If you’ve seen tabloid news stories about Jesus’s face appearing in a piece of burnt toast or Michael Jackson’s visage peering out from the clouds, then you’ll know that you’re far from the only one to see faces all over the place.
Psychologists put this down to ‘pareidolia’ (pronounced pair-ay-doh-lee-ah), which is the formal term for when we detect patterns in information that is completely random.
I say ‘information’ because the phenomenon doesn’t only occur visually, or for faces. For example, sometimes people think they can hear voices in recordings of random sounds.
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The reason you, and so many others, experience pareidolia is because your brain is working overtime to make sense of the world around you. It’s rare that we receive perfectly clear information via our senses – we’re always making inferences, joining the dots or putting together a best guess for what’s going on out there.
Would it be better to set the threshold higher so that you never saw a face that wasn’t there? Or is it better to risk a little facial pareidolia, so that you always spot that person hiding in the shadows?
There is no simple answer to this question. Throughout history some psychologists have linked a tendency for pareidolia to madness or a lack of good judgment.
More recently it’s been suggested that over-active pattern detection might make people vulnerable to conspiracy theories.
But there’s a positive side to it too. Researchers in Germany recently showed that a greater tendency to see meaningful images in naturally occurring scenes (such as clouds and rock faces) was associated with superior performance on tests of creativity, such as coming up with novel uses for everyday objects.
So the next time your brain conjures up a face out of the ether, just think, that’s your creativity on display right there.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Harold Russell, via email) 'Why do I keep seeing faces in everything?'
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