Why we see animals everywhere
A face on a cliff, or a car in a QR code: our brains think they recognise hidden objects everywhere. Two different cognitive processes are the reason.
It’s as if it were about to take flight – Eagle Rock in California, a rock formation that could almost be a sculpture. | Photo: Shutterstock
If you happen to see a sperm whale in a cloud, don’t worry. It’s a perfectly normal phenomenon, because our brain has evolved so that it recognises familiar objects even where they don’t actually exist. Researchers have now been investigating this process in more detail. They gathered a group of 80 people and showed them images from nature, e.g., clouds, rocks, etc., alongside visual ‘white noise’ comprising abstract light-and-dark patterns without any depictions of objects. The participants were then instructed to draw anything that they could discern in these images. The number of ‘objects’ recognised in each category was almost identical – nine on average.
“Our brain is neurobiologically calibrated so that we never see nothing”, says Aleksandra Eberhard-Moscicka of the University of Bern. “This is why it’s constantly recognising objects, regardless of how much structure is offered by the environment”. Nature images primarily generate illusions of things from the natural world, e.g., faces. In these cases, processing occurs from the bottom up. The brain identifies external cues such as a curved line, and turns them into a living thing. In the white-noise images, the participants were more likely to see man-made objects, e.g., tools. This is a top-down process. Since the brain is confronted with an absence of visual anchor points, it draws on its own internal ideas about technology.
In both cases, the most common images conjured up were of animals. According to Nicole Göbel of the Basel University Hospital, millions of years of evolution have taught humans to identify predators or prey at lightning speed. It is possible that similar processes also play a role in hallucinations.
