Faces Everywhere

I've discovered another interesting site which relates to our instinctual visual bias, Strange Maps. I have frequently noticed various shapes on sidewalks, created by melted ice cream and other detritus, but have refrained from photographing them out of deference for the people that reside in or are from those countries. The US in the form of a half-eaten nan is not so bad: *** This is an interesting article in Scientific American, November 25, 2008. In a nutshell, this was part of my thinking behind Miles From Mars

Patternicity: Finding Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless Noise

Why the brain believes something is real when it is not

By Michael Shermer

Why do people see faces in nature, interpret window stains as human figures, hear voices in random sounds generated by electronic devices or find conspiracies in the daily news? A proximate cause is the priming effect, in which our brain and senses are prepared to interpret stimuli according to an expected model. UFOlogists see a face on Mars. Religionists see the Virgin Mary on the side of a building. Paranormalists hear dead people speaking to them through a radio receiver. Conspiracy theorists think 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration. Is there a deeper ultimate cause for why people believe such weird things? There is. I call it “patternicity,” or the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. [more...]