Looking at your dinner, you usually don't expect him to stare back at you. But when Diana Duizer once brought a toast with cheese to her mouth, she was quite surprised.

"I was about to bite off a piece when I suddenly saw a woman's face looking at me. At first I was scared," she told the Chicago Tribune.

Rumors about this incident spread more and more, and in the end, one casino paid Duizer $ 28,000 for her permission to put an amazing toast there for public viewing. Many viewers catch in the soft and calm features of this female face a resemblance to the Madonna, the Mother of God, but it always seemed to me that curls, parted lips and heavy eyelids rather resemble Madonna, a modern, popular singer.

Be that as it may, this toast portrait was in well-deserved company: on a piece of fried bread, they also saw the image of Jesus, whose face allegedly also appeared at different times on a corn tortilla, a pancake and a banana peel.

“If someone claims to have seen Jesus on a piece of toast, then there is a temptation to think that this person does not have everything at home,” says Ken Lee from the University of Toronto in Canada. “But in fact this is a very common phenomenon. that we see faces in a variety of objects in the visual environment".

Lee proved that this is not evidence of divine intervention at all, but that a person's imagination has a very large influence on his perception. And indeed, after listening to his explanation, you involuntarily think about whether you can trust your own eyes.

Our vision turns out to be more subjective than we think - we sometimes see exactly what we want to see.

In the circle of specialists, this phenomenon is known as pareidolia, or a visual illusion of fantastic content. Leonardo da Vinci wrote that he saw some symbols in natural cracks and scratches on stone walls. He believed that these strokes inspired him to create new works of art. In the 1950s, the Bank of Canada was forced to withdraw a series of banknotes from circulation because they allegedly had a grinning devil peeking out of the waves of the hair in the royal portrait (although personally, with all my efforts, I can’t make out any horns in Her Majesty’s curls). And the Viking 1 spacecraft captured what looked like a face on the surface of Mars.

These days, social media makes it easy to share these finds with the world. Try, for example, to search for the hashtag #iseefaces - and you will see, for example, a wise gnome ingrown into a tree, an urn joyfully welcoming you and evil cookies that are not happy with anyone.
Once you see a face in an inanimate object, they begin to appear everywhere. Some of these objects really do resemble the emoticons we use to convey emotions in texting: two circles for eyes and a line for a mouth. But sometimes strange creatures peek out from the most seemingly unexpected places.

In one of his experiments, Lee showed subjects chaotic gray ornaments, reminiscent of flickering dots on a TV screen with the antenna turned off. The researcher encouraged the participants in the experiment to see a face in them, and the participants in the experiment in 34% of cases stated that they succeeded. The facial features in these blurry pictures could only be seen with a very big stretch, but, nevertheless, the brain helpfully gave out the desired illusion.

"The phenomenon appears to be fairly easy to induce," Lee states.
We tend to believe that our eyes regularly convey to us a picture of the world around us, but in fact, the signals coming from the retina are far from ideal, and the brain has to correct them.

According to Lee, it is this correction that explains pareidolia.
Seeing the slanted "eyes" on the facade of the house, we also sometimes involuntarily try to see what they are staring at. The brain is trying to determine what we are currently seeing, relying, among other things, on our previous experience and supplementing the visible image with these expectations.

In this way, he manages to form a relatively complete picture, even if the elements of the surrounding space, for example, are hidden by darkness or fog. But, on the other hand, due to this, our vision turns out to be more subjective than we think - that is, we really sometimes see exactly what we want to see. To test this hypothesis, Lee scanned the subjects' brains while they looked at pictures of random gray dots.

As expected, during the initial recognition of basic image features (such as color and shape), there was increased activity in the primary visual cortex.
But the researcher also noticed that at the moment when the subjects reported seeing a face, the frontal and occipital lobes, which experts believe are responsible for memory and complex thought processes such as planning, were involved in the process. The burst of neural activity in these areas may indicate that expectations and experiences are at play, as Lee anticipated.

