Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
It's funny. Laugh. Science

Why We See Faces - Everywhere 60

Posted by timothy from the and-doodle-them-too dept.
Berek Half Hand writes "Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy has a great personal story of a paranormal visitation to his shower. His report explains a lot about human nature and how our brains our wired. Those of you who may be Kate Campbell fans will also immediately think of 'Jesus and Tomatoes' and the famous Nun Bun."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Why We See Faces - Everywhere More

Why We See Faces - Everywhere

Comments Filter:
  • I see dead people.......

  • seeing faces = crazy (Score:4, Funny)

    by theMerovingian ( 722983 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @12:33PM (#7569524) Journal

    I used to live in an apartment next to a schizophrenic guy. He left his dirty clothes scattered all over his apartment.

    One day, he brought me down to his house because he was seeing faces in the wrinkles of the clothes - and he was running around the room whacking his laundry with a stick to kill the faces.

    I moved not long after that.
    • It's people like the skeptic who wrote the article who take all the fun out of science. *sigh* Back to solving differential equations...

      Wait! Wait! I see the face of God in this equation... can you find it?

      42dx + dy = x - y

      Just look for the product of the alpha and the omega...
    • I used to live in an apartment next to a schizophrenic guy. He left his dirty clothes scattered all over his apartment.

      Is having dirty clothes scattered all over your house a sign of schizophrenia? Is seeing faces in them schizophrenia?

      Or is the real question not the dirty laundry, or the seeing of faces, but the believing the faces are real and wacking your laundry.

      Then again, some people's laundry does need to be wacked.

      Is that the way I say that? I dunno how to say it. [sloth.org]

  • Stone Faces (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AtariAmarok ( 451306 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @12:34PM (#7569545)

    Check out Stone Faces Gazetteer [geocities.com]

    Some of these, especially the sleeping giants and one particular offshore head, are downright eerie.

  • I'm not surprised Phil was fooled (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    He doesn't realize that shower curtain is a product the People's Shower Curtain Collective. The curtain is engineered so that when the working-class struggle against the bourgeois fungus and soap scum is exhausted, the face of Lenin reveals itself as a sign curtain is going on strike and should be replaced.

  • A Priori Knowledge (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dnahelix ( 598670 ) <slashdotispieceofshit@shithome.com> on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @12:57PM (#7569889)
    Some consider the ability to recognize faces in humans as a priori knowledge, that is, knowledge without any prior experience. Apparently, our genes hardwire our brains to know what a face is, even before we ever experience one. I think that is so fascinating. Could it be possible to genetically engineer a human to be born with more knowledge?
    • "Some consider". Well, I dun think so. I mean, if we really wanted to know, we'd have to setup situations where babies are born and the first thing they see is a non-human nurturer. and then the majority of their growing years would have to be spent in the company of said species. If and only if after all that the child still recognizes human faces better then animal faces, then there might be something to the theory. But I don't see anyone trying that experiment anytime soon.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:A Priori Knowledge (Score:3, Insightful)

      by valdis ( 160799 )
      Actually, the problem with being born with more instinctual knowledge is that it makes you *less* flexible. Humans take an amazingly long time to become self-sufficient because we have to learn everything, whereas most other creatures are born already knowing how to do most everything they need to know how to do.

      The trade-off is that although a dog or cat is born with a lot more wired-in knowledge, it's severely restricted in what it can learn after that. Ponder the fact that literate humans are a lot mo
    • Read this book by Oliver Sacks (ISBN 0-684-85394-9), the famed neurologist (the movie Awakenings is about him).

      Anyway, one of the small stories in the book is a bout a man who had a very minor stroke which affected the area of the brain that only recognizes faces. The man would recognize people by their voice, rhythym of their walk, etc. Oddly enough, too, is that the brain did not 'know" that it had been affected, and the mans brain could not grasp the fact that faces exist. Fascinating stuff

  • Happened to me too! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dimwit ( 36756 ) * on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @01:04PM (#7569959)
    I was in South Dakota last year, and I was just driving through this nice wooded area, when I rounded a bend and...

    THERE WERE FOUR FACES, RIGHT THERE IN THE ROCK!

    I mean, like, GIANT faces, not small at all. I was pretty freaked out. I turned the car around and high-tailed it out of there!

