For me personally, this report would be closed
Our brains are easily fooled by different shadows cast on stones, clouds, bodies of water, buildings, etc. The brain stores "photos" of things we have seen at some point. The brain then compares outlines with shadows and as a result different people see different things from the same shadow image. This can also be seen in optical illusions, where our brain plays tricks on us.
Here I found a good science report to it into the german science magazin spektrum.de
I translate the complet text into English:
Figure perception
:
Faces everywhere
Whether clouds, tree bark or the moon - all kinds of objects often seem to have human features. Where does this illusion come from and what happens in the brain?
The Viking 1 space probe photographed the Martian highlands of Cydonia Mensae in 1976. One snapshot from the series of images made headlines: It showed a human face. Although NASA assured that this optical illusion was based only on the interplay of light and shadow, many contemporaries saw the supposed face as the work of a lost civilization.
High-resolution images from 2001 then confirmed that the narrow female face was actually a rock formation several kilometers across. The blurriness of the original image combined with a certain angle of lighting had created the illusion. Strictly speaking, there had never been a continuous face to be seen, but merely a collection of light and dark areas. Our brain simply puts these together to form a face, because it has an astonishing sensitivity to the human physiognomy. Because of this innate urge to give meaning to structures - called "pareidolia" - we think we see human likenesses in sockets, cars or houses.
The human brain has an amazing sensitivity to faces. That's why we sometimes think we see them in inanimate objects.
Face recognition is based on our innate ability to recognize "figures". Our brain combines incoming sensory information into a unified whole and assigns meaning to this perception.
Several brain areas in the temporal and occipital lobes are involved in face recognition and work in a coordinated manner.
The Canadian psychologist Craig Mooney discovered this in the 1950s. He transformed a total of 40 portrait photos taken from different angles into seemingly meaningless patterns of black and white spots. Despite this, most of the test subjects to whom he showed these distorted images were able to recognize human faces in them.
The black and white drawings are now known as "Mooney faces". Mooney's results have been confirmed time and again since then; even if you mix a completely random spot pattern into the series, most people can easily identify which image is not based on a human face. However, if you turn the Mooney faces upside down, they are much more difficult to identify. The brain's facial recognition apparently only works perfectly with upright images.
The rules according to which the brain interprets incomplete shapes and contours in the environment as faces belong to the domain of figure psychology.
https://www.spektrum.de/magazin/ges...-oder-gullydeckeln-gesichter-erkennen/1281573
