TheChairman: Created page with "==Article Transcript== Few of us in the business of making cartoon faces realize that we owe our entire careers to a process in the brain called pareidolia. Simply put, pareid..."

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==Article Transcript==
Few of us in the business of
making cartoon faces realize
that we owe our entire careers
to a process in the brain called
pareidolia. Simply put, pareidolia
(pare-ee-uh-dole-ee-ya) is the
brain’s ability to percieve patterns.
Our brains are so good at
this that we even perceive patterns
from chaos—
that is, where
there might not be any specific
pattern to perceive.

When we see animals in clouds, or
Elvis turns up on our grilled cheese
sandwich, that’s pareidolia at work.
This is not just a visual phenomenon:
we are experiencing audio pareidolia
when we hear hidden messages
in backwards-playing songs or think
we hear ghoulish words in the static
recorded by a ghost hunter. Without
this ability, we would be all but
blinded in our chaotic world, unable
to tell our loved ones apart from
strangers, unable to hear someone
calling out our name in a noisy
room—
and, most importantly, unable
to recognize any kind of cartoon or
exaggerated drawing!

A number of experiments have shown
our brains recognize caricatures even
faster than we can interpret a less
exaggerated line drawing or even
photo of someone. The 2001 BBC
special “The Human Face,” hosted by
John Cleese, summarizes a theory as
to why this happens: some scientists
believe our brains actually store facial
data in caricature form. We hold up
each face we see to a “norm” template
stored in our visual cortex and
then judge where it deviates and
by how much—
then our brain can
interpret who we are seeing. The biology
of how we recognize people is far
more complicated than that, of course,
and researchers are still barely tapping
into the science of thought. But
pareidolia is a well-defined phenomenon
that’s not just limited to human
beings (a horse, for instance, might
misinterpret a garden hose for a
snake—
because the horse’s pareidolia
has sorted the image and filed
it under the pattern “snake”). Think
of pareidolia as the first-responsemechanism
that tells our brain we are
indeed viewing a face (or a rabbit, or
a butterfly, or some other well-known
thing that fits a certain pattern). And,
lucky for cartoonists and bloggers
alike, human pareidolia is “stretchy”
enough to also make emoticons ;-)
and :-P and :-[ more than just a series
of random extraneous punctuation.

What do people recognize most
easily out of random stimuli? Faces
and animals seem to top the list. The
ability to recognize faces is present
even in newborns, who have been
found to respond to even simple dot
patterns in the shape of eyes and a
mouth. Doctors are able to utilize their
own pareidolia by creating diagnostic
mnemonic devices based on certain
recognizable patterns in neurological
scans: scoliosis looks like a butterfly,
Alzheimer’s looks like an elephant,
supranuclear palsy looks like a hummingbird,
and the list goes on. If The
Watchmen ever gets bastardized into
a Saturday morning cartoon, expect
Rorschach to have a plucky young
sidekick named Pareidolia.

It doesn’t take much imagination to realize
that instant recognition of faces
and animals would be pretty helpful
to our savannah-roaming ancestors.
As psychological researcher David
Navon puts it, “An old-time hominid
would be liable to pay dearly, had s/he
failed to recognize a pair of glowing
dots in the bush at dark as the eyes
of a predator, mistaking it for two
fireflies.” So, was this hyper-ability in
our brains selected for over millions of
years and honed by evolution into our
natures? Are we, as so many science
writers say, “hard-wired” to see faces
and animals as quickly as possible,
even where there are only a few
visual clues to point us that way? One
way to help answer that question is to
determine whether the pareidolia/face
recognition takes place in an automatic,
subconscious flash, or is it a later
cognitive construction or interpretation?
In English, that means: Does our
brain see a face-like object or patterns
and immediately scream “FACE!” in
the primal part of our mind . . . or does
it take a look at the object or group of
objects, think about it, and then think
afterward, in the higher parts of the brain, “Erm, I do say, upon reflection,
this looks like a face.” I like to imagine
that the higher parts of the brain
speak with a refined British accent.

In a 2009 article in the journal NeuroReport,
Swiss scientists (Hadjikani
et al.) reported their findings on face
recognition in a clever experiment
that measured brain responses using
magnetoencephalographic (MEG)
mapping. Subjects were shown photographs
of real faces, non-facelike
objects, and facelike objects.

