Today, we're going to talk a bit about Pareidolia, which is the strange phenomenon where people see faces or other patterns in things. The best example is people seeing Jesus in the burn pattern on a grilled cheese sandwich, or those optical illusions where you see faces on either side of a vase, or things like that.
The word Pareidolia comes from Greek, meaning faulty images, and is a form of apophenia, which is a more general term used for finding unrelated patterns in life. One of the theories about why this could happen is that we evolved to spot humans around us, or specific humans in a crowd, and this is just our brain doing 'false positives'. A lot of the things people spot are religious figures, but there are a lot of other things that get spotted, such as a wide variety of non-human things, like teddy bears, elephants, or words.
This is something you probably have experience with if you think about it, but don't worry. It's not a bad thing, and it can actually be pretty fun if you're more on the creative side. If you want to find examples though, look to the sources below or take the quiz that is linked at the end. I'd say not to find faces in your food because it might be harder to eat then, but Sour Patch Kids, among others, has proven otherwise. And that's not something I don't think I want to think on too deeply, so have fun and try to see what you can see in the world around you that you didn't see before.
Sources:
Live Science- What is Pareidolia
Merriam-Webster Dictionary Definition of Pareidolia
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