If you’ve seen tabloid news stories about Jesus’s face appearing in a piece of burnt toast or Michael Jackson’s visage peering out from the clouds, then you’ll know that you’re far from the only one to see faces all over the place.
Psychologists put this down to ‘pareidolia’ (pronounced pair-ay-doh-leeah), which is the formal term for when we detect patterns in information that is completely random. I say ‘information’ because the phenomenon doesn’t only occur visually, or for faces. For example, sometimes people think they can hear voices in recordings of random sounds.