In turn, these processes excited the so-called right fusiform facial area, which reacts to faces - perhaps at this moment there is a feeling that you are looking at an animated being. "If this zone is activated, we understand that they are now 'seeing' the face," says Lee.

Now it becomes more clear why the "faces" of objects cause us the same subconscious reaction as human ones. So, last year, a group of Japanese researchers noted that people try to follow the direction of an inanimate "look" - just like we do when communicating with an interlocutor.

In other words, when we see slanted "eyes" on the facade of the house, we also sometimes involuntarily try to see what they are staring at. Lee's experiment helped establish which regions of the brain might be involved in this process, but it doesn't explain why we tend to see faces at all. Perhaps it is because we see so many faces in our daily lives and therefore expect to see them everywhere. It is also possible that our tendency to see faces has a deeper evolutionary explanation.

Human survival depends very much on the people around us: we ask them for help or fear their aggression, and therefore we need to quickly understand their motives and respond accordingly. Probably, the brain is initially set to recognize people at the first opportunity. It is much less dangerous to make a mistake and see facial features in the tree bark than to overlook an intruder hiding in the bushes.

Other scholars also suggest that a similar mechanism may underlie human spirituality. This hypothesis comes from the fact that our brain, predisposed to understand people and their motivation, tries to see human intentions in everything that surrounds us - in a thunderstorm, a plague, or in a frightening and abstract concept of death.

To deal with our fears, we begin to personify them, populating the world with gods and demons. Tapani Riekki and colleagues at the University of Helsinki in Finland found that religious people are more likely to see faces in blurry pictures than atheists. Be that as it may, the strength of our convictions can at least explain why some see the Mother of God on a piece of toasted bread, and I see the queen of the pop scene. Here is a picture for you. Do you see Jesus on it?

But perhaps the most common form of pareidolia in the Western world is seeing the faces of cars, or rather the front of them. Sonia Windhager from the University of Vienna went to the Ethiopian hinterland to find out if this phenomenon is observed there.

Asking questions to people she happened to meet on the streets and in small cafes, at first she encountered incomprehension. "They thought we were a little crazy," she says. But while Ethiopians may not be particularly familiar with Disney's Cars or the adventures of Herbie in Crazy Racing, they soon understood the purpose of the study and began to evaluate the appearance of cars in photographs in much the same way as Europeans.

For example, cars with large windshields, round headlights and a small grille were perceived as young and feminine, while cars with flatter headlights and a massive underbody were seen as older and masculine. According to Windhager, this suggests that our brains are programmed to read basic biological information (age, gender) from any object that even remotely resembles a face.

And, according to the researcher, this also points to the evolutionary origin of pareidolia. "It's interesting to see how things in today's environment are still perceived by us according to these ancient mechanisms," she notes.

In other experiments, Windhager found that consumers generally prefer cars that look impressive - a trait that automakers are exploiting with might and main. The aggressive expression of car headlights could, in theory, cause nearby drivers to act aggressively or more nervously.

So, in 2006, the Wall Street Journal wrote that sales of "cute cars" such as the legendary "Volkswagen Beetle" began to decline - probably because their owners were oppressed by the ever-growing number of large SUVs around. Therefore, the designers decided to draw more aggressive cars. The Dodge Charger, for example, received stern-looking slit headlights.

"It's like we're making eye contact with the headlights the same way we're making eye contact with passers-by on the street," says Chrysler designer Ralph Gills. However, Windhager wondered if the illusion of a car's gaze could affect traffic safety. "Perhaps the kids might think the car sees them and won't get out of the way," she suggests, adding that the headlights' aggressive expression could in theory cause nearby drivers to act aggressively or more nervously.

Similar psychological effects can be observed in other areas of our lives.
Various studies have shown that a simple picture of a pair of eyes hanging on a wall can make people behave more honestly, and with this simple trick, in some areas, it was possible to reduce the number of bicycle thefts by 60%.

