The Psychology of Seeing Faces in the Clouds

Every Easter morning, Donna Lee makes pierogis. The Polish pastry, made from frying a special dough, has become a beloved part of the family tradition.

But Easter 2005 brought something very unexpected. While turning over the last pierogi, there was something eerily familiar about it. Then it hit her, "Oh my God, it's Jesus!"

That final pierogi had a distinct coloration that bore an uncanny resemblance to the face of Jesus Christ. And on Easter Sunday, too?

For Donna, this was a special moment. This wasn't just any pierogi she was staring at; this was the pierogi. How could her family gobble it down like all the other Easter pastries?

So she did what any reasonable person would do: She listed it on eBay. The Jesus pierogi sold for $1,775.

For Donna, The Jesus Pierogi was a wonderful Easter surprise, and, ultimately, a nice little payday. At the same time, her story provides a window into how our minds make sense of randomness.

For Donna, it was Jesus in her pierogi. But for others, it's seeing faces in the clouds, in the branches of a tree, or in the bath bubbles. Why are we so prone to see meaningful things in everyday objects, and why do we assume that these random events carry greater meaning?

Let's dive into the psychology behind seeing faces in the clouds.

Why We Find Meaning Amidst Incoherence

So what's driving this strange tendency to see faces in pierogis in the first place?

On this account, Donna is far from alone. Every year, 1000s of people claim to be sure they have "found Jesus" in their morning toast, on an orange peel, or in a potato chip. And many more than that see faces when they look up into the clouds. This phenomenon is known as face pareidolia: the overwhelming tendency to see faces in ambiguous settings.

Face pareidolia is driven by the fact that humans are pattern-seeking creatures. The brain is a meaning-seeking organ. We automatically and unconsciously see the "bigger picture," leading us to extrapolate meaning amidst apparent incoherence.

Meaningful concepts, such as faces, pop out everywhere we look. There are many ways to think about this, but the best analogy may be the images from Magic Eye books. These are books filled with pictures like this:

Magic Eye: An analogy for how we seek meaning in our perception

Source: Fred Hsu / Wikimedia Commons (Creative Commons License)

At first glance, it appears to be a random assortment of imagery and pixels—nothing to see here. But in fact, a coherent image is statistically embedded within the picture through a stereoscopic technique.

If you stare at it for more than a few moments, your visual system quietly begins its unconscious search. And for some people, sure enough, within a minute or two, the meaningful percept may suddenly come to the foreground. It seems like magic, but it's our brain's natural, meaning-seeking drive unfolding in real-time.

But here's the thing: We have such a drive to find meaning, that we often see things that aren't there. When a scene is ambiguous, devoid of clear and obvious meaning, we bring the meaning. As Anaïs Nin once said, “We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.” This is true both metaphorically, as well as psychologically.

The Psychology Behind Seeing Faces in Our Foods

We have such a tendency to find meaning in the world, that we often find it—or think we've found it, amidst incoherence. But why faces, specifically?

For many reasons, faces are an easy go-to for our meaning-making brains. We've seen millions of faces in our lifetime, and we're incredibly adept at telling them apart, and discerning what their expressions mean. We have a robust template in the brain for faces, fine-tuned over countless encounters. We even have a specialized region in the brain—the fusiform gyrus—that is highly specialized just for analyzing faces.

Chance encounters are a rare opportunity for making meaning from randomness

Source: Shane Stagner via UnSplash

And so when anything looks remotely like a pair of eyes and a mouth, our brain can jump to an easy conclusion and "see" a face staring back at us.

This is why, when you look up into the clouds, you come to see a face staring back at you despite your knowledge that it's just dust particles and water vapor. And why every year, people find Jesus in their morning pastries.

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Randomness is ultimately unsatisfying—we find a meaningful explanation for what we see, even when it's a stretch. This counts for many things that we encounter on a day-to-day basis, from seeing patterns in Magic Eye to the faces we see in the sky to experiencing feelings of serendipity.

And it might even lead us to see Jesus in our foods.

This post also appears on the Human Nature Blog.