Pareidolia

Neuroscience is a very big deal right now. And I spend a lot of my workday plugged into podcasts like Radiolab and Stuff to Blow Your Mind. So although I really know nothing substantive about why my brain works the way it does, when I see faces in random objects, I understand enough to know that it isn’t magic. It’s just my brain.  All of our brains. This tricky phenomenon is called pareidolia. Basically, it means that our brains try to create familiar patterns in random or vague stimuli.  For humans, faces are one of the most common patterns out there, so we see faces in just about everything.

There are all manner of articles on this and no end of cute photos available on the internet.  This July 2014 BBC article  is informative and also contains some amusing pictures.

So, although your food may become menacing

…I also have this puppy encouraging me during my T’ai Chi class.

The folks in the paper lab have this friend in the photography room:

And, like many folks, this alarmed looking individual has been looking after me since childhood.

Anyway, this is all  just an excuse to share some faces that have been showing up in my work at the lab. It seems like stapled text blocks tend to spawn these creatures.  They show up where old staples have torn the paper in the center of a signature.

I have been documenting these folks as I come across them and here are a few of the best:

Does anyone else have any such friends to share?