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Human imagination is capable of creating visual images not only on the “mental screen”, but everywhere, wherever the gaze falls. Such a psychological phenomenon is called pareidolia.

How does pareidolia work?

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

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

The alarm clock is at a loss, why is it so difficult for you to wake up in the morning before usual.
The washing is completed, and the washing machine seemed to run a marathon.

Word pareidolia 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 not only characteristic of modern man. The American cosmologist Karl Sagan, for example, believes that it was largely thanks to the pareidolia that the ancient man managed to survive. For our ancestors, like us today, it was enough to take a fleeting glance to "read" information in the surrounding space and judge the approach of a friend or enemy.

It is said that every city and even every house has a soul. This structure, if you look closely, certainly expresses emotions. Although, it’s just about the air conditioners and the window.

In some cases, the phenomenon of pareidolia is associated with false observations 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 must admit how easy it is even to see the haunting ghosts even in a flame of fire.

In this photo, the author saw the outlines of a ghost, not only in the fire, but also among the blazing logs. See a man leaning thoughtfully on the railing?

"Live" images in culinary masterpieces

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

When you order coffee with milk in a cafe, the bartender draws an interesting drawing on the surface to please you. Pareidolia even without his participation will improve the mood.

At breakfast, you can see the strange face of an alien origin in such a familiar dish as scrambled eggs.

After a couple of minutes, the fried eggs will be gone, and the image of an alien creature will remain in memory. Maybe you just read fiction before going to bed?

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

It seems that this pepper is shocked by the fact that now it is literally chopped into pieces.

Religious fantasies

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

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

The seller estimated the special toast with the face of the Virgin Mary at $ 99,999,999.00.

Army of Revived Mechanisms

Where there is a wide scope for imagination, it is household appliances and other objects surrounding us. Here is a whole series of photos in which you can probably see the signs of a living creature. Some of them seem to smile, others freeze in horror. In a word, they express that rich gamut of emotions that people themselves usually experience.

Smiling in embarrassment ...
This one is positive too!
And here is a nice couple at all! This mop obviously had a bad day.
This mechanism was deprived of one eye, but it will still work ...
Contemplate the environment, which sometimes leads to bewilderment ... When he suddenly learned something new about himself ...
The short life of the razor can not but upset.
Not everything is as bad as it initially seemed. Even if you are an ordinary grater.

The illusions of pareidolia in the work

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

We examine the details and see a cart with two travelers. It is necessary to step aside a little and the image of a mystical skull will immediately appear.

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

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

The phenomenon of pareidolia today can even simulate electronic systems and digital cameras. An interesting experiment related to the phenomenon of pareidolia was conducted by a group of Korean photo artists. As part of the project, experts created a series of photos of the sky. In a number of shots, the clouds change shape, often resembling human faces.

Due to the easily changing shape in the clouds, it is easy to see a variety of images.

The camera is connected to a computer system, one of the programs of which is able to recognize faces. As a result, the camera recorded images in a cloudy sky that, when fantasized, a person can see. Most often, these are, of course, faces.

The fine line between love and hate

Studies show that different people can perceive the same images completely differently. And the more abstraction, the less likely the emergence of negative emotions, and more precisely the effect of the "sinister valley" described by 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 sharply dislikes.

A copy of man, only without a soul.

When robots in general resembled people, but did not copy them - emotions were extremely positive. The most realistic robots ceased to be “cute” and caused fear, because they seemed 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 the image and form perform similar functions. For example, the headlights of a car resemble human eyes. In some car models, this is especially noticeable, although no one is intentionally aimed at such similarity.

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

Cars with “human faces” attract more attention.

P.S. According to the critic of the Pulitzer Prize, automobile critic Dan Neil, automakers sometimes take such a step, including elements in their car designs that evoke associations with a person’s face. True, pareidolia is not always conducive to increasing sales. The main thing in this business is not to go too far with playing on images in the subconscious.

Looking at his lunch, you usually do not expect him to look at you in return. But when Diana Duiser 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 American newspaper Chicago Tribune.

