Hadjikhani of
Harvard University. Humans are "prewired" to detect faces from birth, she says.
"If you take a baby just after a few minutes of life, he will direct his
attention toward something that has the general features of a face versus
something that has the same elements but in a random order," she says.
And the tendency to pick out familiar figures goes back to the first humans,
says Christopher French of the British Psychological Society.
"We've evolved brains that think in these quick, dirty ways that are usually
right, but at times can lead us to systematically be biased," he explains.
Pareidolia: Why we see faces in hills, the Moon and toasties
"A classic example is the Stone Age guy standing there, scratching his beard,
wondering whether that rustling in the bushes really is a sabre-toothed tiger.
You're much more likely to survive if you assume it's a sabre-toothed tiger and
get the hell out of there - otherwise you may end up as lunch."
Other experts say pareidolia is a consequence of the brain's information
processing systems. The brain is constantly sifting through random lines,
shapes, surfaces and colours, says Joel Voss, a neuroscientist at Northwestern
University.
Makeshift shrine to a likeness of Virgin Mary on a baking tray in Houston,
Texas, 2007 Guadalupe Rodriguez saw the Virgin on a cafeteria baking tray in
Texas
It makes sense of these images by assigning meaning to them - usually by
matching them to something stored in long-term knowledge. But sometimes things
that are slightly "ambiguous" get matched up with things we can name more
easily - resulting in pareidolia, he says.
Pareidolia can also be a product of people's expectations, says neuroscientist
Sophie Scott, of University College London.
"Being able to see Jesus's face in toast is telling you more about what's
happening with your expectations, and how you're interpreting the world based
on your expectations, rather than anything that's necessarily in the toast,"
she says.
And once the Virgin's face or George Washington's profile are spotted, it's
virtually impossible to unsee them, says Bruce Hood, author of The Self
Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity.
"That's one of the things about illusions, they have this remarkable tendency
to formulate in your mind, and it's very difficult to unthink them," he says.
Hearing voices in white noise
Advocates of Electronic Voice Projection (EVP) claim they can use radio
equipment to communicate with the dead. But are they just hearing what they
want to hear?
EVP is a standard tool of ghost hunters worldwide. Many well-educated people
see it as proof positive that the dead are trying to talk to us.
The simplest explanation is that EVP voices are just stray radio transmissions.
Usually they are so faint and masked by static interference that it's hard to
make out what they are saying, and the EVP investigator has to "interpret" them
for you.
But we are naturally well-adapted by evolution to imaginatively reconstruct
speech against a noisy background.
The people who think they hear dead voices
But simply spotting a face in a morsel of food or a fence doesn't explain why
some people spend thousands of pounds to buy it or make a pilgrimage to see it.
Pareidolia can be extremely evocative - especially if a person believes in
miracles, Scott says.
"It's an incredibly strong demonstration of how powerful these perceptual
effects are. We really want to see things like faces, we really want to hear
things like voices, and our perceptual system will set out to do that," she
adds.
For some, pareidolia stands as evidence of the supernatural, Hood says. "People
will seek out these sorts of things for some sort of intervention."
The object itself can also take on special significance, says French. People
assume that if it has been divinely produced, then it has been "touched by God"
and "will bring good fortune", he says.
But you don't have to be particularly religious to appreciate pareidolia.
"I don't for one minute think there's any kind of religious significance or
anything else in them," French says. "But hey, they're pretty neat, aren't
they?"