Transcript of YouTube Video: Why You See Faces in Things

- Hey smart people.

Joe here. And this is a face except not really.

It's like two dots and a line,

but I'm willing to bet when your brain saw this pattern,

it said "face"

I think that was weird.

Well, it was, but I've been seeing weird things everywhere.

Like this washing machine has a face,

this building has a face, and this mop has a big mad face.

And this pepper is even angrier. Probably

because it got cut in half.

Everywhere I look, it's face, face, face, face, face.

Has this ever happened to you?

Of course it's happened to you.

Seeing faces in non-human objects is something people from

every culture experience.

I mean, there's a whole subreddit for this kind of stuff.

You and I are not alone.

It's given us art, movies

and more memes than you can shake a face shape stick at.

So what sort of collective malfunction is

happening in our face-

obsessed brains? Surprise! It's not a malfunction at all.

Your brain is doing what human brains do.

And this video is all about why

and how your brain sees faces in faceless stuff.

That's right. Your brain's about to learn about itself.

That's deep.

Almost as deep as whatever subconscious weirdness makes you

see phantom faces everywhere.

The term we're looking for is facial pareidolia.

Our tendency to see faces in objects

where there aren't any actual faces.

pareidolia is a cool word.

It would make a cool band name,

except I already count at least six bands on

Spotify with that name.

So maybe not, but I digress.

As far as your brain's concerned, pareidolia is a feature,

not a bug.

We homo sapiens are really good at identifying

faces. And it makes sense,

we're social animals.

So being able to identify the mugs

of our fellow species members well helps us build

bonds and stay safe,

right? On the flip side, quickly, spotting the faces

of things that want to hurt or eat us keeps us alive.

So it's not hard to see why natural selection was like,

yeah, let's keep this little skill and let's turn it to 11.

Picking out faces, identifying them

and figuring out if their friends

or foes happens really fast, like literally as fast

as the blink of an eye.

Quick sidebar.

Here's an extremely condensed version of how seeing works.

Okay, light goes in here, hits cells here,

which send chemical and electrical signals along here,

and those signals end up mainly here

in this part of your brain.

The visual cortex.

Why they put the seeing part at the opposite

end from the eyeball part,

I don't know. I didn't design this thing.

Interpreting millions of electrical signals

and trying to turn them into some coherent sensation of

what the world actually looks is hard work.

It's a lot for one little chunk of your brain to handle.

So the primary visual cortex works more like a traffic

coordinator dividing up that work.

When visual data comes in, it sends some to other regions

of the brain. Edges and lines?

That's here. Motion? That goes here. Looking at words?

That goes here. This division of labor where different bits

of visual information are sent

to different processing areas,

that helps our brains figure out

what we're looking at even faster.

But honestly, take a look around you right now.

Take an honest look at all the stuff your visual system

needs to interpret or ignore.

It's a lot!

To keep this visual information tsunami from piling up.

Our visual traffic controller sorts signals into two pathways.

The where and the what pathways.

Information like movement

and where things are located in space is interpreted

by brain cells along the wear pathway.

But figuring out what something is happens along here.

Telling the difference between a bird and a bee

or an adult person or two kids in a trench coat.

Well, that happens here.

But wait, how does your brain flag something as a face?

Well, scientists have discovered that a pattern as minimal

as two small dots on top

of a third dot arranged in a triangular pattern on a

contrasting background, that's enough

for our brain to scream, "Face"

The spacing between the features

or the details they do

or don't contain, they aren't as important as just

that basic arrangement.

Our brain spots this pattern so fast

that it's nearly automatic.

Basically, you have a face detecting hyper processor in your noggin.

When your brain spots a pattern matching this basic face

layout, specific brain circuits for face recognition

light up first.

But then these other slower object recognition processing

areas catch up, reinterpreting that scene into

what you actually see.

What this means is when you see this, one part

of your brain unconsciously screams "face"

and then other parts of your brain comes in shortly after

and says, no, that's not actually a face.

This is why when we experience facial pareidolia,

we can switch back and forth between seeing the face

and seeing the thing for what it actually is.

