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Bored Panda

Entertainment

Eglė Bliabaitė

120 Times People Succumbed To Pareidolia And Saw What Wasn’t Really There (New Pics)

Humans tend to anthropomorphize things: we give names to our pets, plushies, and even cars and boats. For me, a pack of colored pens once served as all the X-Men during childhood playtime. Other times, we see things that aren't really there, like faces in rocks or shapes of dogs in the clouds.

We call the phenomenon 'pareidolia,' and it's an interesting way our brains trick us into anthropomorphizing inanimate objects. Have you ever thought that the front of your car looks like a face? That's pareidolia. Want to see some crazy things people spotted and thought they looked like something else? Scroll away!

Bored Panda wanted to understand pareidolia better, so, we reached out to researcher Mark T. Hamilton. He's a Ph.D. student at the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and has studied why we see faces in things. He kindly agreed to share his research insights with us, so, be sure to check them out below!

#1 I Am Froot

Image credits: RascalsWager

#2 I Found A Mushroom That Looks Like A Little Owl

Image credits: miss421

#3 I Had To Move A Lilac Bush In My Yard A Few Years Ago, And I Spotted This Root That Looked Like A Little Dancer. I Liked Her So Much I Kept Her :)

Image credits: Wrong-Marsupial-9767

If you have ever started seeing faces in clouds or were thinking that your teapot might be smiling at you, don't worry, you're not crazy. Pareidolia is common for a lot of us. Still, it's interesting why our brains are seemingly wired to see faces everywhere: is it because we like to give anthropomorphic qualities to everything?

Researcher Mark Hamilton and his team completed their research on pareidolia in 2024 and have some theories about why we tend to see eyes, noses, and mouths everywhere. The researchers think that pareidolia is just our way of protecting ourselves.

#4 Hand-Shaped Icicle

Image credits: dozolord

#5 These Two Rocks Look Like A Mother Breastfeeding Her New Born Child

Image credits: xaeminn

#6 My Mum Sent Me These Photos Of A Plant Growing Outside Of Her Work. How Does It Have The Perfect Mouth , Nose But Also Eyes !

Image credits: Puff Puff Pass

In a way, pareidolia is the result of our survival instinct. "Our research points to the fact that it might be because of the need to quickly parse and identify animal faces," Hamilton told Bored Panda. "Possibly for things like avoiding predators and catching prey."

Interestingly, humans aren't alone in seeing faces in places where there are none. "Other research that we reference in our paper shows even rhesus monkeys experience pareidolia," Hamilton added. "Pareidolia happens very quickly in the brain, a sign that it's a deep-rooted evolutionary artifact."

#7 My Dog Has A Silhouette Of A Fat Cat In His Fur Pattern

Image credits: littledaikon

#8 I Spilled Some Milk And The Puddle Looks Like A Derpy Ghost!

Image credits: mockjogger

#9 A Piece Of Ice Cream Dropped From My Spoon As I Was Scooping And It Looks Like A Tiny Shark

Image credits: theseapriestess

In their research, Hamilton and his team first fed a state-of-the-art face detector images of human faces. They asked it to recognize faces in pareidolic images. The algorithm didn't do so well, with only a 9% average precision. When the algorithm was trained on pareidolic images, on the other hand, it was way more precise and had a 36% AP.

#10 The Fuzz On My Sock Looks Like A Flamingo

Image credits: littleorganbigm

#11 I Found A Leaf Shaped Like A Manta Ray

Image credits: rezips

#12 After I Poured Milk Into My Coffee, I Found Snoopy On The Doghouse Under The Moon

Image credits: Tacec

"Our research specifically showed that algorithms trained on human faces alone didn't see nearly as much pareidolia as algorithms trained on human and animal faces," Hamilton says. Training the algorithm on animal faces made it recognize pareidolic images even better. Hamilton believes it's because the algorithm generalized beyond just human facial features.

#13 Zombie Foot Tree Trunk

Image credits: CleverUsername006

#14 Shark Cloud With Moon Eye

Image credits: addimaee

#15 This Onion Looks Like An Angry Bird

Image credits: FighterIs

When the algorithm is trained on animal faces it starts thinking about faces more abstractly. "If you think about it, animal faces have a ton of different variants and colors, which might explain why we can see pareidolic faces that look nothing like human faces," Hamilton explains.

#16 Lil’ Ducky In The Soup

Image credits: piinkifairy

#17 I Ate Fried Onion Rings With A Roasted Chicken Which According To My Friends Looks Like A Dog?!

Image credits: Cigarettes_at_beach

#18 Today's Sun Eclipse As Seen At Sunset Resembled A Giant Cat's Head

Image credits: New-Baby5471

If the AI recognizes pareidolia better when it's trained on a more diverse set of faces, does that mean that we, humans, start seeing more faces in things as we age and have seen more living faces of all kinds? Not really. According to Hamilton, other research shows that pareidolia in humans emerges very young. One study even found that fetuses respond to face-like patterns by shining lights into the womb!

#19 Just A Friendly Little BBQ Bear

Image credits: kindjackets

#20 This Chair In The Hospital Waiting Room Is Not Very Happy About Being Sat On

Image credits: gemxvx

#21 This Moth Has Spots Like Skulls On Its Wings

Image credits: reddit.com

Another interesting fact is that there are also gender differences in who sees more pareidolia. "Women see more pareidolia than men, and pareidolic faces tend to be perceived more often as male, both in our dataset and in the broader literature," Mark T. Hamilton tells Bored Panda.

#22 Reflection Of A Dog

Image credits: VenomSwitch

#23 A Duck

Image credits: Ok_Swimming693

#24 My Dog Had A Paw Print On His Paw

Image credits: af0929

The thing that surprised Hamilton and his team most during their research was that pareidolia and detecting animals are linked in modern algorithms. "That's not often connected," he told us. "This helps make sense of a lot of the different pareidolia observations out there. Like its observation in monkeys, its fast response time, even perhaps its skew towards male faces (which one could argue are more correlated with predator traits like strong jaws, harder noses, etc)."

#25 👁️

Image credits: sochono31

#26 Wood You Look At That!

Image credits: pzNx

#27 Was Going For A Walk Last Night And I Stopped Dead In My Tracks - It Looks Like A Person In The Tree... Creepy Af

Image credits: spooknat

Hamilton's team also had some fun during their research. Apparently, the algorithms are quite good at finding pareidolic doppelgängers for animals. It turns out that lions can look like pancakes, some seals look eerily similar to pears, and mice resemble melons! You can see the hilarious examples right here!

#28 This Tree Branch That Looks Like A Dragon

Image credits: babybuttoneyes

#29 Seedpods That Look Like Tiny Skulls

Image credits: abandonedbyserotonin

#30 This Tomato From My Garden Is Shaped Like A Bunny Head

Image credits: Buscemee

The team also wrote down some equations that roughly predict when and where people might see pareidolia. Then, they verified them with human psychophysics studies. "The equation and studies show that there's a "goldilocks" zone of "complexity" in a scene where faces are more likely to pop out," Hamilton explains. You can see a graphic or what's too much pareidolia and what's too little here."