If you see faces in these photos, you suffer from pareidolia

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See the mad face grimacing at you in that ugly mop? If your answer is "yes", you are probably suffering from facial pareidolia, a psychological phenomenon of seeing faces in inanimate objects.

Don't worry, scientists say it's not a sign of madness but a well-wired brain. And some of us are more prone to facial pareidolia than others.

Actually, most people have experienced this weird face recognition. It's just that we've never heard of the word "pareidolia". 

What is pareidolia?

The word is derived from the Greek words para, meaning something faulty, wrong, instead of, and the noun eidōlon, meaning image, form or shape.

It is a form of apophenia, when people see patterns in random, unconnected data.

There have been multiple occasions when people have claimed to see images and themes in unexpected places.

Here are some famous examples:

On the red planet, one of the most famous is the 'face on Mars' spotted by one of the Viking orbiters in 1976.

This was later proven to just be a chance alignment of sand dunes.

In 2012, a chicken nugget shaped like US President George Washington earned more than £5,000 ($8,100) on eBay.

Why pareidolia happens?

For years, scientists have been researching the reason why people see faces in what is quite literally nothing more than a mop, a splotch or a strange rock formation?

Professor Kang Lee from the University of Toronto carried out a study on facial pareidolia. Lee thinks "it's common for people to see non-existent features because human brains are uniquely wired to recognize faces, so that even when there's only a slight suggestion of facial features the brain automatically interprets it as a face."

Some of that is our evolutionary heritage, says 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.

Other researchers from the University of Toronto, Beijing Jiaotong University, Xidian University, and the Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences, discovered that the recognition occurs in the frontal and visual cortex of the brain.

The frontal cortex in each people's brains sent signals to the posterior visual cortex, which then enhanced the recognizable elements to try and interpret the stimulus.

They also found that people can be led to see different images depending on what they expect to see.

Like humans, rhesus monkeys can also detect objects with face-like characteristics.

Using a camera with face-tracking software to find out where the monkeys were focusing their attention, the researchers found that the monkeys fixated on features longer that looked like eyes and mouths than normal objects.

These objects are good at expressing themselves☟

Sources: BBC, Daily Mail 

Editor: Jiao Jie 

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