Pareidolia, see faces and figures where there are none

The world is a complex place, untamed, and exists regardless of our ability to recognize it. Landscapes pile up on top of each other, overlapping (or not at all) and crowding into mountain ranges, fjords and rainforests. The wind constantly changes the canvas of clouds that cover the sky, and beneath them parade its own shadows, trying to follow them hastily, gliding over the irregular balloon.

Every twenty-four hours the light comes and goes and everything that has the property of reflecting it totally changes its appearance. Even on a smaller scale, our chances of knowing directly through our senses do not improve.

Do you know what a 'Pareidolia' is?

Animal life, endowed with autonomous movement, is characterized by changing place, shape and appearance infinitely many times throughout a generation, and changes in Frequencies of light, added to the continuous change of place and position of our bodies, make the raw data of everything we perceive an impossible chaos to understand.

Pareidolia as a way of finding meanings

Fortunately, our brain is equipped with some mechanisms to recognize patterns and continuities in the midst of all that sensory clutter. Neural networks are the perfect way 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 also that we can 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 significant patterns (such as faces) in ambiguous and random stimuli. Take, for example, this duck:

Once you have realized that its beak looks like the caricatured head of a dog, you will never again 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 in charge of process relevant stimuli, so that some patterns are 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 one point in our history, we became capable of making countless objects following simple, recognizable, and regular patterns. And at that moment the party began:

Spindle twist: our face radar

Our brains are equipped with specific circuits that are activated to process visual information related to the faces of differently from the rest of the 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 avoid having the strong sensation of contemplating someone, even if that someone is actually a griffin, a rock or a facade. That's the subconscious power of the fusiform turn: like it or not, it will kick in whenever 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 sometimes we feel watched ...

... and although sometimes we notice that we have missed a joke ...

One of the many greats of 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 patterns that can be read in the middle of the coming and going 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.