You can see their faces more often. Industrial designer, illustrator, practiced at Cardi Studio and Slava Sahakyan's Studio, taught at the Children's Center for Automotive Design, Ford Studio in Cologne

People have long imagined faces on different surfaces: the moon, vegetables, and even burnt toast. A group of Berliners are now scouring satellite images of the Earth for similar images. Why do we so want to see human images everywhere, Lauren Everitt found out.

Frame from the movie Journey to the Moon

Most people have never heard of Pareidolia. But almost everyone has come across it - for example, seeing eyes, nose, mouth on the moon.

Pareidolia is an optical illusion, "the perception of an image or meaning where it actually does not exist" ("Dictionary of the World English Language"). For example, you can make out a face on a tree trunk or animal figures in the clouds.

German design studio Onformative is probably the most extensive and systematic search for such images in the world. Their program, Google Face, will search Google Maps for faces for several months.

earth.google.com

Google Face will scan the Earth several times from different angles. Now the program has already found a mysterious profile in the Magadan region, a man with hairy nostrils near Ashford in Kent, and some kind of creature in the mountains of Alaska.

Berliners, of course, are not the first to look for faces where none really exist.

Last year, a chicken nugget with a portrait of George Washington was sold on eBay - it went under the hammer for $8,100.

And 10 years ago, 20,000 Christians visited Bangalore to worship a chapati (lavash) with an image of Jesus Christ. Some even prayed before this face.

In 2011, a blogger who collects photos of objects that look like Hitler posted a photo of a modest house in Swanzy, Wales, on Tumblr. The sloping roof of the structure is reminiscent of the dictator's famous bangs, and the doors with a small canopy are his characteristic mustaches.

US department store chain JC Penney hit the big jackpot this week after someone noticed on Reddit that one of its teapots looked like Hitler. The teapots sold out immediately.

In 2009, the Allen family from Ystrada, Wales, opened a jar of Marmite (yeast extract paste) and saw the face of Jesus instead of the usual brown spots on the lid.

And the American Diana Dyser in 1994, biting off a piece of toast with cheese, saw the Virgin Mary on it. The woman kept the half-eaten sandwich for more than 10 years, and eventually listed it on eBay. The lot received 17 million views and was sold for 28 thousand dollars.

Google Face developers Cedric Kiefer and Julia Lab were also inspired by Pareidolia.

After seeing the famous "Martian face" photographed by the Viking 1 orbiter in 1976 and experimenting with facial recognition technology, they became interested in how to "make a machine analog of the psychological phenomenon of pareidolia," says Kiefer.

Martian face - 1976 photo and modern close-up

They didn't take their project seriously at first, but the landscapes they found have spread online and are very popular.

"There's something mesmerizing about pareidolia," Kiefer says.

While most of the faces are distorted enough to resemble avant-garde paintings, some look "so realistic it's hard to believe they're random," he adds.

But why do people see faces in spots or folds in relief?

First, thanks to evolution, says Dr. Noushin Hajikhani of Harvard University. Humans are "programmed" to recognize faces from birth, she says.

"Even a newborn reacts to a schematic representation of the face and does not react to drawings where the eyes, nose and mouth are in the wrong order," says the scientist.

Diana Dyser and her holy toast

Even primitive people knew how to distinguish familiar objects from the background, says Christopher French of the British Psychological Society.

“We have developed a brain that thinks quickly, but inaccurately. And therefore sometimes it misleads us,” he explains. “A classic example: a Cro-Magnon man stands, scratches his head and thinks: what is rustling in the bushes - a tribesman or a saber-toothed tiger? in this situation, those who believe in the saber-toothed tiger and run away in time are more likely to survive. Others risk falling into the predatory mouth. "

Other experts believe that Pareidolia is the effect of our brains. It's constantly processing information from outside, analyzing lines, shapes, surfaces and colors, says Joel Voss, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University.

It can also be triggered by our desire to see certain things, says neuroscientist Sophie Scott of University College London.

Mona Lisa on a leaf and Madonna made of chocolate

"If you recognize the face of Jesus on the toast, it tells us not about the toast, but about your expectations and how you interpret the world based on your expectations," she says.

If the crust on the sandwich has already formed for you in the profile of the Virgin Mary, this picture will be firmly fixed in your mind, says Bruce Good, author of Self-Deception.

"This is one of the properties of illusions: it is very difficult to return to its original state and again see a spot instead of something else," he says.

But the ability to discern a silhouette on a toast or a fence does not explain why people are willing to buy these artifacts for a lot of money or worship them.