Rumors about this incident were spreading wider and wider, and as a result, one casino paid Duiser $ 28,000 for allowing her to put on an amazing toast there for public viewing. Many viewers grasp in the soft and calm features of this female face the resemblance to Madonna, the Mother of God, but it always seemed to me that curls, parted lips and heavy eyelids are more like Madonna's modern, popular singer.

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

“If someone claims to have seen Jesus on a piece of toast, then it’s tempting to think that this person doesn’t have everything at home,” says Ken Lee of the University of Toronto in Canada. “But this is actually a very common phenomenon. that we see faces in a variety of objects of the visual environment. "

Lee proved that this does not indicate divine intervention at all, but that the human imagination has a very large influence on his perception. And indeed, after listening to his explanation, you involuntarily think about whether you can believe your own eyes.

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

Among experts, this phenomenon is known as pareidolia, or a visual illusion of fantastic content. Leonardo da Vinci wrote that he saw certain symbols in natural cracks and scratches on stone walls. He believed that these touches 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 were supposedly peering at the grinning devil from the waves of the hairstyle in the royal portrait (although I personally can’t make out any horns in Her Majesty’s curls). And the Viking-1 spacecraft shot something resembling a face on the surface of Mars.

Today, social networks make it easy to share similar finds with the world. Try, for example, searching the hashtag #iseefaces - and you will see, for example, a wise gnome rooted in a tree, joyfully greeting you in an urn and malicious cookies that are not welcome to anyone.
Once you see a face in an inanimate object, they begin to wonder everywhere. Some of these objects really resemble emoticons that we use to convey emotions in correspondence: two circles instead of eyes and a line instead of mouth. But sometimes strange creatures peep out from the most seemingly unexpected places.

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

"It seems that this phenomenon is quite simple to cause," says Lee.
We are inclined to believe that our eyes correctly transmit 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.
When we see the beveled "eyes" on the facade of the house, we too sometimes involuntarily try to discern what they are so staring at. The brain is trying to determine what we are currently seeing, relying, among other things, on our previous experience and supplementing these expectations with a visible image.

Thus, he is able to form a relatively solid 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 performed a scan of the subjects' brains while they looked at pictures with random gray dots.

As expected, during the initial recognition of the basic characteristics of the image (such as color and shape), increased activity in the primary visual cortex was observed.
But the researcher also noticed that at the moment when the subjects reported that they saw the face, the frontal and occipital lobes were connected to the process, which, according to experts, are responsible for memory and complex thought processes - such as planning. A surge of nervous activity in these areas may indicate that expectations and experience are included, as Lee had suggested.

In turn, these processes excited the so-called right spindle-shaped facial area, which reacts to faces - perhaps at this moment you get the feeling that you are looking at an animated creature. "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 are trying to follow the direction of the inanimate "look" - just like we do when communicating with the interlocutor.

In other words, when we see the beveled “eyes” on the facade of the house, we also sometimes involuntarily try to discern what they are so 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. Perhaps the fact is that we see a lot of faces in everyday life and therefore expect to meet them everywhere. It is also possible that our tendency to see faces has a deeper evolutionary explanation.

The survival of a person depends very much on the people around him: we ask them for help or are afraid of 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 earliest opportunity. To make a mistake and see facial features in the tree bark is much less dangerous than to overlook an attacker hiding in the bushes.

Other scholars also suggest that a similar mechanism may underlie human spirituality. This hypothesis is based on the fact that our brain, predisposed to understand people and their motivation, tries to perceive human intentions in everything that surrounds us - in a thunderstorm, 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 from 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 beliefs can at least explain why some see the Mother of God on a piece of toasted bread, and I am the queen of the pop scene. Here you have, for example, a picture. See Jesus on her?