And it would be interesting to know whether thieves are less likely to break into houses whose facades show a face. There is something striking about the fact that the randomly matched visuals that people submit to #iseefaces can have a real impact on our behavior. We no longer inhabit the unknown world with fictional spirits in such numbers as our ancestors did, but to this day we see ghostly faces in cars, houses and social media feeds. But at least these creatures can give even the most soulless and ugly place some spark of humor and life.

Doctor of Psychology Valery Rozanov

If you see faces in objects, you are normal!

Do you remember how, as a child, you looked at the patterns on the carpet or on the wallpaper - and found in them big-nosed and eared monsters, smiling or threatening grimaces? But no one like that was hiding there! Some innocent patterns. Many people retain the ability to "see the gopher where it is not," and at a respectable age. This phenomenon has a beautiful scientific name - "pareidolia".

Psychological handbooks call it “perceptual disturbance.” But in general, if you wish, you can find this phenomenon anywhere. Strictly speaking, clouds are not white-maned horses at all. And even a smiley is by no means an image of a human smile: it's just two dots and a bracket. Have you ever seen two dots and a bracket on a smiling face? Something...

The Internet amuses itself by finding faces on Google maps and drunken octopuses shaped like clothes hooks. So all of us, baby, are a little pareidolic ... But some are especially. And those around you are actively infecting!

Mars attacks!

Take, for example, space explorers. It seems that serious people do not hunt for ghosts for how much in vain ... But no: in the pictures of the hills of the Martian region of Cydonia, taken by the American Viking-1 in 1976, everyone unanimously saw a certain face. And off we go: this is our “Sad Angel”, and here we have the ruins of an ancient city, and there are pyramids, and the hill is generally a phallic symbol of the origin of life ... From one play of light and shadow in the human brain, another extraterrestrial civilization.

Holy Virgin on a sandwich

But fans of science fiction - that's okay, they read and write beautiful myths for themselves and don't particularly touch anyone. But how about going thousands of miles away to bow to… a flatbread? And in 2002, this is exactly what happened: 20,000 (twenty thousand!) Pilgrims descended on the Indian city of Bangalore to India to see the “face of Christ”, which mystically appeared on a chapati cake. And the American lady-designer Diana Dizer kept the sandwich that showed her the “image of the Virgin Mary” for ten years. Only then was she able to part with the relic. For $28,000. And they did buy it!

funny cars

The pareidolic effect is deliberately used by manufacturers. For example, bottles and bottles are given seductive curves so that the subconscious associates them with a female figure, and cars are given individual “facial expressions” depending on the “character” that will attract the consumer: aggressive, assertive or cute.

Load face from cache

Where does this property come from - to see in a banana not just a banana, that is, at every step to find, if not a divine face, then a funny face? Of course, this is a trick of the brain. He reads the information lying on us from the outside, very quickly - but very approximately. Since he already has certain connections and associations in his “RAM” (or in his “cache”), the main of which is: stick-stick-cucumber is clearly Homo sapiens. Our customized “face recognition program” works in one-fifth of a second. And it is the outlines of the face that she gladly substitutes wherever she hits and how much in vain.

Where do ears grow from?

And why do some people see this goodness more and others less? Opinions of specialists, as usual, differ. Patterns and versions here are the following.

• Those who believe in God (gods, demons, the universal mind, the supernatural - underline as necessary) tend to find images of the animate in the inanimate many times more often: in shadows, mountain bends, chips, fish cakes and any other objects. Starting with the Shroud of Turin, the origin of which we, mind you, will not discuss;)
• In the fair sex, the tendency to pareidolia is more common than in the representatives of the strong.
• Similar effects often arise and flourish in the brain under the influence of psychotropic substances or in the initial (that is, initial) stages of acute psychoses.
• As it was said, we automatically “substitute” the seen details into the overall picture, without processing each separately - to save time. This is the basis for the well-known effect of texts such as “According to rzelulattas, there is an odongo English unviertiset, not ieemt zachneiya, in kokam the texts are written in solva”. Everything is wrong, but it still reads quickly and unambiguously.