For some, pareidolia evokes strong emotions - especially if the person is inclined to believe in miracles, Scott says.

Guadalupe Rodriguez saw the Virgin Mary on a tray in a Texas cafe

“It shows how powerful these illusions are. We really want to see these faces, we really want to hear these voices, and therefore our perceptual system will make sure that we see and hear them,” he adds.

For some, pareidolia is proof of the supernatural, Good says. "People are specifically looking around for such things," he says.

One day, Professor Frederick Coolidge and his wife Melissa had a small "wine" incident right on the sofa, covered with an Indian shawl, on which they spent their free evening. The next day he took this shawl and saw a strange stain.

Fantasy or pareidolia?

Professor Frederick Coolidge is a cognitive archaeologist, that is, one who applies cognitive and psychological models to archaeological artifacts and to anthropology in general. And he was surprised when he saw on his Indian shawl the portrait of Lucy, the Afar Australopithecus. Lucy is the most famous distant human relative, living about 3.2 million years ago. Professor Coolidge knew that the tendency of all people to see a face or pattern where it doesn't really exist is called pareidolia.
In part, the psychological phenomenon of pareidolia is similar to the Rorschach test, in which a person unconsciously projects their feelings, attitudes, and impressions onto an absolutely meaningless ink stain. Interestingly, the Rorschach phenomenon is also called directional pareidolia. A person can also project their interests, passions and desires onto forms, so it is not surprising that Coolidge saw Lucy's skull in a spot on a shawl.

Why does a person see faces and other objects where there are none?

The neurological reason for the existence of pareidolia is located mainly in the temporal lobes of the brain, which are called the fusiform gyri. It is there that in humans and other animals (mainly in modern primates) there are neurons responsible for recognizing faces and other objects. From an ontogenetic point of view, it is important for an infant to recognize and distinguish faces in order to feed and socialize.
Astronomer Carl Sagan noted in his 1996 book that babies who were unable to recognize their parents' faces were less likely to win their parents' hearts and thrive. From an evolutionary standpoint, it is critical to recognize faces (and other objects, both animate and inanimate) instantly for the two reasons above, and to recognize predators and other types of threats in the environment. Sagan informally referred to the unintended side effect of this phenomenon as pattern recognition, which is what is called when people sometimes see faces where there are none.
Sagan also offered examples of how people see faces in rocks, vegetables, trees, and, of course, the face of Jesus seen in chips, windows, and other objects. Rocks and cave formations that resemble other objects are called mimetolites, and one of the most famous mimetolites in archeology is a figurine that is over 233,000 years old.

Attributing properties

However, this tiny stone (its length is only three and a half centimeters) was definitely processed, but it was definitely chosen due to the fact that it already resembled a human form. Noted author and skeptic Michael Shermer has stated that the brain is a "belief engine" with a strong tendency to identify patterns where patterns cannot exist, and to assign meaning to patterns where there is a mundane set of circumstances.
As Yale University psychologist Robert Abelson once said, “Attributing a set of data to mere chance is often meaningless.” In addition to this, Shermer said that people often start looking for supporting evidence for their vision, denying and ignoring statements that contradict their views.

Evolutionary Consequences

It is also worth noting that the evolutionary consequences of seeing a pattern where there is none (false positive) are less severe than the consequences of not seeing a pattern where it is (false negative), especially when it comes to recognizing a predator.

Image copyright nottsexminer Flickr CC BY SA 2.0

From the Virgin Mary on a slice of toasted bread to an open-mouthed face in a man's scrotum, why do our brains see these images? This was decided by the correspondent

Looking at your dinner, you usually don't expect him to stare back at you. But when Diana Duizer once brought a toast with cheese to her mouth, she was quite surprised.

"I was about to bite off a piece when I suddenly saw a woman's face looking at me. At first I was scared," she told the Chicago Tribune.

Rumors about this incident spread more and more, and in the end, one casino paid Duizer $ 28,000 for her permission to put an amazing toast there for public viewing.

Many viewers catch in the soft and calm features of this female face a resemblance to the Madonna, the Mother of God, but it always seemed to me that curls, parted lips and heavy eyelids rather resemble Madonna, a modern, popular singer.

Be that as it may, this toast portrait was in well-deserved company: on a piece of fried bread they also saw the image of Jesus, whose face allegedly also appeared at different times on a corn tortilla, a pancake and a banana peel.

