Faces in Mirrors, Windows, Clouds, Smoke, Etc... Pareidolia and Apophenia

The mind is an incredible thing; it can turn some blobs on your grilled cheese sandwich into a face, a cloud into a face and reflections of light from your flash on a mirror into a face. Faces, as found by the scientists at the University of Bremen in Germany, were given different priority in your brain. In fact they believe that there is a whole section of the brain specifically for face recognition. This study was published in the October 2007 edition of the Journal Science.


MIT as well as many other accredited scientific research facilities have also dedicated years of study to the phenomena and found that "These turn out to be very simple relationships, things like the eyes are always darker than the forehead, and the mouth is darker than the cheeks," Sinha said. "If you put together about 12 of these relationships, you get a template that you can use to locate a face." Eventually, they entered in the information they got from MRI studies on what our brains were recognizing when we were shown faces, even those with less than 12 pixels of resolution and found that the computer could do as good a job as the human brain. "This suggests that, like the computer, the human brain processes faces holistically, like coherent landscapes, rather than one feature at a time."

Once in a while, MIT found that the computer emits a false alarm. "This is a good analogy for what the human brain might be doing," Sinha said. "Like the computer, it's trying to determine what the regularities are in all of these faces to create a prototype.

"But this prototype is not perfect. Sometimes genuine faces do not match these regularities, and sometimes non faces satisfy them."people have gotten so used to seeing faces everywhere that sensitivity to them is high enough to produce constant false positives.

There are many other scientific studies that have been done that all come to the same conclusion. With that being said, would a ghost, that has multiple other ways of manifesting and making itself known really need to be a partially smear or unrecognizable possible face?

Both scientist and trained photographers have known for years that this is a quirk of the human brain and pixilation.  The human imagination and need to find faces in everything is just how we are wired and finding faces where they really are not is just an environmental anomaly and not something paranormal at all...... and neither is the face of "Jesus" or Marilyn Monroe in your grilled cheese sandwich.....