“Your brain is superattuned to see faces everywhere,” says Susan Wardle, a scientist who studies how and why people see illusory faces in objects, a phenomenon known as “face pareidolia.” Humans are hypersocial animals. We’re constantly looking for one another out in the world — to find love, avoid danger, connect — so much so that we often see a face where there isn’t one. “You only need this minimal information to see a face because it’s more adaptive to make a mistake and see a funny face in a cloud than to miss a real human face,” says Wardle, who works at the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at the National Institute of Mental Health.
To see more illusory faces, spend time thinking about them. For Wardle, they’ve always been there; growing up, she and her sister gave them their own moniker: “beezups.” Wardle has colleagues who begin spotting faces in sandwiches or storm-drain covers with much more frequency only after they begin face-pareidolia research. “It’s an attention thing,” she says. If you’re not seeing them, try to give yourself the time and space to look out into the world in a curious, aimless way. “Just stare out, not looking at anything in particular, and allow yourself to see patterns.”
In one study, Wardle asked subjects to look at 256 photographs of illusory faces. “Bizarrely, a lot of our examples came from bell peppers cut in half,” Wardle says. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself gendering these inanimate-object visages as predominantly male. Wardle’s research shows that men, women and children all tend to exhibit this bias.
Brain-imaging scans show that illusory faces light up a part of the brain called the “fusiform face area” that is central to all facial recognition. Unlike human faces though, illusory faces, even the scariest-looking ones, don’t pose any real or potential threat. Let yourself delight in them. During her first face-pareidolia experiments, Wardle worried her human subjects would laugh so hard that they would wriggle inside the M.R.I. machine when shown the images of a sleepy-looking coffee cake or an irate-faced leather purse. M.R.I.s require absolute stillness, but so long as you’re not in one, go ahead, laugh.