Image copyright AFP Getty Images Warner Bros Records

“If someone claims to have seen Jesus on a piece of toast, then there is a temptation to think that this person has not everything at home,” says Ken Lee from the University of Toronto in Canada. “But in fact this is a very common phenomenon. that we see faces in a variety of objects in the visual environment".

Lee proved that this is not evidence of divine intervention at all, but that a person's imagination has a very large influence on his perception.

And indeed, after listening to his explanation, you involuntarily think about whether you can trust your own eyes.

Our vision is more subjective than we think - we sometimes see exactly what we want to see.

In the circle of specialists, this phenomenon is known as pareidolia, or a visual illusion of fantastic content.

Leonardo da Vinci wrote that he saw some symbols in natural cracks and scratches on stone walls. He believed that these strokes inspired him to create new works of art.

In the 1950s, the Bank of Canada was forced to withdraw a series of banknotes from circulation because they allegedly had a grinning devil peeking out of the waves of the hair in the royal portrait (although personally, with all my efforts, I can’t make out any horns in Her Majesty’s curls).

And the Viking 1 spacecraft captured what looked like a face on the surface of Mars.

Try, for example, to search for the hashtag #iseefaces - and you will see, for example, a wise gnome ingrown into a tree...

Image copyright Carl Milner Flickr CC BY 2.0

An urn that welcomes you joyfully

Image copyright laddir Flickr CC BYSA 2.0

And evil cookies that are not happy with anyone.

Image copyright thentoff Flickr CC BY 2.0

One of the strangest cases happened to urologist Gregory Roberts from Kingston, Canada. Imagine his patient's surprise when the ultrasound machine showed this open-mouthed face hidden inside his scrotum!

Image copyright Gregory Roberts

Once you see a face in an inanimate object, they begin to appear everywhere.

Some of these objects really do resemble the emoticons we use to convey emotions in texting: two circles for eyes and a line for a mouth.

But sometimes strange creatures peek out from the most seemingly unexpected places.

In one of his experiments, Lee showed subjects chaotic gray ornaments, reminiscent of flickering dots on a TV screen with the antenna turned off.

The researcher encouraged the participants in the experiment to see a face in them, and the participants in the experiment in 34% of cases stated that they succeeded.

The facial features in these blurry pictures could only be seen with a very large stretch, but nevertheless, the brain helpfully gave out the desired illusion.

"The phenomenon appears to be fairly easy to induce," Lee states.

We tend to believe that our eyes regularly convey to us a picture of the world around us, but in fact, the signals coming from the retina are far from ideal, and the brain has to correct them.

According to Lee, it is this correction that explains pareidolia.

Seeing the slanted "eyes" on the facade of the house, we also sometimes involuntarily try to see what they are staring at

The brain is trying to determine what we are currently seeing, relying, among other things, on our previous experience and supplementing the visible image with these expectations.

In this way, he manages to form a relatively complete picture, even if the elements of the surrounding space, for example, are hidden by darkness or fog.

But, on the other hand, due to this, our vision turns out to be more subjective than we think - that is, we really sometimes see exactly what we want to see.

To test this hypothesis, Lee scanned the subjects' brains while they looked at pictures of random gray dots.

As expected, during the initial recognition of basic image features (such as color and shape), there was increased activity in the primary visual cortex.

But the researcher also noticed that at the moment when the subjects reported seeing a face, the frontal and occipital lobes, which experts believe are responsible for memory and complex thought processes such as planning, were involved in the process.

The burst of neural activity in these areas may indicate that expectations and experiences are at play, as Lee anticipated.

In turn, these processes excited the so-called right fusiform facial region, which reacts to faces - perhaps at this moment there is a feeling that you are looking at an animated being.

"If this zone is activated, we understand that they are now 'seeing' the face," says Lee.

Now it becomes more clear why the "faces" of objects cause us the same subconscious reaction as human ones.

So, last year, a group of Japanese researchers noted that people try to follow the direction of an inanimate "look" - just like we do when communicating with an interlocutor.

Image copyright Wout Mager Flickr CC BYNCSA 2.0

In other words, when we see slanted "eyes" on the facade of the house, we also sometimes involuntarily try to see what they are staring at.

Lee's experiment helped establish which regions of the brain might be involved in this process, but it doesn't explain why we tend to see faces at all.

Perhaps it is because we see so many faces in our daily lives and therefore expect to see them everywhere.

It is also possible that our tendency to see faces has a deeper evolutionary explanation.

Human survival depends very much on the people around us: we ask them for help or fear their aggression, and therefore we need to quickly understand their motives and respond accordingly.

