Pareidolia and You
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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