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The Deeper I Stare Into the Internet, the More I See Faces

Pareidolia, that peculiar psychological phenomenon that makes you see faces where there are no faces, rears its head online.
Image: GoogleFaces / Onformative

I know that's not a face up there. I know it's a mere satellite image culled from Google Earth, and that it just so happens, given the extreme vantage point, to bear an uncanny resemblance to a grinning face, even if it is just a craggy geologic formation.

But then, just look at it. Does it not look like a face? Of course it looks like a face. I can't not see it as such. And really, that goes for more and more of my daily experience. I can't stop seeing faces the longer I stare into the glow of the screen. Is there something wrong with me?

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Humans have a knack for seeing faces where there are no faces. This curious psychological phenomenon is known as pareidolia—that's a blend of the Greek words "para" (παρά), for beyond or beside, and "eidolon" (εἴδωλον), for form and image—and it amounts to our hard-wired tendency to see facial attributes pop out of vague, seemingly random stimuli or data. (We can program computers to do the same thing too, but more on that in a moment.)

It's the same phenomenon at play when you look at the appropriately titled " ," the first ever raw fractal to be banned, and can't help but see something NSFW. It's why people see Jesus Christ in pieces of toast, or the man on Mars. It's why I can't help, on first glance, but anthropomorphize this adorable, two-foot DIY sound system.

Google Faces - searching for faces on Google Maps using face recognition by onformative.

It's an innate, near-universal predisposition to see all the faces everywhere that's perhaps best summed up by the late Carl Sagan in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. "As soon as the infant can see, it recognizes faces, and we now know that this skill is hardwired in our brains," Sagan famously wrote.

"Those infants who a million years ago were unable to recognize a face smiled back less, were less likely to win the hearts of their parents, and less likely to prosper," he continued. "These days, nearly every infant is quick to identify a human face, and to respond with a goony grin."

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And so I grin, and the Green Man grins right on back. More than anything else, perhaps it's because the internet allows us to whip around the Earth at satellite heights without even leaving our desks that this sort of digital pareidolia just won't leave me alone.

Up here, otherwise unseen geographic patterns emerge. Things take shape.  Faces appear. Take GoogleFaces, a project that uses and independent searching algorithm "hovering the world to spot all the faces that are hidden on Earth." So many faces.

It's common for people to see non-existent features because human brains are uniquely wired to recognise faces.

So, back to my question: What is wrong with me? Turns out, nothing really.

Back in April, a team of Canadian and Chinese neuroscientists published a study in the journal Cortex in support of the theory that we are, in fact, hard-wired to recognize human faces out of randomized data.

In the study, the researchers tracked the brain activity of volunteers with fMRI scanners, which picked up the steady flickerings of those areas of the brain involved in processing visual stimuli, in this case facial features, as The Independent reported. The study pinpointed the fusiform face area as being crucial to this innate response.

"Most people think you have to be mentally abnormal to see these types of images, so individuals reporting this phenomenon are often ridiculed," Professor Kang Lee from the University of Toronto, who led the study, told The Independent.

"But our findings suggest it's common for people to see non-existent features because human brains are uniquely wired to recognize faces," Kang Lee continued, "so that even when there's only a slight suggestion of facial features the brain automatically interprets it as a face."

Even when there's only a slight suggestion of facial features, being the key phrase. If you need me, I'll be counting millions of zero-eyed faces after millions of zero-eyed faces in the electronic edition of Googolplex Written Out. (Because of course that's a thing.)