However, if you light it up evenly and turn the perspective slightly it just turns into another hill. Our brains saw the face because it hates randomness. The phenomenon is called pareidolia. It is a special form of apophenia, (the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things or ideas) that turns random visual data into faces. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia)
Common examples from everyday life include me seeing a
face on the back of my Toyota. One might see a face in an electrical outlet or
even in a piece of fruit cut just the right way. I remember reading about people
seeing Elvis on burnt toast or Jesus on a potato chip. We see bunnies, horses or
even dragons in the clouds. The list goes on and on.
Over the Labor Day weekend, we took a mini camping
trip to Calaveras Big Trees State Park. (Hence the reason I missed posting a
blog last week.) While fishing in the North Fork of the Stanislaus River, I
came across this rock in the middle of the river.
That’s where my pareidolia kicked in big time. To me it looks like a fossil dinosaur skull. So much so, that I wanted to get down the bank to really look at it. It turns out, it is just simply a rock. But it doesn’t take much imagination to turn it into a whole convoluted story. One friend of mind said, “Oh, Transformers”!
It’s another instance of “seeing is believing” getting
the best of us. Very often our senses can be deceived or even betrayed by our
brain wanting to see what isn’t really there. That’s why it is so important to educate
ourselves concerning the truth. Life is not always what it seems. But a
dinosaur skull, well that would have been cool anyway…
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