• However, first of all, the human brain is programmed to search for and recognize faces - and this feature “starts” from the very beginning. A newborn child first of all singles out the faces of people who are next to him from the surrounding reality.
• One of the theories of the origin of the pareidolia effect is built on this: they say that the ability to recognize faces at a great distance or in fog was so important for our distant ancestors that evolution diligently developed it for survival - until it developed in places to the level of Diana Dyser with her divine sandwich.
• Some psychologists believe that if a person in his usual everyday state has this feature well developed, this is one of the signs of a high level of neuroticism.
• However, it is also a sign of a creative and subtle nature. So if you see an elf in every curl on the upholstery, and a dragon in every fold of the blanket, it means that you have a fine mental organization and developed creative abilities!

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The human imagination is able to create visual images not only on the "mental screen", but also everywhere, wherever the eye falls. This psychological phenomenon is called pareidolia.

How does pareidolia work?

You rest, relax, think about something and look at one point. Focus on whimsical wallpaper patterns that suddenly appear as a face. You shift your gaze to the curtains - the same face is there.

Each of us is able to see distinct visual images in any surrounding object. It all depends on what your thoughts are currently busy with and what mood you are in. Sometimes it even seems that the surrounding objects seem to come to life.

The word pareidolia is formed from a combination - para (near or deviation from something) and eidolon (image). We are talking about the ability to distinguish between animate and inanimate objects in various visual images.

And this ability is characteristic not only for modern man. The American cosmologist Carl Sagan, for example, believes that it was largely thanks to pareidolia that the ancient man managed to survive. It was enough for our ancestors, like us today, to cast a fleeting glance in order to "count" the information in the surrounding space and judge the approach of friend or foe.

In some cases, the phenomenon of pareidolia is associated with false sightings of unidentified flying objects or ghosts. Of course, each specific case requires a separate and thorough study. Not everything can be attributed to pareidolia, but, you see, how easy it is to see restless ghosts even in a flame of fire.

"Live" images in culinary masterpieces

A sound sleep at night and a vigorous awakening in the morning set a positive tone for a new day. Then even morning coffee in a cup will “smile” at you.

At breakfast, you can also consider a strange face of alien origin in such a familiar dish as scrambled eggs.

In the process of cooking, the phenomenon of pareidolia occurs especially often. Ideas for fantasies are sometimes given by nature itself, creating fruits, vegetables and other products of an unusual and reminiscent of living beings form.

religious fantasies

Studies show that much more often the phenomenon of pareidolia has a religious connotation. Scientists from Finland devoted their research to this topic. It turned out that it is easier for believers to see the “faces of saints” or other images associated with their religion in the environment.

For example, Diana Dueser from Miami not only saw the image of the Virgin Mary in the burnt cheese toast, but also put up a valuable lot for sale on the eBay Internet site.

Army of living mechanisms

Where there is a wide scope for imagination, it is household appliances and other objects around us. Before you is a whole series of photographs in which you will surely be able to discern the signs of a living being. Some of them seem to smile, others freeze in horror. In a word, they express that rich range of emotions that people themselves usually experience.

Illusions of pareidolia in creativity

The phenomenon of pareidolia since ancient times has become widespread in the works of famous painters. Leonardo da Vinci himself described this phenomenon as one of the artistic techniques. Often and skillfully, the Hungarian master Istvan Oros also uses it in his series of engravings, in each of which you can see the mystical skull.

Modern animation experts will confirm that it is not only on furniture and electrical appliances that people tend to see some semblance of faces. You can add elements of animation to almost any geometric figure. It is enough to put a dot in its area.

This explains the popularity of emoticons used on the Internet. The easiest option is to put two dots and draw a short line below them. Anyone who looks at this abstract image will immediately have associations with a human face: the dots are two eyes, the line is a mouth.

