Oh, My Fateful Brain
Our brain is wired to find meaning in stimuli even when the stimulus lacks clarity of form. Most notably, we find ourselves constructing images or meaningful features out of clouds and rock formations. This tendency is called "pareidolia". Defined; it acknowledges a misperception of a vague stimulus as having distinctiveness. Such is the case of the well recognized man-in-the-moon image.
Not surprisingly, individuals suffering from hallucinatory tendencies in the schizophrenic syndrome often aggravate pareidolia. In so doing, they believe the images to be personal revelations just for them. Unfortunately, many of these images are recognized as threatening or evil, which seems to be true even for the normal brain.
The fusiform cortex sitting underneath the brain in the posterior region is responsible for facial recognition. Researchers from Dartmouth College have found the brain to be lateralized with respect to objects resembling faces vs. actual faces themselves. That is, the left fusiform gyrus was more active during fMRI imaging of look-alikes than was the right.
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