Neuroscience: why do we see faces in everyday objects?

Neuroscience: why do we see faces in everyday objects? “If someone reports seeing Jesus in a piece of toast, you’d think they must be nuts,” says Kang Lee, at the University of Toronto, Canada. For instance, cars with a big windscreen, round headlights and a small grill tend to be considered young and feminine: …while those with flatter headlights and a bigger, squarer under-body are older and more masculine: To Windhager, this underlines the way our brains are primed to read basic, biological information, like age or gender from anything that vaguely resembles a face – a fact that she thinks underlies pareidolia’s evolutionary origins. “It’s interesting to see how the modern environment makes us perceive things according to these ancient mechanisms,” she says. Windhager’s other studies have found that consumers tend to prefer the more dominant cars – a fact that manufacturers are already using to their advantage; in 2006, for instance, the Wall Street Journal reported that “cuter” cars, like the iconic Volkswagen Beetle, were experiencing falling sales – perhaps because their owners were feeling intimidated by the growing number of large SUVs.