Probably, the brain is initially set to recognize people at the first opportunity.

It is much less dangerous to make a mistake and see facial features in the tree bark than to overlook an intruder hiding in the bushes.

Other scholars also suggest that a similar mechanism may underlie human spirituality.

This hypothesis comes from the fact that our brain, predisposed to understand people and their motivation, tries to see human intentions in everything that surrounds us - in a thunderstorm, a plague, or in a frightening and abstract concept of death.

To deal with our fears, we begin to personify them, populating the world with gods and demons.

Tapani Riekki and colleagues at the University of Helsinki in Finland found that religious people are more likely to see faces in blurry pictures than atheists.

Be that as it may, the strength of our convictions can at least explain why some see the Mother of God on a piece of toasted bread, and I see the queen of the pop scene. Here is a picture for you. Do you see Jesus on it?

Image copyright Chris Gladis Flickr CC BYND 2.0

But perhaps the most common form of pareidolia in the Western world is seeing the faces of cars, or rather the front of them.

Sonia Windhager from the University of Vienna went to the Ethiopian hinterland to find out if this phenomenon is observed there.

Asking questions to people she happened to meet on the streets and in small cafes, at first she encountered incomprehension. "They thought we were a little crazy," she says.

But while Ethiopians may not be particularly familiar with Disney's Cars or the adventures of Herbie in Crazy Racing, they soon understood the purpose of the study and began to evaluate the appearance of cars in photographs in much the same way as Europeans.

For example, cars with a large windshield, round headlights and a small grille were perceived as young and feminine:

Image copyright Raphal Labb Flickr CC BYSA 2.0

... and cars with flatter headlights and a massive lower part - as older and more masculine:

Image copyright Dodge Chrysler

According to Windhager, this suggests that our brains are programmed to read basic biological information (age, gender) from any object that even remotely resembles a face.

And, according to the researcher, this also points to the evolutionary origin of pareidolia. "It's interesting to see how things in today's environment are still perceived by us according to these ancient mechanisms," she notes.

In other experiments, Windhager found that consumers generally prefer cars that look impressive - a trait that automakers are exploiting with might and main.

The aggressive expression of car headlights could, in theory, cause nearby drivers to act aggressively or more nervously.

So, in 2006, the Wall Street Journal wrote that sales of "cute cars" such as the legendary "Volkswagen Beetle" began to decline - probably because their owners were oppressed by the ever-growing number of large SUVs around.

Therefore, the designers decided to draw more aggressive cars. The Dodge Charger, for example, received stern-looking slit headlights.

"It's like we're making eye contact with headlights the same way we're making eye contact on the street," says Chrysler designer Ralph Gills. "And we're giving cars a menacing expression."

However, Windhager wondered if the illusion of a car's gaze could affect traffic safety.

"Maybe the kids might think the car sees them and won't get out of the way," she suggests, adding that the headlights' aggressive expression could, in theory, make surrounding drivers act aggressively or more nervously.

Similar psychological effects can be observed in other areas of our lives.

Various studies have shown that a simple picture of a pair of eyes hanging on the wall can make people behave more honestly, and with this simple trick, in some areas, it was possible to reduce the number of bicycle thefts by 60%.

And it would be interesting to know whether thieves are less likely to break into houses whose facades show a face.

There is something striking about the fact that the randomly matched visuals that people submit to #iseefaces can have a real impact on our behavior.

We no longer inhabit the unknown world with fictional spirits in such numbers as our ancestors did, but to this day we see ghostly faces in cars, houses and social media feeds.

But at least these creatures can give even the most soulless and ugly place some spark of humor and life. Like this cute kid.

Image copyright Daniel Oines Flickr CC BY 2.0

This example illustrates well the psychological phenomenon of pareidolia. It is he who makes us see the most diverse images in random objects. In this article, we tried to understand the phenomenon of pareidolia, and also learned how it can play into the hands of artists and designers.

The word pareidolia comes from the Greek words para. (para - near, around, deviation from something) and eidolon is an image. The phenomenon manifests itself in the way in which we see something distinct and definite in some visual images - for example, the figures of people and animals in the clouds.

One of the famous examples of pareidolia is a region in the northern hemisphere of Mars - Cydonia (Cydonia Mensae) or the "Face of Mars". One of the weathered hills, which was captured in a photo from the Viking 1 station, looked like a huge stone sculpture of a humanoid face. And there are many similar examples in space.