    I can't be sure, but one of the guys looked just like Abraham Lincoln! The other one might have been Stalin, but I'm not sure...

  • Faces in the Clouds (Score:3, Interesting)

    by illegalien ( 313491 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @01:07PM (#7569994) Homepage
    If you found this article interesting, you may want to read Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion [amazon.com] by Stewart Guthrie.

    In one word, this book is about Anthropomorphism - The ascription of human characteristics to things not human.

  • The man who mistook... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @01:45PM (#7570435)


    Perhaps this is a good time to plug Oliver Sachs' classic The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat [amazon.com], a collection of essays about bizarre cognitive disorders such as Tourette's Syndrome [wikipedia.org]. It is of interest here because the title story is about a man whose face-recognition "software" was broken - not just the ability to distinguish Peter from Paul, but the basic ability to recognize a face as a face. Bizarre and a bit scary, but a very good read, and very thought provoking.

  • Bourgeois and Tsar Family!!! (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I can't believe that when this man talks about the deaths of the bolshevik regime, he talks about the tsar family and the bourgeois.

    What about the tens of thousands of peasants that were massacred by the Tcheka? What about the Krondstadt butchery? What about the gulags?

    Who cares about the tsar. He was an asshle too.

  • In Soviet Russia, Lenin showers you! ;)

  • Virgin Pancake (Score:4, Funny)

    by RealErmine ( 621439 ) <commerce@@@wordhole...net> on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @02:26PM (#7570992)
    My girlfriend once was making pancakes and she discovered an uncanny image of the Virgin Mary in the folds cooked into one. After I confirmed its resemblance we comtemplated whether or not to eat it. Maybe, since we're not religious, we could have at least made some money charging admission to all the crazies out there. In the end though, there was only one sane course of action to take.

    She was delicious.
    • She was delicious.

      Who? Your girlfriend, or the VM Pancake?

    • actually, mum used to make pancakes with faces in them on purpose. She'd make the nose and eyes and ears first, and then pour batter over them, and viola! teddy-bear faces. We didn't think twice about eating them, however, and with that prior experience, i can't imagine that if we found an image in a pacake- even an image of the virgin mary- we'd have any trouble passing the syrup. If it happened in something we weren't familiar with as a portrait medium- say, in the gravy boat, or made out of the holes in

  • Carl Sagan... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by OneOver137 ( 674481 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @03:45PM (#7571800) Journal
    has a great explaination of this effect in his book "The Demon Haunted World."

    He states, "Humans, like other primates...enjoy one another's company. ...Parental care of the young is essential for the continuance of the hereditary lines. As soon as the infant can see, it recognizes faces, and we now know that this skill is hardwired in our brains."

    He continues, "As an inadvertant side effect, the patter-recognition machinery in our brains is so efficient in extracting a face from a clutter of other detail that we sometimes see faces where there are none."
    • I expect that the built-in recognition of faces by a baby, and its subsequent happy reactions (stairing, grins, and happy-noises) also aid in keeping babies alive because its care-givers find the recognition pleasing.

      And if you have ever spent the night up with an unhappy baby, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

  • It's no mystery... (Score:2, Informative)

    by ivanmarsh ( 634711 )
    You can't help but see faces, it's hardwired into your brain.

    http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~gitars/16-721/final/final .html [cmu.edu]

  • In Alaska - Mt. Susitna - also known as "Sleeping Lady" has long been perceived to be the form of a woman in repose. [alaskaphotography.com]

    Like most natural scenario that is enduring - this one has stories that go along with it. Here's one [d21c.com] about what the mountain is waiting for before 'she' gets up again.
  • I think the brain has some sort of "coprocessor" to indentify faces.

    However, there are people who can't indentify who it is if they meet a known person. This condition is called prosapagnosia.

    www.prosopagnosia.com [prosopagnosia.com]
  • It's been discussed here before, and on wired, but hey, why not give it another whirl :) The Face of Music [wired.com]

    For some reason, most of the other pages with the info have disappeared from the web, unfortunately.

  • Everywhere I look I see vaginas [nasa.gov]

Slashdot Top Deals

"Ninety percent of baseball is half mental." -- Yogi Berra

Close