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

When asking questions by chance people met on the streets and in small cafes, at first she was confused. “They thought we were a little crazy,” she says. But, although Ethiopians are not particularly familiar with the Disney cartoon Cars or the adventures of Herbie from Crazy Racing, they soon realized 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 radiator grill were perceived as young and feminine, and cars with flatter headlights and a massive lower part - as older and more courageous. According to Windhager, this suggests that our brain is programmed to read basic biological information (age, gender) from any subject, even remotely resembling a face.

And, according to the researcher, this also indicates the evolutionary origin of pareidolia. “It's interesting to see how things in the modern environment are still perceived by us in accordance with these ancient mechanisms,” she notes.

In other experiments, Windhager found that consumers usually prefer cars that look impressive - and that’s what our car manufacturers are doing. Aggressive expression of car headlights in theory can cause other drivers to behave more aggressively or more aggressively.

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

“It looks like we meet the headlights with the eyes just like the eyes of passers-by on the street,” says Rrys Gills, Chrysler designer. “And we draw a formidable expression on our cars.” However, Windhager thought about whether the illusion of a car look does not affect traffic safety. “Perhaps the children might think that the car sees them and they will not leave the road,” she suggests, adding that the aggressive expression of headlights in theory can cause other drivers to behave more aggressively or more aggressively.

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

And it would be interesting to know if thieves rarely climb into houses on whose facades a face is read. There is something striking in that the randomly coinciding visual elements that people send to #iseefaces can have a real impact on our behavior. We no longer inhabit the unknown world with fictitious 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 a spark of humor and life.

Doctor of Psychology Valery Rozanov

It often happens that you look at your food, and it looks at you in response. Once Diana Dizer made a toast with cheese and was shocked. “I was just about to bite off him, when I suddenly saw the woman’s face. She looked at me, ”Diana told the Chicago Tribune. “That scared me a lot.”

The story of Dizer gained fame, began to attract more and more attention, and in the end, a certain casino paid her 28 thousand dollars for the right to put on a toast in her shop window. The soft rounded features and the pacified expression on the face of the “imprinted” woman on it reminded many people of the image of the Virgin Mary. Although I personally always thought that wavy hair, parted lips and fluffy eyelashes most likely evoke the image of a more modern idol.

Whatever Madonna you recall when you see a woman on a toast, you can assume that she was in good company. The image of Jesus was also seen on a piece of bread, as well as on a taco, pancake and banana peel, while the BuzzFeed resource recently posted photographs of peppers resembling the faces of British politicians.

“If someone says that he saw Jesus on a sandwich, you might think that this person was crazy,” said Kang Lee, a specialist from the University of Toronto, Canada. - However, such a phenomenon is not uncommon. We are programmed to see faces on every corner in the surrounding visual world. ” Lee proved that such an experience can be not only divine intervention, but also the result of the influence that our imagination has on perception. Of course, after his explanations, you have the risk of permanently losing the ability to believe your eyes.

“If someone says that he saw Jesus on a sandwich, you might think that this person was crazy. However, such a phenomenon is not uncommon. ”

This phenomenon is called "pareidolia" and is very common. Leonardo da Vinci wrote about the images of people he saw among the natural marks on the stone walls, and believed that they help to find inspiration. In the 1950s, the Bank of Canada was forced to withdraw a series of banknotes from circulation due to the smirking feature that was found among the curls on the royal head (although I personally have never seen a hint of horns on Her Majesty's head). And the Viking I spacecraft during the expedition found on Mars a distorted face carved on stone among the rocks.

Today, sharing your visions with others has become easier thanks to social networks. Just look for the hashtag #iseefaces. You will see a wise dwarf hiding among the folds of the tree bark:

... a trash can that welcomes you with a joyful smile:

... a few evil pretzels:

... and a kettle claiming to be Hannibal Lecter.

However, the most terrible case probably occurred with urologist Gregory Roberts and his patient from Kingston, Canada. Imagine the shock they experienced when, during an ultrasound of the testicles, they saw this moon-shaped face that was staring at them ...

