Interestingly, pareidolia might explain the many supposedly paranormal and mystical phenomena, including UFO and Bigfoot sightings and other visions. Neuroscientists Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik say that mental disease can aggravate pareidolia, as can fatigue and sleepiness.
“After a recent surgery, one of us (Martinez-Conde) noticed faces everywhere, in places as unlikely as the ultrasound images of her left arm during an examination of potential postsurgical blood clots,” they wrote in Scientific American. “She realized at once that the ubiquitous faces were the product of lack of sleep and the high titer of pain medication in her bloodstream, so she was more fascinated than concerned.”
Martinez-Conde’s doctor agreed but made a note in her file for a different drug regimen in the future—just in case. Luckily, the hospital room’s walls were bare, and there was no yellow wallpaper in sight.
Martinez-Conde and Macknik said that our brain is wired to find meaning. “Our aptitude to identify structure and order around us, combined with our superior talent for face detection, can lead to spectacular cases of pareidolia, with significant effects in society and in culture,” they explained.
A good example comes from 1976. As NASA’s Viking 1 orbited Mars, looking for possible landing sites for its sister ship, Viking 2, it spotted the likeness of a mile-wide human face staring back from the Red Planet’s Cydonia region.
Experts believed that the Martian “sphinx” was one of numerous mesas around Cydonia and that unusual shadows made it look like a humongous head. Conspiracy theorists, on the other hand, favored the alternative explanation of a government cover-up and criticized NASA’s unsuccessful attempts to hide the remnants of an ancient Martian civilization.
Two decades later, NASA decided to obtain high-resolution images of Cydonia. According to then chief scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, Jim Garvin, they felt it was important to the taxpayers.
In April 1998, the Mars Orbiter Camera team snapped a picture 10 times sharper than the original Viking photos, revealing the mystifying Face on Mars to be... a mesa.
Notable examples of pareidolia can be found in the art world as well. “The brain’s capacity to establish false links among things that are not actually connected is essential to the ‘paranoiac-critical method’ artistic technique invented by Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí,” Martinez-Conde and Macknik added.
(Paranoia and pareidolia even have the same etymology, from the Greek para- for “instead of” and -oid, -oeides or -eidos for “form.”)
“In Dalí’s Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire, several features in Voltaire’s face are formed by the bodies of people in the scene.”
In general, humans are likelier to see male, rather than female faces, in inanimate objects, a 2022 study in the journal PNAS discovered. And our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, do see some face-like features in objects, but not nearly as well as we do. This highlights just how important such social information is to us as compared with other animals.