The phenomenon of pareidolia today is able to imitate even electronic systems and digital cameras. An interesting experiment related to the phenomenon of pareidolia was carried out by a group of Korean photo artists. As part of the project, specialists created a whole series of photographs of the sky. In a number of shots, the clouds change shape, often resembling human faces.

The camera was connected to a computer system, one of the programs of which is capable of recognizing faces. As a result, the camera captured images in the cloudy sky that a person can see by fantasizing. Most often, these are, of course, faces.

The thin line between love and hate

Research shows that the same images can be perceived differently by different people. And the more abstraction, the less the likelihood of negative emotions, or rather the “uncanny valley” effect, described by the Japanese Masahiro Mori in 1978.

The scientist studied what emotions people experience when they see robots that look like themselves. It turned out that if an anthropomorphic object is too naturalistic, a person's dislike sharply arises.

When robots generally resembled people, but did not copy them, the emotions were extremely positive. The most realistic robots ceased to be "cute" and caused fear, because they seemed to be real people, but at the same time abnormal.

"Human features" of cars

The phenomenon of pareidolia is often observed in the automotive industry. It is noticed that the front of the car, under certain conditions, is similar to a human face. Anthropomorphism works great when image and form perform similar functions. For example, car headlights resemble human eyes. In some car models, this is especially noticeable, although no one purposefully strives for such similarity.

This effect was clearly demonstrated by Pixar in the animated film "Cars", in which cars were successfully "humanized".

P.S. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning car critic Dan Neil, automakers sometimes take this step by incorporating elements that evoke associations with the human face into the design of cars. True, pareidolia does not always increase sales. The main thing in this matter is not to overdo it with the game on images in the subconscious.

Have you ever wondered why our brain sees faces in a wide variety of objects? Sometimes, peering into a gloomy cloud, we understand that it looks like the twisted face of a terrible giant. Looking at our morning toast, we realize that melted cheese has formed a woman's face on toasted bread. Often such finds can be found in the forest. Going for a walk in the forest, you may find that a strange growth has formed a semblance of a gnome's face on an oak trunk.

strange visions

The most frequent vision that people guessed in their food can be considered the face of Jesus Christ. Wherever His bright image did not appear: on pancakes, fried toast, corn tortillas and even banana peels. A photograph of sweet peppers spread around the world, in which the resemblance to famous British politicians was clearly guessed. If you notice that the face of the Madonna is encrypted on the surface of some object and tell people about it, they may consider you crazy. Do not rush to be offended, just show them a unique item. We bet your opponents will see the same thing.

Pareidolia

Psychologists explain this phenomenon in this way. It turns out that the human imagination has a powerful influence on visual perception. Human nature is programmed to perceive images in various environmental objects. The phenomenon of visual illusion with fantastic content is called pareidolia.

From Leonardo da Vinci to the present day

The great artist Leonardo da Vinci admitted that he could recognize hidden images in the natural fractures of stone walls. According to the master, it was these symbols that inspired him to create another masterpiece.

In the 1950s, an amazing thing happened in Canada. A batch of banknotes was withdrawn from circulation, in which an encrypted devil “hid” in the royal portrait. I wonder what will happen if you look at the portrait of Catherine II depicted on the hundred banknote of the Russian Empire for a long time? Is it possible that the devil will jump out of there?

The internet is full of images like this.

So, for example, such a case is most famous. A Canadian urologist performed an ultrasound of the scrotum on his patient. Of course, the results were immediately displayed on the monitor. What was the bewilderment of the man when he saw that inside his sex glands a surprised face with an open mouth “hidden”.

These faces are everywhere

Don't be surprised if you see something like this the next time you go to the ultrasound room. You are just too impressionable. Scientists explain this phenomenon as follows: once you notice a face in some thing or natural object, these images will haunt you throughout your life.
Moreover, some illusions can be nothing more than the simplest emoticons: a circle or an oval, two dots instead of eyes and a curved line instead of a mouth. And some can be so complex that they can easily be compared to a work of art.