There are several theories regarding the cause of this feature in humans. Carl Sagan, an American cosmologist and popularizer of science, claimed that pareidolia was one of the survival tools of ancient man. In his 1995 book, Demon-ghost world: the science how candle in darkness" he writes that the ability to recognize faces at a distance or in conditions of poor visibility was an extremely important property. In the course of evolution, a person developed a mechanism that made it possible to read a person’s gender, his emotions and other characteristics with just a fleeting glance. The instinct made it possible for a person to instantly judge who was coming towards him - friend or foe. Homo sapiens has learned this so well that we have begun to distinguish people even where there are none. When we look at mechanisms, interior items, cars and other random objects, quite unconsciously we begin to see faces in them. Many blogs are dedicated to this curiosity, where random objects are published in which the features of living beings are clearly distinguishable.

More of these photos can be found at thingswithfaces.com

Experts also argue that pareidolia gives rise to many misconceptions, such as those associated with UFO sightings, Elvis coming to life, or the Loch Ness Monster. As with the aforementioned burnt toast, pareidolia often has religious overtones. A Finnish study found that people who believe in God and other supernatural phenomena are more likely to see faces in inanimate objects and landscapes.

Pareidolia is actively used by artists. Even Leonardo da Vinci wrote about this phenomenon as an artistic device. “If you look at any wall, speckled with various spots or lined with various types of stones, you can imagine whole scenes and see in it the resemblance to various landscapes, mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys and hills,” he wrote in one of my notebooks. One of the most famous artists who uses such illusions in his work is the Hungarian Istvan Oros, who created a series of engravings with harmless scenes, the compositions of which clearly depict a mystical skull.

Engraving by István Oros

Illustrator Scott McCloud made his curious suggestion about pareidolia. He noted that we can see people's faces not only in electrical sockets, grates, chairs and other inanimate objects, but also in absolutely any curved geometric figure, if we add one point to its area. Exactly the same as an abstract emoticon (which is two dots and a line) we regard as a human face.

The phenomenon of pareidolia has learned to imitate computer systems. The system works on the same principle with digital cameras. A curious example about a year ago was presented by an art group from Seoul Shinseungback Kimyonghun. Artists who for a brief moment merge into the likeness of a human face. They developed a script that used the OpenCV face detection library and connected a digital camera to the computer, pointing at the sky. So the system detected and photographed human faces in the sky automatically.

Pareidolia was also adopted by industrial designers. Aarron Walter, in his book Designing for Emotion, compares design to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. To be relevant and useful, product design must meet specific user needs. At the top of the pyramid, according to Maslow, is self-realization, in the case of design, these are the emotions and personality that product design should carry. In order to emphasize them, there are many ways - one of them can be a technique with anthropomorphization.

In 1915, the Coca Cola Company created the iconic Contour Bottle. This bottle quickly became associated with Mae West. (American actress and sex symbol of the early 20th century) because it resembled the shape of a female body. At that time, bottle designs rarely differed in shape from a regular cylinder. Obviously, a bottle with anthropomorphic characteristics became more attractive, and many companies over the next decades tried to adopt this concept. Until now, bottles of shampoos and other beauty products have curves that resemble a waist.

Designers and architects certainly think about the fact that if the object being created even remotely resembles something anthropomorphic, then these associations will definitely appear in the consumer. Especially funny situations happen when the design of the object has sexual connotations. So, for example, the innocent London skyscraper Mary-Ex regularly becomes the object of jokes because of its phallic shape.

People perceive the design of the same objects very differently. Experiments have shown that various products with anthropomorphic characteristics are viewed by consumers depending on the different cultural, social and ethical norms of society. So, for example, a computer with a red glowing round button may seem quite ordinary, but those who watched Stanley Kubrick's film "2001: A Space Odyssey" will inevitably associate it with HAL 9000.

Effectively using anthropomorphism in design is not easy. As noted in The Next Nature, the most abstract images work best. The desired effect is produced by products that have subtle anthropomorphic details that most will not consciously notice. Abstraction reduces the chance of evoking negative emotions while maintaining positive associations. A good example is the Philips Senseo coffee maker, which "bows helpfully" while brewing a hot cup of coffee.

Philips Senseo coffee maker

Imitation of animal forms (or zoomorphism) can be a good alternative to anthropomorphism. It is known that people are much more condescending to animals than to their own kind. In the same way that we would consider a person running in circles in the street to be at least strange, but a dog trying to catch up with his tail is funny. Robot dog Aibo is considered adorable, but Android robot Asimo seems clumsy and even intimidating.

