May 10th, 2008 | Mars survey

Geological Faces in Places: Which looks most like a face?


Unlike all of the previous Faces in Places polls, these do not come from the blog of that name. Instead, these come from Skeptoid.com, The Face of Mars Revealed. On that site, Brian Dunning is using these geological faces to demonstrate how common it is to see faces in natural geological formations.

 Mr. Dunning says that we see these faces because of "a perceptual phenomenon called pareidolia, which is the tendency for the brain to see order in randomness... It causes us to see a face made of headlights and grills on the front of a train or a truck, or the face of the Virgin Mary on a piece of toast. Pareidolia means that any two dots and a line, like those on the Cydonia face, will shout "eyes and mouth" to a human brain. Carl Sagan proposed that brains are hardwired to see faces. Without the phenomenon of pareidolia, no drawing less than a Rembrandt masterpiece would be recognizable as a face."



Geological Faces in Places: Which looks most like a face?


44 votes, 228 views , 3 comments
 
 
Poll tags:Mars, Pareidolia, Places, Cydonia, Faces

 
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Comments (3)
Bmccue7
(Reply)
Georgia, United States

posted May 10th, 2008 at 18:04 CDT

Sad, but true.

Vulgarian
(Reply)
Massachusetts, United States

posted May 10th, 2008 at 17:48 CDT

The "Od man of the mountain" fall down go boom.

Bmccue7
(Reply)
Georgia, United States

posted May 10th, 2008 at 14:09 CDT

Plus, the Badlands Guardian looks like he's wearing an iPod.

 
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