Pareidolia

Halfway through the "puppet seminar" below, it struck me that a human quirk works to the puppeteer's advantage: that of "pareidolia." This is the term for perceiving a "pattern" in random stimulus -- and it most often manifests in seeing a random -- and often minimal -- series of shapes and thinking "that kind of looks like a face."

The mop was what struck me -- all you had to add to make it look like a face was add three balls to it, one for a nose and two for eyes. Look at it from another angle and it still wouldn't look like a face. But hold it a certain way and two balls suddenly became "eyes."

Some researchers believe that we're genetically inclined to respond to faces. Carl Sagan argued that being able to recognize faces at a distance, with only the poorest of visual cues, was a genetic advantage - being able to pick off a friend from a foe at a great distance was sometimes a matter of life or death, as was being able to even just see that the thing sticking up several yards off was a person rather than a tree, say. So the better humans were in responding to "facial features" without needing much detail, the better off we were. Even newborn babies tend to pay more attention to "faces", or objects resembling faces, than anything else around them.

So we're kind of hardwired to see "faces" in things with only the most minimal of cues, which is why if you hold your sock in a certain way it makes people say, "hey, it's a mouth."