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."
44 votes,
228 views
,
Sad, but true.
The "Od man of the mountain" fall down go boom.
Plus, the Badlands Guardian looks like he's wearing an iPod.