The reality is that if you start to see the faces of objects that are looking at you, you will notice them everywhere. Some of these objects definitely resemble emoticons. But sometimes strange creatures can jump out of us from the most unexpected places. In one of Lee’s studies, the participants in the experiment were shown chaotic gray patterns, similar to what we see on the TV screen when the antenna is not working. Having received a barely noticeable clue, these people suddenly began to say that they saw a face among the patterns, and "observed" it for 34% of the time. All the shapes that were present in the images were extremely blurry - and yet somehow the brain managed to assemble them into an illusory image of the face. “It turns out that the appearance of this phenomenon is easy enough to provoke,” says Lee.

Nevertheless, we prefer to think that our pupils always honestly report what is in front of us, and the retina takes an imperfect, confusing, but real image, which is then redirected to the brain. Lee is convinced that this “downstream data processing” is leading to pareidolia.

One way that helps the brain navigate the disorder that reigns around is to make predictions about what is about to appear in sight. It is based on our experience and is capable of imperceptibly projecting these expectations onto what we see. This helps to put all the details into a clear picture, even if the objects are difficult to see, say, because of fog or in the dark. However, this same mechanism makes our eyesight more subjective than might be expected, since we really see what we want.

To test his hypothesis, Lee recorded the electrical activity of the brain of each participant during the experiment. As expected, he found an increased activity of the striatal cortex (the part of the brain that performs primary processing of visual information) at the moment when people began to pay attention to the color and contour of the images. But, in addition, Lee saw that activity flared up in the frontal and occipital areas, which are responsible for higher cognitive functions, in particular planning and memory. This happened as soon as the subjects began to see illusory faces. Such a jump in activity probably indicates that expectations and experience play a role in this process, as was predicted in Lee's theory. This, in turn, may be related to the operation of the right spindle-shaped gyrus, which calculates whether the recognition object is a face. Her work, obviously, gives rise to an eerie feeling that we are looking at a creature that is able to think and feel. “If such activity occurs, we know that people really“ see ”the face,” says Lee.

This may explain why the appearance of illusory faces provokes the same subconscious reactions that arise when looking at a real person. Last year, for example, a group of Japanese researchers found that we follow the “look” of such individuals in the same way as the look of real people. In other words, if we see that the house is puzzling at us, we may feel an acute desire to find out what amazed him so much.

Lee’s experiments made it possible to create a map of brain regions involved in the process of recognizing illusory faces, but have not yet answered the question of why we see them. One reason may be that we face many faces every day and expect to meet them everywhere. “From our very childhood, they have become the irritant we encounter most often,” Lee explains. Perhaps there are deeper evolutionary reasons why we are particularly prone to see faces. In matters of survival, a person depends so much on others - it does not matter whether he needs their help or, on the contrary, fears their aggression - that he simply needs to be able to respond quickly and understand the motives of human actions. So our brain is probably just made to notice other people wherever possible. If we accidentally make a mistake and see a face in the folds of the tree bark, this is better than not noticing the enemy who is hiding in the bushes.

“In an attempt to give meaning to our fears, we begin to personify them, populating the world with gods and demons”

According to other researchers, if you look at a similar mechanism more speculatively, you can explain human spirituality. The idea is that the brain, programmed to understand the actions and motivations of other people, is trying to find intent, like a human, in everything around it, be it a thunderstorm, a plague or an abstract concept of death that terrifies us. In an attempt to give meaning to our fears, we begin to personify them, populating the world with gods and demons. Surprisingly, Tapani Riekki and other specialists from the University of Helsinki, Finland, found that religious people more often than atheists see faces in fuzzy pictures. However, regardless of whether such a theory is true, the strength of our expectations can at least explain why some see the Mother of God on a piece of bread and others see the queen of pop music. Or take another shot. Do you see Christ? ...

And yet, probably the most common form of pareidolia in the Western world is the habit of seeing faces in cars. Sonya Windhager from the University of Vienna, for example, deliberately went to the countryside in Ethiopia to find out if the locals would see the same thing. Interviewing people on the roads and in eateries, she was faced with an unexpected reaction. “They thought I was a little crazy,” says Sonya. And yet, despite the fact that the inhabitants of Ethiopian villages did not watch cartoons like “Wheelbarrows,” they quickly understood the purpose of the study and began to evaluate the images in much the same way as Europeans. For example, cars with a large windshield, round headlights and a small radiator grill in Europe and Africa are usually perceived as “young” and “girls”:

... while flat headlights and a large, angular body are associated with adulthood and courageous features.

