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Why Do People See Faces in the Moon?
Our brains are hard-wired to find meaningful images in random lines and shapes—even if those figures are on the moon.
By Nadia Drake, for National Geographic
For as long as humans have lived on Earth, the moon has been our nearest celestial companion, and a rich natural canvas for the human imagination. When the Earth passes between the moon and the sun early on April 15, resulting in a total lunar eclipse, darkness will cover the craters and mountains in which humans, for millennia, have spotted faces and figures.
In Western cultures, perhaps the most familiar vision is "the man in the moon." In East Asian cultures, moon-gazers might point to a rabbit; in India, a pair of hands. From ancient times to the modern era, from different spots on the globe, a tree, a woman, and a toad have all been found hiding in the moon's shining face.
"When you first look at the moon, you pretty much see light areas and dark areas, and some are more gray than others," said planetary geologistCassandra Runyon of the College of Charleston, in South Carolina. "The lighter areas are the mountains, often referred to as the highlands. The dark areas are volcanic—the mare, which is Latin for 'seas.'"
In the contours and colors of the lunar surface, people can find meaningful figures for the same reason that we "see" the face of Elvis in a potato chip or Jesus in a grilled cheese sandwich. It's just the way our brains work.
"The brain is really a predictive organ," said Nouchine Hadjikhani, a neuroscientist at Harvard University. "We try to find sense in the noise all the time, and we fill things with information."
The phenomenon of seeing faces where there are none is a form of information-filling called pareidolia. It's something all humans do.
Looking for Meaning
Joel Voss, a cognitive neuroscientist at Northwestern University, Chicago, is studying how our brains help us ascribe meaning to otherwise random assortments of shapes and lines. In studies, he has presented research participants with computer-generated squiggly lines—meaningless shapes derived from triangles or circles—and asked subjects whether the shapes resemble something meaningful.
"About half end up being meaningful, on average," Voss said.
Voss used fMRI—a neuroimaging procedure that measures brain activity by tracking changes in blood flow—to study the brain regions activated when a person sees the squiggles. He found that the same areas involved in processing actual, meaningful images lit up when the squiggles were viewed.
"To your visual system, there's no difference between a picture of a frog and some weird collection of dots and lines you've never seen before that vaguely resembles a frog," Voss said. "Your brain is very happy to treat those things as the same thing."
Brain Wiring and Storytelling
Why do our brains do this? In The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, astronomer Carl Sagan offered a possible explanation. Perhaps recognizing faces, even in vague shapes, was evolutionarily advantageous, Sagan suggested: "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 wrote.
Voss proposes another explanation. Think of the human brain as a flexible, all-purpose machine meant to succeed in whatever random environment it inhabits. To triumph in strange places, Voss says, the brain must be able to quickly process unfamiliar visual stimuli—like new shapes and lines—and figure out what's worth paying attention to. Seeing faces and figures is merely a consequence of the brain's tendency to match stored information with new stimuli.
"Although we see the world as this very structured, object-containing environment, it's really just a bunch of random lines and shapes and colors," he said. "The reason why it's so easy to see meaningful things in nonsense shapes is that those nonsense shapes have a lot of the same features as meaningful things."
In scientific terms, what a moon-gazer sees may come down to brain wiring. But through the ages, what civilizations perceived in the moon's face took on greater significance, in the preservation of cultures, origin stories, and beliefs.
"The night sky is one of the greatest storytelling panoramas," saidAdrienne Mayor, a science historian at Stanford University in California who studies how ancient cultures interpreted data and derived meaning from the natural world.
"Things in the natural world are the hints and clues for the story," Mayor said. "When you see the moon, you remember the story you heard when you were a kid and you pass it on."
-----------------------------------------------------------
Pareidolia: Why we see faces in hills, the Moon and toasties
People have long seen faces in the Moon, in oddly-shaped vegetables and even burnt toast, but a Berlin-based group is scouring the planet via satellite imagery for human-like features. What's behind our desire to see faces in our surroundings, asks Lauren Everitt.
Most people have never heard of pareidolia. But nearly everyone has experienced it.
Anyone who has looked at the Moon and spotted two eyes, a nose and a mouth has felt the pull of pareidolia.
It's "the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist", according to the World English Dictionary. It's picking a face out of a knotted tree trunk or finding zoo animals in the clouds.
German design studio Onformative is undertaking perhaps the world's largest and most systematic search for pareidolia. Their Google Faces programme will spend the next few months sniffing out face-like shapes in Google Maps.
