...and there is also a human figure, several faces, a bunny rabbit, a gun, a small chair, a large forest, and pretty much every other shape the human eye can piece together given a very large number of random shapes to contemplate. They are all real, in the sense that people genuinely do register them in the mind. As many writers have noted, the tendency of the eye and the brain to collaborate on creating recognizable objects is a well-known and quite powerful psychological phenomenon known as pareidolia.
The mystery rat of Mars, aka, a random rock. (Credit: NASA/MSL) From an evolutionary point of view, pareidolia is a very useful thing. Babies are hard-wired to look for their mothers' faces, because that is their source of food and protection (and eye contact is an important social bond). There is also a significant upside in perceiving the shapes of both predators ...