According to Sonya Windhager, this means that our brain is programmed to read basic biological information - age and gender - from any objects that vaguely resemble faces. This fact, from her point of view, suggests that pareidolia has an evolutionary origin. “It is curious how the modern living environment makes us use such an ancient mechanism to perceive reality,” Sonia notes.

Other Windhager studies have revealed that consumers are more likely to choose "imperious" machines, and manufacturers are taking advantage of this trend. For example, in 2006, the Wall Street Journal reported that “cute” cars like the legendary Volkswagen Beetle began to sell worse today - perhaps because their owners feel fear and awkwardness in the face of sports cars, the number of which is increasing every year . That's why designers more often create cars that look more dominant. Dodge Charger, for example, turned out to be equipped with narrow beveled headlights that gave it a formidable look and created the impression that he was staring intently at other cars, driving them into the paint. “The headlights seem to be able to make eye contact just like human eyes,” says Chrysler designer Ralph Gills. “A bad face is what we strive for.” Windhager, in turn, wonders if the illusion of eye contact can affect road safety. For example, we can get into trouble if, due to the “facial expression” of the machine, we subconsciously decide that it is reasonable. “It may seem to the children that the car sees them if they cross, so they don’t stop at the passage,” says Sonya. A meeting with cars with a more threatening “facial expression” can cause anxiety or aggression in other drivers.

Similar psychological effects can manifest themselves in all areas of our lives. Various studies have shown that a simple image of a pair of eyes, looking at point blank, makes people behave more honestly, and in some countries this technique of “annoying surveillance” has reduced the number of bicycle thefts by 60%. I wonder if the “faces” painted on the houses and secretly “watching” passers-by are capable of affecting the frequency of thefts ...

Surprisingly, the motley company of characters whose photos people post on the social network with the hashtag #iseefaces, in fact, stealthily controls our behavior. Perhaps today we are no longer inclined to inhabit nature with spirits, as our ancestors did, but we still let the same phantom creatures into our homes, cars and twitter. After all, in the end, they are able to transform the most ugly and soulless places into paintings full of beauty and humor. Is not it, my little friend?

Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon due to which people can see faces in objects. Want to know if you have this phenomenon? Then take a look at the following photos.

Why do people see human faces in inanimate objects?

Have you ever seen a dog in the cloud? Or the face on the wall? The reason these funny situations happen is because of pareidolia. This is a psychological phenomenon that makes people see concrete forms filled with meaning in random inanimate objects.

Fire hydrant or new Muppet character?

Given the amusing expression of his “face”, this fire hydrant would easily make friends with one of the characters in the Muppets puppet show. After all, they all have the same big and funny eyes.

Two-faced mountains

The landscapes in southwest America are full of diverse mountain formations, such as this one, located in the Valley of Fire in Nevada. If you look closely, you can see one (or even several) faces on the surface.

The saddest nut you've ever seen

At first glance it is difficult to say what is generally depicted in this photograph, first of all, an incredibly sad face catches your eye. In reality, this is half the chestnut, which definitely did not like the fact that it was cut in half.

Would you settle in this screaming house?

Breathtaking views of the ocean, clear sky, beautiful flowers. Who would not want to live on this house, located on an island in Greece? However, it is worth noting that the house itself looks like it saw a ghost.

You will be horrified by this gender

You are unlikely to want to step on the floor, which has such a surprised and frightening expression on your face.

Shocked stove

Some people look at this photo and see an old car that definitely saw better times, but you can see something else. Can you guess what happens in the head of this stove?

Happy beehive

If you don’t know the context, you might think that this is a photograph of a smiling mask or a mythical creature with a special sense of humor made from papier-mâché. However, in reality it is a hive of red hornets, which definitely has no reason to smile.

