Among the many reasons why my photography, and thus my posting, has slowed down so much is the temperature, which like most of the rest of the country has dropped significantly. The triops tank on the porch, which was no longer showing any activity anyway, had formed several thin sheets of exploratory ice crystals extending down into the depths – cool enough (a ha ha) when viewed within the water, but much more distinct when removed. Yet the real reason I’m commenting is that, unless you’re a rare individual, you will have no problem seeing a face in this image, at the very least now that I’ve mentioned it.
Just pause here for a moment and consider how ludicrous this is. About the only details that contribute to this idea are a round spot, hardly rare in nature, and a jagged gap underneath that we interpret as a mouth. But, c’mon, is there any species in the freaking world that even remotely resembles this? If we actually saw a person like this, wouldn’t we be struggling to suppress our instinct to spew obscenities (well, my instinct, anyway) for the sake of decency? While many people could spot the ‘face’ instantly, how hard would it be to program a computer to find it? Could we explain this human trait to the visiting extra-terrestrials? Maybe they’ve already seen this weird thing in us, and that’s why they’re staying away. That and some internet memes…
This tendency to see faces is very common, and called pareidolia. And it’s remarkably easy to provoke. While anyone might argue that this isn’t supposed to represent a true face, only a cartoonish caricature, that doesn’t actually explain anything – it’s likely that we can get anything out of cartoons because of precisely this trait, since if you look at most cartoons, the features that represent a face are often not much more detailed than this, certainly not anything close to human appearance by any measurement. The point is, it doesn’t take much to make us see a face, and we’re easily capable of ignoring numerous missing details, bad proportions, and extraneous spikes coming from the forehead.
It’s not just faces, as some of the examples at this page from the Skeptic’s Dictionary shows. We can spot similarities in shapes, contours, shadows, and contrast, for faces, whole bodies, and even positions. At some point, this all crosses the vague line into what we can call pattern recognition, and it’s not even clear we were ever outside of it in the first place. We are, as a species, quite adept at pattern recognition, which may provide a bit more understanding of some points on that page. They list Carl Sagan as saying that pareidolia is an evolutionary trait, but then pronounce some skepticism of this, saying that there’s no evolutionary advantage for “a hawk to be dive-bombing shadows on rocks.” This is perhaps taking a rather superficial view of evolution. A hawk attacking a shadow isn’t likely to produce anything detrimental to the hawk if it’s wrong, simultaneously being extremely beneficial if the shadow really is a prey animal – the benefits outweigh the hazards by a significant margin. And the same can be said for pattern recognition as a whole, throughout many different species. Because of the way genes dictate development, patterns in coloration are actually common, and spotting these can lead to a meal, or to determining the predatory species before they’re too close to avoid. Some species have even developed an advantage based on this trait, by showing eyespots or other traits of dangerous predators to ward off potential attackers. There is also aposematic coloration, the ‘keepaway’ warning of bright, contrasting colors, which present a distinct pattern coupled with a discouraging defense that together are firmly memorable; one bad experience being enough to merit an ongoing avoidance of the species. While patterns of behavior, and cause-and-effect, are also traits that can help a species predict an outcome, which can be useful for the fox capturing a mouse under leaves all the way up to humans planting crops for a later yield. In fact, a vast majority of our knowledge base can be attributed, at least in part, to pattern recognition, and even our scientific method emphasizes replication: ensuring there really is a pattern in the first place.
Pareidolia, then, might be considered an over-sensitivity to such patterns, recognizing a visual cue that really doesn’t exist. As indicated above, this is not necessarily detrimental, and it should be noted that no species is perfectly primed towards survival; while our upright stance provides a lot of benefits, it also leads to chronic back and knee issues in our species. The fact that our species, with very few exceptions, is so inordinately prone to finding faces and patterns is extremely strong evidence that it’s an evolved trait, even if it’s so vague as to produce a face from misshapen ice.
Having bad eyesight, I have another perspective that might have some bearing, one that we often don’t think about in our world of corrected vision. If our vision is bad, the finer details are often lost, and what we might see are vaguer shapes, defined more by contrast. There is nothing that defines perfect or optimal vision; it all depends on our environment, so everyone relies on pattern recognition in one circumstance or another, such as spotting a distant face in a crowd. Caricatures often rely upon the details we’re more likely to notice, exaggerating them far beyond reality while still sparking recognition in most people.
This has already turned out to be a much longer post than originally intended (sorry,) and I keep finding more bits to speculate upon. For instance, the amount of pareidolia that relates to religious themes seems remarkably high, leading to some thoughts about whether religious people are far more prone to seeing such images, and why this should be. However, this is assuming that the pattern I thought I saw actually exists, which is not really supportable. People can see faces in soda cans and manhole covers, and may see several a week – they’re just not remarked upon very often. Religious images, however, are validation, often considered evidence of supernatural influence and ‘a sign’ of something. Thus, it isn’t necessarily that religious folk are more inclined to see it, they may simply be more inclined to find significance in it, and from my own experience, this is practically a defining trait of religious folk. There is a certain level of amusement to be found in these; no physical description of jesus or mary exists in scripture, so anyone’s impression is either imagination, or based on artwork that was the artist’s imagination, while no one ever finds the face of muhammad because any likeness is considered blasphemous…
I mentioned above about teaching a computer to find faces, yet it’s been done – not necessarily for any useful reason, but many cellphones now have facial recognition software, because I guess humans need the help? It couldn’t possibly be because smartphones are ridiculously expensive toys. But anyway, this article has a great composite image of random polygons that, at low resolution, look like portraits – mostly of Albert Einstein, which you’re welcome to make all the snide comparisons to the above paragraph that you can. There are two more articles that I found while poking around, here and here, that may also be entertaining. Meanwhile, I’ll keep an eye on the ice…