Visualization in the most unexpected places

It will be interesting to look at how people who took part in various experiments devoted to the study of the phenomenon of visual illusion behave. In one of the experiments, volunteers had to observe chaotic gray ornaments.
Approximately the same images can be observed in a television receiver with the antenna turned off. The subjects were faced with the task of peering into this chaotic image and trying to make out the face lurking among the gray dots. As you understand, no one was hiding in the image, and the task of the participants was to intentionally create a visual illusion.

How to create an illusion?

It turned out that in 34 cases out of 100, the subjects actually managed to create an illusion in their imagination. At least they claim so. But in order to verify the plausibility of their words, you yourself can do something similar by sitting in front of the screen of a tube TV not connected to the cable. Don't expect the images looming before your eyes to be distinct or obvious. The image is too blurry. However, let's pay tribute to the helpfulness of the human brain, because it tries to draw the desired illusion in the imagination. It turns out that if we want, we can easily call this phenomenon from almost any image.

Why is this happening?

The explanation of this fact lies in human eyes. The fact is that they simply cannot convey to us a complete and accurate picture of the outside world. All the signals that enter the retina of the eyes are far from ideal. And it is our brain that processes and corrects the information received through the eyes. At the stage of correction, an illusion occurs, called pareidolia. All our visual images are adjusted to the picture seen before. In other words, if you have never recognized strange faces in some objects, most likely, this will not threaten you in the near future, and vice versa.

In the same way, a whole picture of a street immersed in the morning fog is formed: we walk and recognize objects that are almost hidden. In the same way we navigate in darkness. The brain transfers the information of the room seen earlier and, as it were, layers it on the twilight.

Vision is subjective

On the other hand, it turns out that our vision conveys purely subjective information to us, and in any case we can see what we want? In order to be convinced of this, let's find out how the brain behaves while the eyes are trying to make out the face among small randomly moving gray dots. So, during the experiment that we described to you, various parts of the brain were scanned in the subjects.

At the moment when the volunteers drew in the imagination the basic characteristics (color and shape), the primary visual cortex worked most actively. However, at the moment when the volunteers reported the formation of a complete picture, the frontal and occipital lobes began to work. These departments are responsible for thought processes, memory and planning.

Conclusion

Experts have learned why a person recognizes faces in unexpected objects. They established which parts of the brain are responsible for the process of creating an illusion. However, they never found the real reason for this. We probably see too many faces every day. Perhaps this is the evolutionary reason associated with survival.

Image copyright nottsexminer Flickr CC BY SA 2.0

From the Virgin Mary on a slice of toasted bread to an open-mouthed face in a man's scrotum, why do our brains see these images? This was decided by the correspondent

Looking at your dinner, you usually don't expect him to stare back at you. But when Diana Duizer once brought a toast with cheese to her mouth, she was quite surprised.

"I was about to bite off a piece when I suddenly saw a woman's face looking at me. At first I was scared," she told the Chicago Tribune.

Rumors about this incident spread more and more, and in the end, one casino paid Duizer $ 28,000 for her permission to put an amazing toast there for public viewing.

Many viewers catch in the soft and calm features of this female face a resemblance to the Madonna, the Mother of God, but it always seemed to me that curls, parted lips and heavy eyelids rather resemble Madonna, a modern, popular singer.

Be that as it may, this toast portrait was in well-deserved company: on a piece of fried bread, they also saw the image of Jesus, whose face allegedly also appeared at different times on a corn tortilla, a pancake and a banana peel.

Image copyright AFP Getty Images Warner Bros Records

“If someone claims to have seen Jesus on a piece of toast, then there is a temptation to think that this person does not have everything at home,” says Ken Lee from the University of Toronto in Canada. “But in fact this is a very common phenomenon. that we see faces in a variety of objects in the visual environment".

Lee proved that this is not evidence of divine intervention at all, but that a person's imagination has a very large influence on his perception.