If you overdo it with the realism of an anthropomorphic object, then the observer is very likely to experience the so-called “uncanny valley” effect. According to the hypothesis, robots or other objects that look or act approximately like a person (but not exactly like a real one) cause dislike and disgust. This phenomenon was discovered in 1978 by Japanese scientist Masahiro Mori, who conducted a study of people's emotional reactions to the appearance of robots. At first, the results were predictable: the more human-like the robot, the prettier it seems - but only up to a point. The most humanoid robots unexpectedly turned out to be unpleasant to people because of small inconsistencies with reality, causing a feeling of discomfort and fear. This is probably due to the fact that at a certain level of robot-human resemblance, the machine ceases to be perceived as a machine, and begins to seem like an abnormal person or a “living corpse”.

Telenoid R1 robot developed at Osaka University

One of the most striking examples of anthropomorphism in design is automobiles. Long before Pixar introduced the Cars cartoon, people noticed the similarity between the front of the car and the face. Pulitzer Prize-winning car critic Dan Neil told Wired magazine, “Automakers know a lot about how people see faces in inanimate objects. Sometimes it plays into their hands, and sometimes it plays against them.”

Kirill Musienko

Industrial designer, creator of the Stubus watch, the Svintus network port, Candyberg caramels, etc.

« Can anthropomorphism and zoomorphism be useful techniques in the work of an industrial designer? Yes, if there is a goal to cause sympathy. I think it's almost a win-win. Even the jokes of the shadows on Mars make us feel that there is life that we like there.

Network port "Svintus", developed by Kirill Musienko
A vulgar example of zoomorphism, according to Musienko: a USB hub in the form of a sow and piglets

The form should justify the functionality, a bottle in the form of a female figure is normal, but a smartphone in the form of a female figure is bad. It also happens that the subject turns out to be vulgar or disproportionate, or the idea is not witty, in any way. Sometimes it's even funny when the anthropomorphism is accidental, like, for example, a teapot that looks like Hitler from a certain angle. There is just a design for a fan, but there is a functional one. I consider it in bad taste to abuse one direction, sooner or later you can turn sour, but you should always try to try something new.

Anthropomorphism is applicable when the image, structure or form of an object has something in common with a function. In graphic design, this technique "works" when a hidden form (face, figure, silhouette) does not immediately strike the eye, but is formed from elements that cannot be superfluous in the logo.

Andrey Sulemin

Industrial designer, illustrator, practiced at Cardi Studio and Slava Sahakyan's Studio, taught at the Children's Center for Automotive Design, Ford Studio in Cologne

“Associations of the face of a person and a car, of course, are, but I think few people intentionally try to give any “expression” to it. It is rather an association on the subconscious - what a person first of all pays attention to (although both in a car and in a person the face is not a determining factor in appearance). The character can turn out to be predatory, evil, kind, etc., but this is a consequence of the nature of the car and the general design direction. I think no one draws a car, saying "here, these are the eyes, the nose will be like this, and here we will make a cheerful smile." When there is too direct association with a facial expression, this is still not good, a car is still an independent object. The rest, by and large, is the imagination of the audience.

Yaroslav Rassadin

Designer of transport, electronics, lighting, furniture and accessories. Collaborates with brands such as Marussia Motors, Triode design, Roche Bobois, Koziol, Glenfiddich, Roca, Yota, Synqera, Kaleva, etc.

“The similarity of a car with a face is associated with safety requirements for lighting. There are many aspects, but the main thing is that we must see the dimensions at night, so placing them is sufficient and necessary in the corners. Only and everything. Further, imagery and analogies do their job, it seems to us that they are persons. A person begins to think, which, by the way, is easy to break: examples are the Nissan Juke or the latest Citroen C1 (2014). It was worth putting two pairs of different optics to break these stereotypes.

In a sense, this feature has become the reason and basis for the corporate style of many brands and has allowed them to express themselves in the market more qualitatively. Not all brands cult it, but it is widely used anyway. Naturally, each brand has its own philosophy, so, for example, take BMW. This is a predator, a cat that can be either sweeter or more aggressive, depending on the target audience. Cheaper models (1 series) will be more "like kittens" - with large optics, a little "cute". Medium, matured (3, 5 series) - angry, aggressive, peppy (X5, X6). The most luxurious do not have to prove anything. They are calm and confident, like lions (episode 7). There is also the Z-series, which is like a cheetah, figuratively speaking. She looks like a cat, but she didn't care about the rest of the family, so she's faster and more exotic. Other brands can be analyzed in the same way. As a rule, what is cheaper causes excitement and smiles. What is more expensive is already a confident, strong and calm look. There is a parallel here with age.

