He said it’s a phenomenon called pareidolia, which is the brain’s ability to create shapes out of random objects—like seeing animals in clouds, faces in rocks, or objects in ink blot tests. “Far from being a vision defect, pareidolia has a lot of survival value if you need to quickly spot predators in the jungle, for instance,” he added.
“Recognizing a crab in a landscape filled with wind-weathered rocks is no more surprising—nor more significant—than seeing a winking face in a semi-colon followed by a parenthesis. ; ) ”
Also, some social media users claim there’s a “Yeti” peeking out from behind a rock in the same picture.
A study in 2012 tried to make more sense of pareidolia.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, “used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to pinpoint the spot in the brain in which pareidolia plays out, and determined that it’s actually in two spots called the left and right fusiform gyrus,” writes Time magazine, citing the study.
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