Is that Jesus in my toast? Pareidolia explained

3

On July 25th 1976 the Viking 1 mission captured a particularly strange picture on Mars. In the photo one of the rocky mountains in the Cydonia region looked just like a face. A big one. Complete with a mouth, eyes, and what looked like a helmet (or a very bad haircut).

There was a sudden interest in the face on Mars. Even the mainstream news picked up the story and the images were broadcast to millions of viewers on the nightly news and in newspapers around the world. As a kid I saw lots of images of the face on Mars. It looked like a face to me, and I got very excited. Is this it? I thought. Could Martians actually be real? There was plenty of wild speculation to feed my interest. I listened as Richard Hoagland and other conspiracy theorists on Art Bell’s radio show discussed hidden civilizations beneath the martian surface, ancient temple complexes dotting the martian landscape, ties to Earthly pyramids, the possibility of martians being our own ancestors, and of course, a huge government cover-up.

Sadly for Hoagland and many other fringe theorists all of these fun ideas were crushed by reality in 1998. That was the year when the Mars Global Surveyor returned to Cydonia and sent back images of the region with far more detail. The pictures revealed that the face was just an ordinary mountain. One with a few peaks and hollows which, when the light hits them just right, look like a face. 

What happened? The short answer is that I, along with so many others, fell for the bias called “pareidolia.” This is our tendency to see faces or other meaningful patterns in random images. Even though pareidolia is an error in our perception, it is an error that makes a lot of sense. Human brains are literally wired to see human faces from birth. It is one of the first developmental tasks that we have: find the face of our caregiver and lock on to it. We continue to be primed to look for faces even in adulthood. Our brains are constantly scanning for meaningful patterns. Faces may be the most meaningful pattern of all.

Pareidolia is one of the very first biases we ever encounter as children and so as you can imagine, it plays a big role in children’s books that feature cognitive biases. In Beyond Belief: The Adventure Begins, the hero of the book falls beneath a Saturn Five rocket (luckily it is dormant). As he is laying there looking up he sees the three bells of the rocket’s exhaust system above him and for a moment thinks it is the face of a giant. This is how this bias usually happens: in an instant, in dim light, and automatically. Our brain processes it so fast that we have to put effort into quelling the fear it causes.

As a psychologist who tends to daydream a lot, I sometimes wonder what it would be like If the dinosaur extinction never happened and we evolved from velociraptors instead of little mouse-like creatures. Then the face on Mars wouldn’t have looked like a face to us at all, but a jumble of hills and shadows, which is what it actually is. Perhaps we would have seen a face in the long neck and jagged teeth of the Valles Marineris instead. Or if we had descended from beavers instead of apes we may have found evidence of martian dams near the Jezero Crater. The glitch of pareidolia is not just hard-wired, it is species specific, which should make us all the more skeptical when we see faces in space. Or in trees. Or clouds.

Over the years pareidolia has led to a lot of weird things. In 2008 Steve Cragg, a pastor in Texas, claimed that he found a Cheeto that looked like Jesus. He may have hit the jackpot, because that same year Diane Duyser of Miami sold a 10 year old grilled cheese sandwich on Ebay with the likeness of the Virgin Mary on it. The sandwich sold for $28,000. Pareidolia is not limited to religious icons either. The state quarter for New Hampshire has an image of the Old Man of the Mountain, a rock face that looks like a literal rock face. Sadly, nature took its course and the Old Man collapsed on May 3, 2003. But New Hampshirites were so fond of him that they preserved him on the quarter for perpetuity. Take that gravity.

The Rorschach ink-blot test hijacks pareidolia to give psychologists insight into people’s personalities (just how much insight is highly debatable).

Teaching your skeptical kid about this bias

Pareidolia is a fun bias to play with and kids love it. If you want to teach your little skeptic about it an easy way it to spend a little time cloud-watching together. Let your imaginations run wild with all the shapes. There are always faces to be seen, but there are also turtles, horses, spaceships, mushrooms, and so much more.

Another fun way to teach your kid about pareidolia is to spot the intentional uses of it. Designers make things that are expressive and which hint at faces, they know we are drawn to them. Especially when it comes to purchases that we tend to identify with. Cars are a big and easy example of this. So are some houses. Surrealist artists often hide faces in their paintings, and you can spot them in optical illusions as well. All of these are fun and kids love them.