As a rule, anthropomorphic design is applicable to dynamic objects moving in space, but it is quite possible to use it in static ones, but very carefully. There are, for example, buildings that hint at faces or household objects with windows, and, unfortunately, in 99% of cases this is bad taste, no matter how expressive it looks.”

Yaroslav Yakovlev

A graduate of the European Design Institute, together with Bernard Viil from the Netherlands, became the winner of the "Car for the President" competition, organized by Marussia Motors in cooperation with the Research Automobile and Automotive Institute (NAMI) and the Cardesign.ru portal.

“Automotive designers do not just think about it, but quite consciously give the “face” of the car one or another character, depending directly on the audience for which the car is designed. Much depends on how and how successfully the designers managed to get into the heart of the buyer, displaying certain traits of the car, but also on the brand's fame and the relevance of a particular model in the overall range of the brand; many different unknowns of the equation, but, undoubtedly, the inherent nature plays a very important role in the success of the model. For a young buyer, these are often the aggressive features of a daring hooligan, family cars are neutral, like a typical family man with a little extra weight, big business tycoons have a confident, calm, elegant, presentable character - a copy of the owner.

Ferrari 458 Italia

All surfaces are involved in sports cars, not just the front end, which can be either confidently neutral or aggressive. For example, the side surfaces from the front arch to the back, passing to the sloping roof, have a certain amount of sexual motifs inspired by female hips. (Ferrari 458 Italia is a prime example of this, in the 3/4 rear-top view it is very clearly visible)- a kind of passionate red-haired fury. One of my favorite "car faces" is, perhaps, the good-natured face of the Italian simpleton Fiat 500 - a ray of positive among the vast majority of aggressive bullies. And, of course, the conceptual BMW Gina, whose surfaces are able to change and give different features to the “face” - this, in fact, was one of the goals of the experiment, because an ordinary car with one “expression” lives from the moment it leaves the assembly line to the press. When it comes to industrial design, nothing comes at a glance, because often these are just derivatives of a cube with rounded edges, which do not need to have the “charming smile of a false radiator grille” for commercial success, another “bunch of keys” operates to the heart of the client.

August 12th, 2016

What do you see in this photo? That's right - it's the head of an alien. You and I had several large collections on this topic, well, for example, or for example

The word pareidolia comes from the Greek words para (para - near, around, deviation from something) and eidolon - image. The phenomenon manifests itself in the way in which we see something distinct and definite in some visual images - for example, the figures of people and animals in the clouds.

Let's learn more about it

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THERE ARE SEVERAL THEORIES REGARDING THE CAUSE OF THIS FEATURE IN HUMANS. Carl Sagan, an American cosmologist and popularizer of science, claimed that pareidolia was one of the survival tools of ancient man. In his 1995 book The Demon-Ghostworld: Science as a Candle in the Dark, he writes that the ability to recognize faces at a distance or in poor visibility was an extremely important property. In the course of evolution, a person developed a mechanism that made it possible to read a person’s gender, his emotions and other characteristics with just a fleeting glance.

The instinct made it possible for a person to instantly judge who was coming towards him - friend or foe. Homo sapiens has learned this so well that we have begun to distinguish people even where there are none. When we look at mechanisms, interior items, cars and other random objects, quite unconsciously we begin to see faces in them. Many blogs are dedicated to this curiosity, where random objects are published in which the features of living beings are clearly distinguishable.

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EXPERTS ALSO SAY THAT PAREIDOLIA GENERATES MANY MYSTERIOUS THINGS, FOR EXAMPLE, RELATED TO UFO SIGHTS, ELVIS REVIVED, OR THE LOCH NESS MONSTER. As with the aforementioned burnt toast, pareidolia often has religious overtones. A Finnish study found that people who believe in God and other supernatural phenomena are more likely to see faces in inanimate objects and landscapes.

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ILLUSTRATOR SCOTT MCCLEOUD MADE HIS CURIOUS SUMMARY ABOUT PAREIDOLIA. He noted that we can see people's faces not only in electrical sockets, grates, chairs and other inanimate objects, but also in absolutely any curved geometric figure, if we add one point to its area. Exactly the same as an abstract emoticon (which is two dots and a line) we regard as a human face.