And indeed, after listening to his explanation, you involuntarily think about whether you can trust your own eyes.

Our vision is more subjective than we think - we sometimes see exactly what we want to see.

In the circle of specialists, this phenomenon is known as pareidolia, or a visual illusion of fantastic content.

Leonardo da Vinci wrote that he saw some symbols in natural cracks and scratches on stone walls. He believed that these strokes inspired him to create new works of art.

In the 1950s, the Bank of Canada was forced to withdraw a series of banknotes from circulation because they allegedly had a grinning devil peeking out of the waves of the hair in the royal portrait (although personally, with all my efforts, I can’t make out any horns in Her Majesty’s curls).

And the Viking 1 spacecraft captured what looked like a face on the surface of Mars.

Try, for example, to search for the hashtag #iseefaces - and you will see, for example, a wise gnome ingrown into a tree...

Image copyright Carl Milner Flickr CC BY 2.0

An urn that welcomes you joyfully

Image copyright laddir Flickr CC BYSA 2.0

And evil cookies that are not happy with anyone.

Image copyright thentoff Flickr CC BY 2.0

One of the strangest cases happened to urologist Gregory Roberts from Kingston, Canada. Imagine his patient's surprise when the ultrasound machine showed this open-mouthed face hidden inside his scrotum!

Image copyright Gregory Roberts

Once you see a face in an inanimate object, they begin to appear everywhere.

Some of these objects really do resemble the emoticons we use to convey emotions in texting: two circles for eyes and a line for a mouth.

But sometimes strange creatures peek out from the most seemingly unexpected places.

In one of his experiments, Lee showed subjects chaotic gray ornaments, reminiscent of flickering dots on a TV screen with the antenna turned off.

The researcher encouraged the participants in the experiment to see a face in them, and the participants in the experiment in 34% of cases stated that they succeeded.

The facial features in these blurry pictures could only be seen with a very large stretch, but nevertheless, the brain helpfully gave out the desired illusion.

"The phenomenon appears to be fairly easy to induce," Lee states.

We tend to believe that our eyes regularly convey to us a picture of the world around us, but in fact, the signals coming from the retina are far from ideal, and the brain has to correct them.

According to Lee, it is this correction that explains pareidolia.

Seeing the slanted "eyes" on the facade of the house, we also sometimes involuntarily try to see what they are staring at

The brain is trying to determine what we are currently seeing, relying, among other things, on our previous experience and supplementing the visible image with these expectations.

In this way, he manages to form a relatively complete picture, even if the elements of the surrounding space, for example, are hidden by darkness or fog.

But, on the other hand, due to this, our vision turns out to be more subjective than we think - that is, we really sometimes see exactly what we want to see.

To test this hypothesis, Lee scanned the subjects' brains while they looked at pictures of random gray dots.

As expected, during the initial recognition of basic image features (such as color and shape), there was increased activity in the primary visual cortex.

But the researcher also noticed that at the moment when the subjects reported seeing a face, the frontal and occipital lobes, which experts believe are responsible for memory and complex thought processes such as planning, were involved in the process.

The burst of neural activity in these areas may indicate that expectations and experiences are at play, as Lee anticipated.

In turn, these processes excited the so-called right fusiform facial region, which reacts to faces - perhaps at this moment there is a feeling that you are looking at an animated being.

"If this zone is activated, we understand that they are now 'seeing' the face," says Lee.

Now it becomes more clear why the "faces" of objects cause us the same subconscious reaction as human ones.

So, last year, a group of Japanese researchers noted that people try to follow the direction of an inanimate "look" - just like we do when communicating with an interlocutor.

Image copyright Wout Mager Flickr CC BYNCSA 2.0

In other words, when we see slanted "eyes" on the facade of the house, we also sometimes involuntarily try to see what they are staring at.

Lee's experiment helped establish which regions of the brain might be involved in this process, but it doesn't explain why we tend to see faces at all.

