Jesus Christ on toast? A brain scan reveals how facial pareidolia is formed. health and wellness

One afternoon in 1994, Diana Duiser, a jewelry designer from Florida, United States, experienced a mysterious sensation in her kitchen. The message came via grilled cheese sandwiches. “I went to eat and then I saw this woman looking at me,” he told the newspaper. Chicago Tribune, Burning on the surface of the bread left a recognizable shape. “It was the Virgin Mary. I was left in a situation ShockHe said then. Instead of finishing his breakfast, Duiser put it in a plastic bag and told his story to the press, first local, then national, and over the years, international press. A decade later, when the sandwich became a pop icon, he auctioned it off on eBay, where he sold it for $28,000. The sale made it clear that Ms. Dueser was a marketing genius, but also that she was not the only person to see a human (or divine) face on a slice of bread.

It was not long ago that ashrams were built, relics were sold or stories of ghosts or aliens were told. But in recent years, science has begun to understand the complex neural process by which humans believe that we see faces everywhere. It’s called facial pareidolia and the research was published a few days ago in the journal PNAS Analyzed how and where it originates in the brain. Its study could open the door to understanding autism spectrum disorders, schizophrenia or Parkinson’s.

“This work uses an electroencephalogram and is in line with recent research,” neuropsychologist Saul Martínez-Horta explains in a telephone conversation. “For some time now, with the ability to break down to milliseconds what, when, and where activity occurs in our brain, we are beginning to understand the entire sequence of processes that accompany perception.”

In the case of pareidolia, the sequence would be as follows: When we see a human face, or something that slightly resembles it, there is a “communication” between different areas in our brain. On the one hand, there are areas that deal with visual stimuli. On the other hand, areas of memory, which fill in the gaps of what we are seeing with “what we might be seeing.” And finally, an area called the facial fusiform gyrus, which plays a key role in the early stages of recognizing faces, but not any other visual stimuli. “That is, faces begin to be processed in a different area of ​​the brain and they begin to be processed even earlier,” says Martínez-Horta.

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Human perception is not explained as if we were constantly analyzing the external world. What we see about the world is usually an anticipation, we perceive what the brain thinks is most likely. “When you look at Elvis, you don’t recognize all the elements that make up Elvis’ face, but your brain already has a specific representation of his face, it knows it,” the expert says. This way you avoid investing huge amounts of resources in reading all the information coming to you. “The brain accesses memory stores in which we store bits and pieces that resemble what we are seeing. And at this point, something is already starting to tell your visual system, hey, this could be Elvis.

But what happens when we see Elvis on French fries? The communication between different areas of our brain sometimes works like a game of telephone and sends false information to our brain. There is no face, but we believe we see it. “The fact is that pareidolia occurs, especially with faces that we know very well, because we store their meaning in memory,” explains Martínez-Horta. And because, somehow, we are programmed to see human faces. We are obsessed with them.

Neurologist Susana Martínez-Conde of the State University of New York measures this obsession in her laboratory. “We analyze eye movements, exposing participants to all kinds of images, and we see that we spend more time examining faces than other objects,” he confirmed in a telephone conversation. . This, on an evolutionary level, makes sense, “because being social creatures, it is important to recognize whether the face we are seeing is that of a friend, family member, enemy, or neighbor with whom we have fought.” In fact, it is a trait common with other social mammals, such as monkeys, who also suffer from pareidolia.

Pareidolias say more about what we see than what we see. Our way of perceiving the world is reflected in optical illusions. And this is a very manly way. In a study published by the journal PNAS, It was found that 80% of the participants had a male bias when assigning the gender of faces. On toast, on potatoes or on walls, we see men’s faces everywhere. By a ratio of four to one, there is a tendency to perceive deceptive faces as masculine rather than feminine. There was a female bias in only 3% of participants.

This hallucination reflects the brain’s widespread tendency to find meaning where there is none. “Artificially arranging disorganized components into a coherent perception. Because it is not a phenomenon that exists in the world, but that we construct it, so that our subjective perception does not correspond to objective reality,” says Martínez-Conde.

The same thing happens with sounds, when we believe that someone has said our name. Or with psychoanalysis or messages hidden in the audio track. “Information is cluttered, but because we are committed to recognizing words and assigning them meaning, we tend to find words where there are none,” the expert explains. Perception is more a construction and simulation than an accurate reconstruction of reality.

But after perceiving this perceived face, our brain reevaluates what we are seeing. Unless religious or esoteric beliefs come into play, we think it is a hallucination or an optical illusion. Unless there is any kind of disease. “We study the phenomenon of pareidolia a lot in the context of neurodegenerative diseases, especially Parkinson’s,” explains Martínez-Horta. A 2021 study claimed that more than 47% of Parkinson’s patients have experienced this type of optical illusion. “Before patients have more complex and bizarre hallucinations, they begin to see faces everywhere,” the expert confirms. But this latter process of understanding does not occur here, so pareidolia is integrated as part of reality.

Understanding this phenomenon may help better understand neurodegenerative diseases, and explain how humans perceive the world around us. Finding the part of the brain responsible for this phenomenon not only confirms that Toast is not Jesus Christ, but it could help us better understand ourselves. “Pareidolia tells us very well,” Martínez-Horta summarizes. “The fact that we have no control over what we see is an example of how we often see the world.”

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