I know pareidolia (seeing faces in objects) is built into our brains, but does anyone know why or where it comes from?
In: Biology
I’m not a neurologist.
But I would think it’s pretty closely related to our ability to read each others faces and recognize them and tell people apart from the slightest differences and pick up on their emotions from their face.
We have some sort of “facial recognition accelerator” in our brains and I feel like paradolia is a side effect of it taking empty input and trying to pattern match.
I know we have some secret sauce because some people are face blind. We can tell celebrities apart in caricatures.
One of our greatest advantages over other animals is our unique forms of social interactions. Humans have developed a lot of subtle ways of coordinating with one another in ways that help the species as a whole, from hunting down mammoths to building supercities. We can nonverbally communicate extremely subtle cues and recognize familiar individuals from great distances without needing a strong sense of smell. In short, our ability to see and discern faces gives us an advantage. Select for that trait over millennia and you’ll also have some weird side effects, like seeing faces where there aren’t any.
To spot hidden threats fast. The biggest threat to a human being is another human being. It’s better to spot a threat fast then figure it’s not what you thought than to miss one and die. also the brain is a big pattern matching machine. It’s always matching patterns, even when idle.
I’m not a neurologist.
Because we are a highly social species that uses our faces to communicate and tell each other apart, but our faces don’t actually differ from each other by a very wide margin compared to background noise.
So, from an evolutionary and neurological standpoint, we’re left with the options of:
Develop more complex and diverse faces.
Develop better generalized memories, so we can remember any face-size area of face-like complexity.
Develop other methods of telling people apart.
Develop the ability to learn how to differentiate faces.
Develop a method to tell faces apart, built into the brain.
Evolution went with the last one. And also the second and third to an extent. “Why” isn’t really a question for evolution. The other methods probably just didn’t emerge. Although some of them also probably wouldn’t have worked as well.
But when you have a part of the brain that’s dedicated to doing that, it’s also going to overreact sometimes.
Kind of like how random crowd noises can sound like your own name, sometimes. You listen for it, so you hear it more than it happens.
Recognizing patterns is an important skill for highly visual creatures like primates; it helps us react faster to things that might be food, mate or danger. But it’s not foolproof – hence pareidola
Pattern recognition is a survival trait – which goes together with why animals develop camouflage, since the goal of camouflage is to *mislead* pattern recognition.
You are the descendant of people who *noticed* the tiger in the tall grass and GTFO.
Humans have super complex social structures and it comes with many pluses and minuses. One thi g that ultimately results is the biggest determination of survival is social skills and pardolia fits in to recognize expressions and enemies. The greatest predator of humans is other humans.
The other result of those social skills is it results in relationally linking different things, and complex pattern recognition and prediction. The end result that’s really a minor byproduct is math and science and engineering and technology. And I mean minor. Look how long it took for scientists to go from teaching a machine arithmetic and programming to bei g able to recognize human speech. Science as we know it is almost computationally simple compared to just talking. And that’s not yet getting into nuance etc.
Latest Answers