Google Faces will scan the entire globe several times over from different angles. So far the programme has pinpointed an eerie profile in Russia's remote Magadan region, a fellow with hairy nostrils next to Priory Road in Ashford, Kent, and a mangy creature in the mountains of Alaska, among others.
It's certainly not the first to uncover faces where they don't actually exist.
This week, US department store JC Penney sold out of a kettle thought to look like the leader of the Third Reich after the resemblance was noted on social news site Reddit.
A chicken nugget shaped like US President George Washington earned more than £5,000 ($8,100) on eBay last year.
A decade earlier, some 20,000 Christians travelled to Bangalore to pay homage to a chapatti with the image of Christ burnt on it. Some visitors even offered prayers to the glass-encased flatbread.
In 2011 a Tumblr site that specialises in finding things that look like Hitler posted aphoto of a modest terraced house in Swansea. Its angled roof resembles a comb-over, and the moulding over the house's door is said to evoke the dictator's trademark moustache.
In 2009 the Allen family of Ystrad, Rhondda, spotted the face of Jesus on the underside of a Marmite lid. Instead of the usual mundane brown smears, they found a "comforting" image and saved the top after finishing off the jar.
And American Diana Duyser took a bite out of a cheese toastie in 1994 only to find herself face-to-face with what looked to her like the Virgin Mary. She noticed the Madonna's burnt image on the bread after the first bite and saved the rest of the sandwich for over a decade.
Duyser put it up for auction on eBay where it drew 1.7 million hits and eventually sold for about $28,000 (£18,500).
Google Faces designers Cedric Kiefer and Julia Laub were also inspired by pareidolia.
After seeing the famous "Face in Mars" snapped by the Viking 1 Orbiter in 1976 and playing around with facial recognition technology, they became curious about "how the psychological phenomenon of pareidolia could be generated by a machine", Kiefer says.
They didn't expect their project to be a big deal, but soon their photos of faces in the Russian tundra and rural Britain were spreading across the web.
"It seems like there is something fascinating about pareidolia," Kiefer says.
While some countenances resemble cartoon characters and abstract art, other images appear almost "too real to believe it's just coincidence", he adds.
But why do people see faces in what is quite literally nothing more than a stain, a splotch or a strange rock formation?
Some of that is our evolutionary heritage, says Dr Nouchine Hadjikhani of Harvard University. Humans are "prewired" to detect faces from birth, she says.
"If you take a baby just after a few minutes of life, he will direct his attention toward something that has the general features of a face versus something that has the same elements but in a random order," she says.
And the tendency to pick out familiar figures goes back to the first humans, says Christopher French of the British Psychological Society.
"We've evolved brains that think in these quick, dirty ways that are usually right, but at times can lead us to systematically be biased," he explains.
"A classic example is the Stone Age guy standing there, scratching his beard, wondering whether that rustling in the bushes really is a sabre-toothed tiger. You're much more likely to survive if you assume it's a sabre-toothed tiger and get the hell out of there - otherwise you may end up as lunch."
Other experts say pareidolia is a consequence of the brain's information processing systems. The brain is constantly sifting through random lines, shapes, surfaces and colours, says Joel Voss, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University.
It makes sense of these images by assigning meaning to them - usually by matching them to something stored in long-term knowledge. But sometimes things that are slightly "ambiguous" get matched up with things we can name more easily - resulting in pareidolia, he says.
Pareidolia can also be a product of people's expectations, says neuroscientist Sophie Scott, of University College London.
"Being able to see Jesus's face in toast is telling you more about what's happening with your expectations, and how you're interpreting the world based on your expectations, rather than anything that's necessarily in the toast," she says.
And once the Virgin's face or George Washington's profile are spotted, it's virtually impossible to unsee them, says Bruce Hood, author of The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity.
"That's one of the things about illusions, they have this remarkable tendency to formulate in your mind, and it's very difficult to unthink them," he says.
But simply spotting a face in a morsel of food or a fence doesn't explain why some people spend thousands of pounds to buy it or make a pilgrimage to see it.
Pareidolia can be extremely evocative - especially if a person believes in miracles, Scott says.
"It's an incredibly strong demonstration of how powerful these perceptual effects are. We really want to see things like faces, we really want to hear things like voices, and our perceptual system will set out to do that," she adds.
For some, pareidolia stands as evidence of the supernatural, Hood says. "People will seek out these sorts of things for some sort of intervention."
The object itself can also take on special significance, says French. People assume that if it has been divinely produced, then it has been "touched by God" and "will bring good fortune", he says.
But you don't have to be particularly religious to appreciate pareidolia.
"I don't for one minute think there's any kind of religious significance or anything else in them," French says. "But hey, they're pretty neat, aren't they?"