Because we're seeing both. Our subconscious,

almost automatic face finding ability

is what got researchers wondering: are humans born

with our amazing face detection software?

Or do we learn it? To figure that out,

scientists stuck babies as young

as six days old in MRI machines

to look at their brain activity.

How they did that, I have no idea,

but they found that the face detecting regions

of those babies' brains were already sending

signals to one another.

Just like in adults.

This a big clue that homo sapiens are born

with a hardwired ability to recognize facial patterns,

even when we're nothing more than squishy pooping potatoes.

But while those MRIs are definitely impressive,

they're not a hundred percent proof that we're born with it.

Other researchers think our ability to quickly see

and identify faces is something that we learn.

We know from studies in animals that we are not born

with an ability to see lines, angles, or movement.

These are things that we learn to see

by seeing them as babies.

And study after study has shown

that babies prefer looking at faces, partly

because we're always sticking our face in their faces.

And because babies are born with, well,

pretty bad vision, to be honest.

And the high contrast

and movement of our faces are one

of the few things they can see at that early age.

And over time, babies learn that those faces are associated

with things like comfort

and food. That trains us to look for faces

and identify different ones from a very early age.

So yeah, scientists are still figuring out how much

of our ability to see and recognize faces is learned,

and how much we're born with.

But figuring this stuff out is important

because it will let us develop ways to help the hundreds

of millions of people living with prosopagnosia

or face blindness.

That means maybe some of you watching this have face

Honestly, it's really the only excuse for continuing

to confuse me for Hank Green

or Keith from the try, guys, because come on.

I don't even see it. Okay, fine. I do.

We're also learning that people

with Alzheimer's disease may have issues

with the visual processing parts of their brain.

And understanding how brain regions

and our visual cortex work together could help us diagnose

autism earlier to help kids get the help they need.

Because being able to see faces,

it's a really important part of being human.

You don't have to take my word for it. Ask evolution.

Evolutionarily speaking, it's better

to assume something is a face

and be wrong than ignore what might be a face.

And well, you know,

face recognition also helps us figure out

what others are feeling so

that we have more meaningful social interactions.

That way we react one way if someone looks happy

and another if they look sad or upset.

Our ability to judge people's emotions

by their facial features is so strong that we do it

for objects too.

It's why this person's neck is happy to see you.

And these onions definitely are not. Projecting emotions onto

non-faces can even shape human behavior.

For example, a group of researchers in the UK found

that we are more attracted to products that look happy,

and companies can take advantage of pareidolia

to sell more stuff.

Another study found that cars

that looked like they were smiling were better

sellers than others.

Unless you're a tough dude-bro. Then maybe you want this mad car.

Because it looks tough and you're also tough

and you definitely lift.

And don't skip leg day,

which we know 'cause you drive a car that looks like this.

- Faces can even push us to change the course of evolution.

And biologists realize

that domesticated dogs have additional muscles in their

faces that let them wiggle their eyebrows.

Wolves don't have those muscles.

It turns out that doggy eyebrows helped them connect

with us, and that helped them survive.

Since the cuter the puppy dog eyes, the more likely we were

to share our fire and food with them.

Adorable evolutionary manipulation? I'll allow it.

So understanding how

and why we see faces not only helps us understand ourselves better,

but it can give us a deeper understanding

of evolution too.

So let's face the facts.

We know our brains love faces.

So when you see a schnoz on your squash,

cara in a calabaza, a visage in your Volkswagen,

or a kao in your bao, remember you're just being human.

Stay curious.

Thanks so much for sticking around at the end of video.

If you did make it this far, leave me a comment

with your favorite face emoji.

And as always, thank you to everyone

who supports the show on Patreon,

including these fine folks right here

who I assume have wonderful faces.

And you and your face can head over to our Patreon page

and learn how you can support the show directly.

Find out about new videos

before anybody else in the entire

universe, as far as I can tell.

Well, there's a link down in the

description if you wanna learn more.

We'll see you in the next video. Take it easy.

It's really the only excuse ...

for contugf ...

continuing to confuse me ...

for Hank Green

Hey smart people. Joe, here. This ... nope.