by Nicole Wetsman POPSCI.COM • FALL 2019 117STRAIGHT FACEhead
in the
clouds
THIS IMAGE OF THE CARINA NEBULA
shows only dust, ionized gases, and stars. But
there’s a chance a dog on its hind legs looks
back at you. Neuroscientists dubbed such rec-
ognition “pareidolia”—the human tendency
to interpret random stimuli as familiar objects.
It’s why people sometimes perceive a smile in
a passing cloud or the man in the moon.
Two parts of the brain cause facial par-
ei do lia, says Kang Lee, a developmental
neuroscientist at the University of Toronto.
The fusiform face area, a region of the
brain’s visual system, activates specifically in
response to a visage. Simultaneously, the in-
ferior frontal gyrus tells the visual system howstrange an object can look and still be recog-
nized. The result can be a freakish tendency to
see human expressions where none exist.
Researchers still haven’t pinned down the
precise neural dance that turns random blobs
into profiles, Lee says. But it’s possible that
humans, both evolutionarily as a species and
individually through years of practice, have
developed such a knack for this shape identi-
fication that we do it unthinkingly all the time.
Lee spots mugs everywhere. But not every-
one has the same degree of pareidolia—some
people might hardly see them at all. If you do
see faces where there are none, don’t freak
out: Someone else certainly does too.NA
SA