Why Do We See the Man in the Moon?
Take a look at the slideshow above. The photos depict, in order: tower binoculars, a tank tread, tree bark, headphones, a tray table, a toilet, eggs, and more tree bark. Yet I perceived every one of them as a face, and I bet you did, too.
That’s because, as I wrote about a few weeks back, most people are obsessed with faces. We see faces everywhere, even in things that are most definitely not faces. The most famous example is probably the man in the moon. The weirdest has got to be the person who reportedly paid $28,000 for an old grilled cheese sandwich whose burn marks outline the face of the Virgin Mary.
This phenomenon, called face pareidolia, isn’t new (Leonardo da Vinci even wrote about it as an artistic tool). But nobody knows much about how or why our brains create this illusion. This week I came across a fascinating brain-imaging study that begins to investigate these questions. The paper, published in the journal Cortex, is titled “Seeing Jesus in Toast,” and this fall it won an Ig Nobel Prize, awarded “for achievements that first make people laugh then make them think.”
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