Face front!

This column was first published in May 2008.

Sometimes, the wood grain on my bathroom cupboard looks like a vulture in profile.

Other times, it looks like a creature from “The Dark Crystal,” an old movie by Muppet master Jim Henson. But when I blink, it goes back to being wood grain.

Humans have a tendency to recognize images, especially faces, in inanimate objects. The scientific term for this is pareidolia, a word so obscure my spell checker spits it out like rotten meat.

We practice pareidolia from infancy because life rewards it. The first time we smile up at our parents, recognizing them as separate and distinct from the swirls of light and color around them, we receive positive reinforcement in the form of hugs and kisses. This tells us it’s good to know people. Recognizing faces becomes so ingrained that we keep seeing them wherever we look.

Taking this to the next level, psychologists speculate that designers unwittingly copy the human face when they create. Call it ego, going with what you know, or an extension of all those koochie koos they received as babies.

Check out a three-slotted electric wall socket – two eyes and a nose. Some sockets have additional red and black reset buttons underneath – a mouth and a moustache.

How about the front of an automobile? Two headlights (eyes) and a grill (a smile, albeit one with braces). Many houses, with front doors flanked by two windows, appear vaguely human. (Kids draw them this way all the time.)

The masons who worked on Glamorgan Castle dropped a few faces into the stonework around the building. These aren’t technically gargoyles, which are connected to spouts to throw rainwater away from a building. In gothic terms, Glamorgan Castle hosts “grotesques,” fantastic faces and forms with no utilitarian purpose. Of course, I could be imagining faces where none exist. (You have to get out of your car and walk around the building to see – or not see – them.)

Our penchant for face finding isn’t limited to manmade objects. We spot faces in clouds, ashes, mountains and fields. Remember the photo of a devilish visage in the smoke above the Twin Towers? While Photoshop tricks and religious indoctrination helped the illusion, it also illustrates the power of pareidolia.

The sight of the man in the moon is another example, although only dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy freaks believe it is there by design. Photos of Mars by the Viking Orbiter show what appears to be a face – some say Jesus – etched into the red planet. Again, it says more about us and our face-recognition software – i.e. our eyes and brain – then it does any welcome mat put out by God or little green people. Look at the same images with better resolution and different contrast and you can’t discern a face at all.

An entire website – inanimatefaces.com – is devoted to photos of faces in unlikely places: chairs, boxes, telephones and book bags. The shortcut language of e-mails and text messages depends on pareidolia. Otherwise, how would we know people are happy, sad or surprised when they type :), :( and :0.

Some enterprising souls turn a profit from pareidolia. The faces of the Virgin Mary, the Buddha, John Lennon and Elvis spotted on cookies, grilled cheese sandwiches, greasy napkins and boogered-up Kleenex tissues fetch far more than they’re worth on eBay. Wasn’t it Nietzsche who said that if you look long enough into the void, the void begins to look back?

Maybe I should put my section of bathroom cupboard for sale on the Internet. Surely, a Muppet fan somewhere is willing to pay top dollar.