The MEG data collected by these
researchers showed that a part of
the brain’s visual area (the fusiform
face area, or FFA, in the lower back
part of our brains, roughly between
the ears) showed activity very quickly
when a subject looked at either a face
or a facelike object. All brain reaction
time is measured in milliseconds—but
even in terms of brain impulses, we
register a super-quick response to
faces. The real faces showed a dip
in the MEG at around 130 ms, then a
high spike at 165 ms. While the facelike
objects did not illicit the same dip
at 130 ms, they
produced a spike
at around 165 ms
that was equal to
that produced by
real faces. The
non-facelike objects,
meanwhile,
produced a spike only half as high. So
indeed, our brains do scream “FACE!”
rather early in the game—and not just
for real faces. Cartoony or symbolic
marks/objects that have what can be
interpreted as eyes, a nose, and a
mouth get the same level of fireworks
in our synapses.

So it seems easy to infer that pareidolia
is a trick that hominid brains
developed millions of years ago, when
our ancestors left the trees and began
using vision rather than smell as their
primary sense. Were those individuals
whose brains had pareidolia better
able to avoid deadly situations because
they were able to recognize a predator,
enemy, or mother-in-law hiding in
the bushes waiting to attack? Dr. Mark
Baxter, Associate Professor of Neuroscience
at Mount Sinai School of
Medicine, warns us: “You can create
all sorts of evolutionary ‘just-so stories’
about why this
would be useful
for primates to
have (we being
a social species
and all). But weird
things happen
when you start to look for specialized
processing modules in the temporal
cortex—you get one that preferentially
responds to pictures of locations,
including houses (the ‘parahippocampal
place area,’) or you also get one
that likes chairs . . . It’s kind of hard to
make up an argument that having a
specialized brain area for processing
chairs confers a survival advantage!”
So wait — if I understand this correctly,
our finding an evolutionary pattern to
our pareidolia might just be us falling
victim to our pareidolia, that is, thinking
we see a sensible pattern where there
isn’t necessarily one? Holy conundrum,
Batman! My mind has just been blown,
FFA, PPA, and all.

Seriously, though, this type of research
is opening doors for more studies
on people who, due to injury or other
conditions, have unusual reactions to
faces. Some who suffer damage to the
FFA lose their ability to recognize their
own children, while neurological studies
on autism have been confounded
because autistic persons dislike looking
at human faces. Further research
using facelike objects (or cartoons)
might help decode the face-processing
routes for those with brains different
from our own.

So is the ability to recognize, appreciate
(and create) cartoon, symbolic
representations of faces actually
as instinctual in our minds as the
flight-or-fight response? How early,
I wonder, did the first hairy ape-like
caricaturist get a laugh from drawing
his friend Thag on the cave wall?
Or how about our nearest parallel
to cave men: namely, children?
(Yes, I do think of kids as prehistoric
little bundles of pure instinct; I think
most folks who work at a theme
park would agree with me on that,
too). I’ve seen so many hand-wringing
parents try to intellectualize the
experience of getting drawn, calming
little Billy down and explaining that
the artist lady is going to draw “a funny
face” that won’t look exactly like
him, not like a photograph, and so
on and so forth, as if they are afraid
their kid won’t “get it” when I turn the
picture around. And over years and
years, it’s become clear to me that
kids DO get it—they get it more than
mom or dad seems to understand
and appreciate the art form, actually.
They need no training or education
to recognize the face and get a good
laugh out of it.

As caricature artists, I’m sure many
of us have experienced that feeling
of “letting go” when we are doing
quick, gestural work at a fast-paced
party or crowded theme park. Higher
functions become harder to switch
back to. I’m usually a good speller, for
instance, but I find recalling how to
spell even simple words like “happy
anniversary” is more difficult after I’ve
been “in the zone,” drawing person
after person. And
how often have
you raced through
a drawing without
thinking about
it, then suddenly
realized it was
the best likeness
you’ve produced in years—better than
anything drawn out of tortured, overthinking
effort? There exists no actual
data on the matter, but I am quite
curious about how much of our primal,
subconscious mind we are tapping into
when we slip into this state. I will wait
patiently for a group of scientists to get
funding and design a study that might
provide me a solid answer (though I
may be waiting a very long time).

So, the next time someone says your
art form is low-brow, tell them they’re
correct. It’s so low-brow it’s near the
brain stem, actually. Meanwhile, let’s
get out there and continue using
people’s pareidolia for fun and profit,
everyone!

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TheChairman: Created page with "==Article Transcript== Few of us in the business of making cartoon faces realize that we owe our entire careers to a process in the brain called pareidolia. Simply put, pareid..."