What makes us see faces or figures in a burnt potato chip, wood grain surface, walls, ceilings, etc?
It is very important to us to be able to recognize faces. It is more important to our survival to recognize faces whenever they are present, than to recognize that similar patterns are not faces, so we have evolved to see faces in the clouds and elsewhere. I once saw a cloud in the unmistakeable profile of Voltaire. To understand the world we make patterns; sometimes the patterns are meaningful, but sometimes they aren’t. All cultures make patterns with the stars, but every culture makes different patterns, this suggests that the patterns are illusory. Another fact that predisposes us to see patterns where there aren’t any is that most of us have learnt to interpret pictures, something that is so fundamental to our daily lives that we forget the neurological effort it takes to interpret a photograph as a three-dimensional scene. The fact that we can see faces in photographs rather than just patches of colour on a two-dimensional surface is evidence of our ability to make patterns; and