Our brains are hard-wired to find meaningful images in random lines and shapes—even if those figures are on the moon.
By Nadia Drake, for National Geographic
For as long as humans have lived on Earth, the moon has been our nearest celestial companion, and a rich natural canvas for the human imagination. When the Earth passes between the moon and the sun early on April 15, resulting in a total lunar eclipse, darkness will cover the craters and mountains in which humans, for millennia, have spotted faces and figures.
In Western cultures, perhaps the most familiar vision is "the man in the moon." In East Asian cultures, moon-gazers might point to a rabbit; in India, a pair of hands. From ancient times to the modern era, from different spots on the globe, a tree, a woman, and a toad have all been found hiding in the moon's shining face.
"When you first look at the moon, you pretty much see light areas and dark areas, and some are more gray than others," said planetary geologistCassandra Runyon of the College of Charleston, in South Carolina. "The lighter areas are the mountains, often referred to as the highlands. The dark areas are volcanic—the mare, which is Latin for 'seas.'"
In the contours and colors of the lunar surface, people can find meaningful figures for the same reason that we "see" the face of Elvis in a potato chip or Jesus in a grilled cheese sandwich. It's just the way our brains work.
"The brain is really a predictive organ," said Nouchine Hadjikhani, a neuroscientist at Harvard University. "We try to find sense in the noise all the time, and we fill things with information."
The phenomenon of seeing faces where there are none is a form of information-filling called pareidolia. It's something all humans do.
Looking for Meaning
Joel Voss, a cognitive neuroscientist at Northwestern University, Chicago, is studying how our brains help us ascribe meaning to otherwise random assortments of shapes and lines. In studies, he has presented research participants with computer-generated squiggly lines—meaningless shapes derived from triangles or circles—and asked subjects whether the shapes resemble something meaningful.
"About half end up being meaningful, on average," Voss said.
Voss used fMRI—a neuroimaging procedure that measures brain activity by tracking changes in blood flow—to study the brain regions activated when a person sees the squiggles. He found that the same areas involved in processing actual, meaningful images lit up when the squiggles were viewed.
"To your visual system, there's no difference between a picture of a frog and some weird collection of dots and lines you've never seen before that vaguely resembles a frog," Voss said. "Your brain is very happy to treat those things as the same thing."
Brain Wiring and Storytelling
Why do our brains do this? In The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, astronomer Carl Sagan offered a possible explanation. Perhaps recognizing faces, even in vague shapes, was evolutionarily advantageous, Sagan suggested: "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 wrote.
Voss proposes another explanation. Think of the human brain as a flexible, all-purpose machine meant to succeed in whatever random environment it inhabits. To triumph in strange places, Voss says, the brain must be able to quickly process unfamiliar visual stimuli—like new shapes and lines—and figure out what's worth paying attention to. Seeing faces and figures is merely a consequence of the brain's tendency to match stored information with new stimuli.
"Although we see the world as this very structured, object-containing environment, it's really just a bunch of random lines and shapes and colors," he said. "The reason why it's so easy to see meaningful things in nonsense shapes is that those nonsense shapes have a lot of the same features as meaningful things."
In scientific terms, what a moon-gazer sees may come down to brain wiring. But through the ages, what civilizations perceived in the moon's face took on greater significance, in the preservation of cultures, origin stories, and beliefs.
"The night sky is one of the greatest storytelling panoramas," saidAdrienne Mayor, a science historian at Stanford University in California who studies how ancient cultures interpreted data and derived meaning from the natural world.
"Things in the natural world are the hints and clues for the story," Mayor said. "When you see the moon, you remember the story you heard when you were a kid and you pass it on."
-----------------------------------------------------------
Pareidolia: Why we see faces in hills, the Moon and toasties
People have long seen faces in the Moon, in oddly-shaped vegetables and even burnt toast, but a Berlin-based group is scouring the planet via satellite imagery for human-like features. What's behind our desire to see faces in our surroundings, asks Lauren Everitt.
Most people have never heard of pareidolia. But nearly everyone has experienced it.
Anyone who has looked at the Moon and spotted two eyes, a nose and a mouth has felt the pull of pareidolia.
It's "the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist", according to the World English Dictionary. It's picking a face out of a knotted tree trunk or finding zoo animals in the clouds.
German design studio Onformative is undertaking perhaps the world's largest and most systematic search for pareidolia. Their Google Faces programme will spend the next few months sniffing out face-like shapes in Google Maps.
Google Faces will scan the entire globe several times over from different angles. So far the programme has pinpointed an eerie profile in Russia's remote Magadan region, a fellow with hairy nostrils next to Priory Road in Ashford, Kent, and a mangy creature in the mountains of Alaska, among others.
