Pareidolia, seeing faces and figures where there are none

The human brain tends to perceive faces in inanimate objects.

The world is a complex, untamedThe world is a complex, untamed place, and exists independently of our ability to recognize it. Landscapes are piled on top of each other, overlapping (or not) and crowding into mountain ranges, fjords and rainforests. The wind constantly changes the canvas of clouds that cover the sky, and beneath them parade their own shadows, which try to follow them as they glide over the irregular topography of the globe.

Every twenty-four hours the light comes and goes and everything that has the property of reflecting it changes its appearance completely. 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, form and appearance infinite times throughout a generation, and the changes in light frequencies, 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 brains are equipped with some mechanisms to recognize patterns and continuities amidst all that sensory clutter. Neural networks are the perfect way to create systems that are always activated in the same way in the face of apparently different stimuli. Hence, we can recognize 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 that goes by the name of pareidolia.

Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon consisting of the recognition of meaningful patterns (such as faces) in ambiguous and random stimuli. Take, for example, this duck:

Once you've noticed that its beak looks like the caricatured head of a dog, you can never again fail to have this effect every time you see such a duck. But not all pareidolias are as discrete as this one. Evolutionarily we have evolved neural networks in charge of process relevant stimuliso 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 stimuli that resemble human faces. human facesThe visual system, a part of the body that is of great importance for nonverbal communication. Later on, at one point in our history we became capable of making an infinite number of objects following simple, recognizable and regular patterns. And that's when the party started:

Fusiform gyrus: our face radar.

Our brains are endowed with specific circuits that are activated to process visual information about 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 the fusiform gyrusand in a matter of hundredths of a second it makes us see faces where there are faces, but also where there are not. Moreover, when this second possibility occurs, we cannot help but have the strong sensation of contemplating someone, even if that someone is actually a griffin, a boulder or a facade. That is the subconscious power of the fusiform gyrus: whether we want it or not, it will be activated every time we see something vaguely reminiscent of a face. It is the trade-off for having designed a brain that is prepared to deal with a large number of changing and unpredictable stimuli.

So, although because of these pareidolias we sometimes feel under surveillance...

... and even if we sometimes feel that we have missed a joke...

One of the many greatnesses of the human brain

... it is good to remember that these phenomena have their raison d'être in the special treatment that our brains give to the patterns that can be read in the coming and going of confusing images. Our brains make us wise, but nature makes our brains useful. From today, when your brain detects a face where there is only an object, you will also remember this article.