The human brain seems wired to see human faces where there are none, whether in clouds, the moon or even tree trunks.
- In the brain, facial recognition goes very fast and happens in a few hundred milliseconds.
- The human brain has developed specialized neural mechanisms to quickly detect faces and it exploits common facial structure as a shortcut for rapid detection.
- Not only do we imagine faces, we analyze them and give them emotional attributes.
If you’re one of those people who tend to see human faces everywhere, don’t worry, you’re not crazy. In fact, you are a victim of pareidolia. If the phenomenon is known, its mechanisms are less so. To try to understand them better, Australian neuroscientists from the University of Sydney have studied the question and suggest that the way our brain identifies and analyzes real human faces is driven by the same cognitive processes that identify illusory faces. They presented their findings July 7 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Some see Jesus on toast, I’m Rimbaud in pigeon droppings on my car pic.twitter.com/CjUogcQJXM
— Redd???? (@reddooh_) December 6, 2018
A parallel experience
Until now, scientists haven’t understood exactly what the brain does when it processes visual signals and interprets them as representations of the human face. “From an evolutionary perspective, it seems the benefit of never missing a face far outweighs the errors where inanimate objects are considered faces.says Professor David Alais, lead author of the study. There is a big advantage in detecting faces quickly but the system plays ‘fast and free’ by applying a rough model of two eyes to a nose and a mouth. Many things can satisfy this model and thus trigger a face detection response.”
In the brain, facial recognition goes very fast and happens in a few hundred milliseconds. “We know that these objects are not really faces, but the perception of a face persistsinsists David Alais. We end up with something strange: a parallel experience that it is both a convincing face and an object. Two things at once. The first impression of a face does not give way to the second perception of an object.”
The need to put an emotion on these faces
The human brain has developed specialized neural mechanisms to quickly detect faces and it exploits common facial structure as a shortcut for rapid detection. “Pareidolia faces are not rejected as false detections but undergo facial expression analysis in the same way as real faces”, advances the neuroscientist. Not only do we imagine faces, we analyze them and give them emotional attributes. According to the researchers, this expression analysis of inanimate objects is due to the fact that as deeply social beings, it is not enough to detect a face. “We have to read the identity of the face and discern its expression. Are they friend or foe? Are they happy, sad, angry, pained?“, adds David Alais.
A bias of the brain
The researchers observed a known bias in the judgment of human faces that persisted with the analysis of inanimate imaginary faces. They tested this by mixing real faces with pareidolia faces and observed that the result is the same. “This crossover condition is important because it shows that the same underlying facial expression process is involved regardless of the image type.said Professor Alais. This means seeing faces in the clouds is more than a childhood fantasy. When objects convincingly resemble a face, it’s more than an interpretation: they’re really driving your brain’s face-detection network. And that grimace, or that smile, is your brain’s facial expression system at work. For the brain, fake or real, faces are all treated the same.”
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