If You Immediately See Faces In These Photos, This Is What It Says About You

Take this palm tree as an example. Your eyes might skim the trunk – nothing out of the ordinary about the rough texture there. But at the top of it, a hollow in the center looks a bit like a mouth when you note its situation beneath a pair of knots, which mimic a set of peepers.

Or maybe you’ve headed to the bakery this weekend for a treat – cinnamon bun, anyone? Before you can bite into the sweet confection, though, its curves catch your eye. It almost looks like the face of a person who has fallen fast asleep. They’ve even got their mouth slightly ajar, a position in which we’ve all dozed off, whether or not we want to admit it.

You probably find that the sky is full of faces too. This one’s particularly foreboding: a dark puff of cloud that’s backlit by a setting sun. The orangey rays peeking through the dark-gray gloom illuminate a creepy face. Beneath its shadowy eyes, you can see a slender nose, as well as the pumpkin-colored outline of a mouth.

Not all the faces you’ll see will be human ones, either. Imagine you’ve just reclined back in the dentist’s chair and looked up. That moveable light they use to illuminate your mouth might appear to be smiling back at you too. And the friendly figure looks quite mammalian: we see the distinct features of a water buffalo.

Indeed, plenty of gadgets come with human-like faces, whether or not that was the manufacturer’s vision. Take this tiny heater as yet another example. Its temperature-control knobs look like eyes, its on-off switch makes a nose and the light that indicates that it’s hot? Well, that creates the perfect little mouth.

Here’s an even tougher one to spot: did you notice the face right away? If so, you probably had a good laugh at how unimpressed the mop seems. Its eyes have narrowed into slits, and its mouth hangs slightly open. As the Redditor who shared the picture put it, the cleaning implement looks like “that one guy who hates his job.”

In how many of those photos did you instantly see a face? If you needed help from the text, then you might not be one of the people who experience this phenomenon. But if you do, you’ll want to read on and understand precisely why inanimate objects always seem to be peering back at you.

As long as humans have had the tools to write down their experiences, they have been noticing – and chronicling – the faces that they see in things. Leonardo da Vinci, for example, examined stone walls and found that natural markings made the slabs appear animated. He thought that these rocky faces could inspire his art.

The Renaissance man da Vinci pinpointed faces perhaps before the phenomenon even had a name. Being able to see faces in random objects is known as pareidolia, pronounced par-i-DOH-lee-a. The word can be broken down into two Greek halves: para, which means incorrect or faulty; and eidōlon, which means shape or image.

There are plenty of famous cases in which a random object caused a stir for apparently bearing a face – and not just any visage, either. Perhaps you’re heard of the Shroud of Turin, a centuries-old swath of linen that has been on display in Turin, Italy’s San Giovanni Battista cathedral since 1578.

On first glance, you might not think much of the Shroud of Turin. The 14-foot-long piece of linen has some markings on it that, upon further inspection, have raised quite a few eyebrows. You might be able to see what the fuss is about – the fabric seems to have the imprint of the sunken frame of Jesus himself.

An even closer view of the Shroud makes the face in the fabric even clearer. The figure appears to have dark, sunken-in eyes and long tresses, just as Jesus does in artistic renditions of his face. Squint and you might be able to see that the man appears to be wearing a crown of thorns too.

Whether or not the Shroud of Turin was actually used to wrap Jesus’s body after crucifixion is a question that remains unanswered by experts. But there’s no doubt that the piece of fabric is a prime example of pareidolia: people can, indeed, see his face in splotches on the age-old piece of linen.

Many of the most famous moments of pareidolia revolve around religious figures that seem to show face on everyday objects. Imagine this: you’ve fired up a skillet and popped a sandwich over the flame. When you slide your grilled cheese onto your plate, you notice the face of Jesus staring back at you.

A similar tale unfolded in Miami resident Diane Duyser’s kitchen. She held on to her Jesus-bearing grilled cheese for a whopping 10 years before she decided to put it up for sale on eBay. Shockingly, interest in the curiously charred sandwich was high, and it sold for a whopping $28,000 in 2004.

In fact, people have found Jesus’s likeness in all types of food. In 1977 it was a flour tortilla that bore Christianity’s most famous face. Nearly 30 years later, a youth group leader in Houston named Steve Cragg plucked a Cheeto from the bag and found that it looked a lot like his church’s most sacred figure.

Still, not all famous cases of pareidolia come with a familiar face. In 1976 a NASA spacecraft called Viking 1 hovered over Mars. The mission was simple: take photos of the surface so that astronauts could pinpoint a smooth spot for the vessel’s sister ship, Viking 2, to land on its impending voyage.

Those all-important photos captured more than just the perfect landing pad, though. They also snapped a massive two-mile-long bump on the surface of Mars that looked eerily like a human head. Mission control all saw the silhouette staring back at them, and it sparked a pretty genius idea.

NASA experts thought that showing the face on Mars to the world would spark intrigue and interest in the red planet. Little did they know just how correct that theory was. The massive mug has inspired books, magazine articles, radio shows and even a Hollywood movie. And some even believe that the skull-shaped figure may even be proof that there was life on the planet.

In the end, though, space experts confirmed that the face-shaped rock on Mars was just that and not a shrine to any sort of planetary inhabitants. In other words, it was just an out-of-this-world example of pareidolia – one that broke the mold, since it caught on with the public without featuring a religious figure.