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THE PHENOMENON OF PAREIDOLIA LEARNED TO IMITATE COMPUTER SYSTEMS. The face recognition system on Facebook and digital cameras works on the same principle. A curious example about a year ago was presented by an art group from Seoul, Shinseungback Kimyonghun. The artists took photographs of the clouds, which for a brief moment merge into the likeness of a human face. They developed a script that used the OpenCV face detection library and connected a digital camera to the computer, pointing at the sky. So the system detected and photographed human faces in the sky automatically.

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In 1915, the Coca Cola Company created the iconic Contour Bottle. This bottle quickly became associated with May West (an American actress and sex symbol of the early 20th century) because it resembled the shape of a female body. At that time, bottle designs rarely differed in shape from a regular cylinder. Obviously, a bottle with anthropomorphic characteristics became more attractive, and many companies over the next decades tried to adopt this concept. Until now, bottles of shampoos and other beauty products have curves that resemble a waist.

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“AUTOMOBILE DESIGNERS DO NOT JUST THINK ABOUT THIS, BUT COMPLETELY CONSCIOUSLY GIVE THE “FACE” OF THE CAR THAT OR ANOTHER CHARACTER DEPENDING DIRECTLY ON THE AUDIENCE FOR WHICH THE CAR IS DESIGNED. Much depends on how and how successfully the designers managed to get into the heart of the buyer, displaying certain traits of the car, but also on the brand's fame and the relevance of a particular model in the overall range of the brand; many different unknowns of the equation, but, undoubtedly, the inherent nature plays a very important role in the success of the model. For a young buyer, these are often the aggressive features of a daring hooligan, family cars are neutral, like a typical family man with a little extra weight, big business tycoons have a confident, calm, elegant, presentable character - a copy of the owner.

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By the way, one of the famous examples of pareidolia is a region in the northern hemisphere of Mars - Cydonia (Cydonia Mensae) or the "Face of Mars". One of the weathered hills, which was captured in a photo from the Viking 1 station, looked like a huge stone sculpture of a humanoid face. And there are many similar examples in space.

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German design studio Onformative is probably the most extensive and systematic search for such images in the world. Their program, Google Face, will search Google Maps for faces for several months.

Berliners, of course, are not the first to look for faces where none really exist.

Last year, a chicken nugget with a portrait of George Washington was sold on eBay - it went under the hammer for $8,100.

And 10 years ago, 20,000 Christians visited Bangalore to worship a chapati (lavash) with an image of Jesus Christ. Some even prayed before this face.

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US department store chain JC Penney hit the big jackpot this week after someone noticed on Reddit that one of its teapots looked like Hitler. The teapots sold out immediately.

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In 2009, the Allen family from Ystrada, Wales, opened a jar of Marmite (yeast extract paste) and saw the face of Jesus instead of the usual brown spots on the lid.

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While most of the faces are distorted enough to resemble avant-garde paintings, some look "so realistic it's hard to believe they're random," he adds.

But why do people see faces in spots or folds in relief?

First, thanks to evolution, says Dr. Noushin Hajikhani of Harvard University. Humans are "programmed" to recognize faces from birth, she says.

"Even a newborn reacts to a schematic representation of the face and does not react to drawings where the eyes, nose and mouth are in the wrong order," says the scientist.

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Even primitive people knew how to distinguish familiar objects from the background, says Christopher French of the British Psychological Society.

The brain assigns meaning to these images - usually by comparing them with information stored in long-term memory. But sometimes he comes across "ambiguous" things that he mistakenly correlates with familiar objects. This is Pareidolia.
It can also be triggered by our desire to see certain things, says neuroscientist Sophie Scott of University College London.

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"If you recognize the face of Jesus on the toast, it tells us not about the toast, but about your expectations and how you interpret the world based on your expectations," she says.

If the crust on the sandwich has already formed for you in the profile of the Virgin Mary, this picture will be firmly fixed in your mind, says Bruce Good, author of Self-Deception.

"This is one of the properties of illusions: it is very difficult to return to its original state and again see a spot instead of something else," he says.

But the ability to discern a silhouette on a toast or a fence does not explain why people are willing to buy these artifacts for a lot of money or worship them.

For some, pareidolia evokes strong emotions - especially if the person is inclined to believe in miracles, Scott says.

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For some, pareidolia is proof of the supernatural, Good says. "People are specifically looking around for such things," he says.

The object itself can also take on a special meaning, French says. People believe in his divine origin, that he bears the "seal of God" and is "happy," he says.

But you don't have to be religious to be positive about pareidolia.
"I don't believe these silhouettes have any religious significance," says French. "But they're so cute and neat, you'll agree!"

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