Perhaps it is because we see so many faces in our daily lives and therefore expect to see them everywhere.

It is also possible that our tendency to see faces has a deeper evolutionary explanation.

Human survival depends very much on the people around us: we ask them for help or fear their aggression, and therefore we need to quickly understand their motives and respond accordingly.

Probably, the brain is initially set to recognize people at the first opportunity.

It is much less dangerous to make a mistake and see facial features in the tree bark than to overlook an intruder hiding in the bushes.

Other scholars also suggest that a similar mechanism may underlie human spirituality.

This hypothesis comes from the fact that our brain, predisposed to understand people and their motivation, tries to see human intentions in everything that surrounds us - in a thunderstorm, a plague, or in a frightening and abstract concept of death.

To deal with our fears, we begin to personify them, populating the world with gods and demons.

Tapani Riekki and colleagues at the University of Helsinki in Finland found that religious people are more likely to see faces in blurry pictures than atheists.

Be that as it may, the strength of our convictions can at least explain why some see the Mother of God on a piece of toasted bread, and I see the queen of the pop scene. Here is a picture for you. Do you see Jesus on it?

Image copyright Chris Gladis Flickr CC BYND 2.0

But perhaps the most common form of pareidolia in the Western world is seeing the faces of cars, or rather the front of them.

Sonia Windhager from the University of Vienna went to the Ethiopian hinterland to find out if this phenomenon is observed there.

Asking questions to people she happened to meet on the streets and in small cafes, at first she encountered incomprehension. "They thought we were a little crazy," she says.

But while Ethiopians may not be particularly familiar with Disney's Cars or the adventures of Herbie in Crazy Racing, they soon understood the purpose of the study and began to evaluate the appearance of cars in photographs in much the same way as Europeans.

For example, cars with a large windshield, round headlights and a small grille were perceived as young and feminine:

Image copyright Raphal Labb Flickr CC BYSA 2.0

... and cars with flatter headlights and a massive lower part - as older and more masculine:

Image copyright Dodge Chrysler

According to Windhager, this suggests that our brains are programmed to read basic biological information (age, gender) from any object that even remotely resembles a face.

And, according to the researcher, this also points to the evolutionary origin of pareidolia. "It's interesting to see how things in today's environment are still perceived by us according to these ancient mechanisms," she notes.

In other experiments, Windhager found that consumers generally prefer cars that look impressive - a trait that automakers are exploiting with might and main.

The aggressive expression of car headlights could, in theory, cause nearby drivers to act aggressively or more nervously.

So, in 2006, the Wall Street Journal wrote that sales of "cute cars" such as the legendary "Volkswagen Beetle" began to decline - probably because their owners were oppressed by the ever-growing number of large SUVs around.

Therefore, the designers decided to draw more aggressive cars. The Dodge Charger, for example, received stern-looking slit headlights.

"It's like we're making eye contact with the headlights the same way we're making eye contact with passers-by on the street," says Chrysler designer Ralph Gills.

However, Windhager wondered if the illusion of a car's gaze could affect traffic safety.

"Perhaps the kids might think the car sees them and won't get out of the way," she suggests, adding that the headlights' aggressive expression could in theory cause nearby drivers to act aggressively or more nervously.

Similar psychological effects can be observed in other areas of our lives.

Various studies have shown that a simple picture of a pair of eyes hanging on a wall can make people behave more honestly, and with this simple trick, in some areas, it was possible to reduce the number of bicycle thefts by 60%.

And it would be interesting to know whether thieves are less likely to break into houses whose facades show a face.

There is something striking about the fact that the randomly matched visuals that people submit to #iseefaces can have a real impact on our behavior.

We no longer inhabit the unknown world with fictional spirits in such numbers as our ancestors did, but to this day we see ghostly faces in cars, houses and social media feeds.

But at least these creatures can give even the most soulless and ugly place some spark of humor and life. Like this cute kid.

Image copyright Daniel Oines Flickr CC BY 2.0