Good old rust

Is it just rust that spoils the look of a ship that was once new and beautiful? Or is it a frightening face? It’s hard to say at first glance. In the end, this is what you saw in this photo in the first place.

If you see faces in objects - you're normal!

Do you remember how in childhood you looked at patterns on a carpet or on wallpaper - and found nosy and eared horrors in them, smiling or threatening grimaces? But nobody like that was hiding there! Some innocent little 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 reference books call it "a violation of perception." But actually, if you want, you can find this phenomenon anywhere. Strictly speaking, clouds are not white-haired horses at all. And even a smiley face - by no means an image of a human smile: it's just two points and a bracket. Have you ever seen two dots and a bracket on a smiling face? That's it ...

The Internet has fun finding faces on google maps and drunken octopuses in the form of hooks for clothes. So we all, baby, are a bit of a pareidolic ... But some are especially. And others are actively infected!

Mars attacks!

Here, say, space explorers. It seems that serious people don’t hunt for ghosts in vain ... But no: in the pictures of the hills of the Martian region of Kydonia taken by the American “Viking-1” in 1976, everyone unitedly saw a certain face. And off and on: this is our “Sad Angel”, and here we have the ruins of the ancient city, and there are the pyramids, and the hill is a phallic symbol of the origin of life ... From another play of light and shadow in the human brain, another extraterrestrial blossomed and rampant civilization.

Holy virgin on a sandwich

But science fiction lovers - that’s okay, they read and write beautiful myths and don’t particularly touch anyone. But what about going thousands of kilometers to bow ... a cake? And in 2002, this was exactly what happened: 20,000 (twenty thousand!) Pilgrims arrived in the Indian city of Bangalore in India to see the “face of Christ,” which mystically appeared on the chapati cake. And the American lady-designer Diana Dyzer kept a sandwich, revealing to her the “image of the Virgin Mary”, ten years. Only then could she part with the relic. For 28,000 dollars. And you bought it!

Funny cars

Pareidolic effect is deliberately used by manufacturers. For example, bottles and bottles are given seductive bends so that the subconscious mind 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.

Downloading the face from the cache

Where does this property come from - to see in a banana is not just a banana, that is, at every step to find if not a divine face, then a funny face? Of course, these are tricks 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 the “RAM” (or “cache”), the main one of which is: stick-stick-cucumber - this is clearly homo sapiens. Our individual “face recognition program” is triggered in one fifth of a second. And it is precisely the outlines of her face that she gladly substitutes wherever she gets and how much in vain.

Where the ears grow from

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

• Those who believe in God (gods, demons, the universal mind, the supernatural - need to emphasize), tend to find many times more often the images of the animate in the inanimate: in the shadows, bends of mountains, chips, fish cakes and any other objects. Starting with the Shroud of Turin, the origin of which we, chur, will not discuss;)
• In the fair sex, a tendency to pareidolia is more common than among the stronger.
• Such effects often arise and flourish in the brain under the influence of psychotropic substances or in the initial (i.e., initial) stages of acute psychoses.
• As was said, we automatically “substitute” the seen details in the overall picture, without processing each separately - to save time. This is the basis for the well-known effect of texts of the type “According to the Rzelulattas of the Ilsean-Western Odongo of the Unly Universitet, there is no opportunity for it, in coca, the bee-cheeses are delighted in the solva”. Everything is wrong, but still read quickly and unambiguously.

• However, first of all, the human brain is programmed to search and recognize faces - and this feature is “launched” from the very beginning. A newborn child first of all distinguishes from the surrounding reality the faces of people who are next to him.
• This is the basis for one of the theories of the occurrence of the pareidolia effect: supposedly, 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 Dizer with its divine sandwich.
• Some psychologists believe that if a person in his usual daily state is well developed this feature is one of the signs of a high level of neuroticism.
• However, this is also a sign of 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, that means you have a fine mental organization and developed creative abilities!

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