And, as we mentioned before, cases of pareidolia occur in our day-to-day lives too. Perhaps you could pinpoint the faces in the images above, or maybe you’ve realized now that you do notice them in buildings, household items, in nature… They’re everywhere, but why is it that you can see them?

There are several theories as to why we see faces in inanimate objects – and, yes, each and every one of us will notice these phantom visages from time to time. Cosmologist Carl Sagan had his hypothesis why pareidolia happens. He said it all boiled down to the way our species had to adapt to survive.

In his book The Demon-Haunted World – Science as a Candle in the Dark, Sagan posited that humans have long needed pareidolia to survive. It allowed us to see faces from far away or in low visibility, the cosmologist argued. That way, we can decide quickly if the person coming is a friend or an enemy.

That makes sense, of course, but how does seeing faces in inanimate objects help out humankind? Well, according to Sagan, that’s just what happens when our brains misinterpret the signals they receive. So not all of what it reads as faces are actually faces – but we tend to get it right when it really counts.

University of Toronto, Canada, researcher Kang Lee spoke to BBC Future in 2014 about his pareidolia-centric research. “It’s very pervasive… We are primed to see faces in every corner of the visual world,” he said. And, similar to Sagan, he believed that it all comes down to our colorful imaginations and how they can overpower our perceptions.

Lee has more than just hypothesized on the subject of pareidolia, though – he conducted actual studies to better understand why we have the tendency to see faces where they aren’t. He showed his research subjects staticky images, similar to what you’d see on a TV that isn’t hooked up to a cable box.

With a bit of priming, Lee found, it was “pretty easy to induce” pareidolia in subjects. Thirty-four percent of the time, they told researchers that they could see a person on the screen. Yes, the subjects were finding human forms in the random grey-toned patterns placed before them.

Lee helped explain why this might be the case, both inside of his study and out in the real world. The retina gathers images of the world around us and sends all of that information to the brain. Sometimes, though, those recordings are imperfect, and the brain has to work to clean up and make sense of the snapshots.

As these images upload, so to speak, the brain tries to make sense of what you’re seeing. So it makes its most educated guess based on what you’ve looked at in the past. This helps you to see things in poor lighting or through fog, for example. But it also means that what you get isn’t always what you’re actually seeing.

Lee had to test this new layer to his idea, so he whipped out the staticky images again. This time, though, he scanned research subjects’ brains as they pored over the pictures. The primary visual cortex lit up, and that was to be expected. This portion of the brain processes all of the information sent from the retinas into your noggin.

But when subjects believed that they saw a face in the grey patterns, other parts of the brain revved up, too. Lee saw activity in the occipital and frontal regions of the organ, where memory, planning and other forms of high-level thinking take place. And that seemed to corroborate the idea that our expectations and past experiences may shape what we think we see.

After that, Lee saw that the brain would light up its right fusiform face area. As the name implies, this portion of the organ reacts to seeing an actual visage – so it was noteworthy that it fired up for an imagined one. “If that’s activated, we know they really are ‘seeing’ a face,” the expert explained.

Other research on pareidolia seems to lend credence to Lee’s findings. For example, Japanese researchers found that people keep their eye on the inanimate objects that appear to be staring at them. If we register these faces as real ones, then it makes sense that they’d trigger the same subconscious response we’d give to an actual person in front of us. We’d keep an eye on someone who glared at us nonstop, right?

Still, while Lee’s studies mapped out what happens in the brain to cause pareidolia, it didn’t completely explain why we see faces everywhere. He had a few ideas to share on that front, though. He wondered if we perceive other people in inanimate objects because from the youngest age, all we do is look around to try and find faces. Lee explained, “Starting from childhood, they are the most common stimuli that we encounter in everyday life.”

Other researchers wondered if pareidolia had its links to humankind’s allegiance to religion and spirituality – and, no, not because Jesus’ face appears in so many inanimate objects. Instead, some experts believe that the brain has all of the tools it needs to discern and understand people. But it might struggle to comprehend more abstract or scary concepts.

So rather than admitting that it doesn’t understand death or a natural disaster or a plague, the brain attributes intention to these events – and everything else around us too. Personifying fears – making them bad guys – can help us to make sense of them. And that’s why so many people turn to religion to understand the world, the experts say.

One little bit of research seems to back this up, in a way. A team at the University of Helsinki found that religious test subjects were more prone to finding faces in inanimate objects than their atheist counterparts. Perhaps that’s why so many famous pareidolia cases have revolved around biblical and other spiritual figures.

And that’s not all – pareidolia might give people a push to act better and with more honesty. Think about it: they’re perceiving a pair of eyeballs staring back at them. Why would they do something devious while someone seems to be watching? Perhaps it’s worth buying a house that smiles back to keep burglars at bay.

On that note, it’s a bit crazy to think that the mugs you pinpoint in architecture, in nature and everywhere in between could be affecting your behavior. But we think it’s best to simply sit back and enjoy pareidolia and all of the weird, wacky and, sometimes, beautiful faces that come with it. That includes this icy profile, which you might have to squint to see. When you do, though, it’s a credit to your well-evolved brain – you’ve spotted yet another face out there in the world, whether it really exists or not.