It's certainly not the first to uncover faces where they don't actually exist.
This week, US department store JC Penney sold out of a kettle thought to look like the leader of the Third Reich after the resemblance was noted on social news site Reddit.
A chicken nugget shaped like US President George Washington earned more than £5,000 ($8,100) on eBay last year.
A decade earlier, some 20,000 Christians travelled to Bangalore to pay homage to a chapatti with the image of Christ burnt on it. Some visitors even offered prayers to the glass-encased flatbread.
In 2011 a Tumblr site that specialises in finding things that look like Hitler posted aphoto of a modest terraced house in Swansea. Its angled roof resembles a comb-over, and the moulding over the house's door is said to evoke the dictator's trademark moustache.
In 2009 the Allen family of Ystrad, Rhondda, spotted the face of Jesus on the underside of a Marmite lid. Instead of the usual mundane brown smears, they found a "comforting" image and saved the top after finishing off the jar.
And American Diana Duyser took a bite out of a cheese toastie in 1994 only to find herself face-to-face with what looked to her like the Virgin Mary. She noticed the Madonna's burnt image on the bread after the first bite and saved the rest of the sandwich for over a decade.
Duyser put it up for auction on eBay where it drew 1.7 million hits and eventually sold for about $28,000 (£18,500).
Google Faces designers Cedric Kiefer and Julia Laub were also inspired by pareidolia.
After seeing the famous "Face in Mars" snapped by the Viking 1 Orbiter in 1976 and playing around with facial recognition technology, they became curious about "how the psychological phenomenon of pareidolia could be generated by a machine", Kiefer says.
They didn't expect their project to be a big deal, but soon their photos of faces in the Russian tundra and rural Britain were spreading across the web.
"It seems like there is something fascinating about pareidolia," Kiefer says.
While some countenances resemble cartoon characters and abstract art, other images appear almost "too real to believe it's just coincidence", he adds.
But why do people see faces in what is quite literally nothing more than a stain, a splotch or a strange rock formation?
Some of that is our evolutionary heritage, says Dr Nouchine Hadjikhani of Harvard University. Humans are "prewired" to detect faces from birth, she says.
"If you take a baby just after a few minutes of life, he will direct his attention toward something that has the general features of a face versus something that has the same elements but in a random order," she says.
And the tendency to pick out familiar figures goes back to the first humans, says Christopher French of the British Psychological Society.
"We've evolved brains that think in these quick, dirty ways that are usually right, but at times can lead us to systematically be biased," he explains.
"A classic example is the Stone Age guy standing there, scratching his beard, wondering whether that rustling in the bushes really is a sabre-toothed tiger. You're much more likely to survive if you assume it's a sabre-toothed tiger and get the hell out of there - otherwise you may end up as lunch."
Other experts say pareidolia is a consequence of the brain's information processing systems. The brain is constantly sifting through random lines, shapes, surfaces and colours, says Joel Voss, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University.
It makes sense of these images by assigning meaning to them - usually by matching them to something stored in long-term knowledge. But sometimes things that are slightly "ambiguous" get matched up with things we can name more easily - resulting in pareidolia, he says.
Pareidolia can also be a product of people's expectations, says neuroscientist Sophie Scott, of University College London.
"Being able to see Jesus's face in toast is telling you more about what's happening with your expectations, and how you're interpreting the world based on your expectations, rather than anything that's necessarily in the toast," she says.
And once the Virgin's face or George Washington's profile are spotted, it's virtually impossible to unsee them, says Bruce Hood, author of The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity.
"That's one of the things about illusions, they have this remarkable tendency to formulate in your mind, and it's very difficult to unthink them," he says.
But simply spotting a face in a morsel of food or a fence doesn't explain why some people spend thousands of pounds to buy it or make a pilgrimage to see it.
Pareidolia can be extremely evocative - especially if a person believes in miracles, Scott says.
"It's an incredibly strong demonstration of how powerful these perceptual effects are. We really want to see things like faces, we really want to hear things like voices, and our perceptual system will set out to do that," she adds.
For some, pareidolia stands as evidence of the supernatural, Hood says. "People will seek out these sorts of things for some sort of intervention."
The object itself can also take on special significance, says French. People assume that if it has been divinely produced, then it has been "touched by God" and "will bring good fortune", he says.
But you don't have to be particularly religious to appreciate pareidolia.
"I don't for one minute think there's any kind of religious significance or anything else in them," French says. "But hey, they're pretty neat, aren't they?"
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