Monday, February 12, 2007

Random Patterns Become Faces

I've had a number of experiences where I'll see faces in everything. Specifically walls w/ swirly drywall patterns, and really really easily in wood. I've wondered why we see faces in randomness like the man in the moon, the face on mars, wood grain, etc. This article (NyTimes) in typical empirical scientific fasion talks about how people process faces, but not why we see faces. My hypothesis is that its because a human face is probably the first thing we see, or at least make sense of what it is we're seeing. Out of the grey fog of non-vision your mothers face comes into view. Thoughts?

1 comment:

geekedout said...

something like that. your brain is a pattern recognizer. put a language around a child and it will learn that language with ease and without instruction. i think we have a similar mental function for faces. you can tell minute differences between them with hardly any effort, but cannot reproduce the details of a painting to save your life.