Why Our Brains Find Meaning in Random Patterns

I allowed myself to take time to do something frivolous. I walked around my house like a child looking for bugs or something. I was washing dishes and I looked down. There was a little bit of soap on the countertop and I wiped the soap away and I saw a face. I thought it maybe looked like a football player with their helmet off, but they had the shoulder pads on. But then it looked more like an astronaut.

that had taken their helmet off maybe they had just come home from a mission or they were rehearsing for a mission but there's kind of like a shiny spot next to a dark spot that looked like it might be like a speech bubble for a little cartoon and

Watching the reflections move back and forth in the light kind of gave it a sense of motion. And I wasn't expecting that. I was just cleaning my house. And that was really fun. It's very freeing. Gets you something fun to do. And I think... A lot of times people's days are not necessarily fun and this is a way for you to take some control over your time and engage yourself in play.

Have you ever looked into a cloud or a pattern in the wall and seen a face staring back at you? It's called pareidolia when our brains spot familiar patterns like faces or figures in random objects. Welcome to the Science of Happiness. I'm Dakar Keltner. Researchers say pareidolia may help prime our minds for creativity and understand more about diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

We'll hear reflections from Oakland-based musician Malik Mays about trying pareidolia as a mindfulness practice. Even something as simple as a window, like a two-paned window, that became a cyclops. And later...

We'll speak with neuroscientist and artist Antoine Belmar-Pépin about his research on the connection between pareidolia and creativity. I think this deep connection between creativity and nature... and how Paris Delia is just one door that opens us to this form of connection with nature where we reconnect with the myth and with the stories that are embedded in our environment.

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Welcome back to the Science of Happiness. I'm Dacher Keltner. The ways our brains take in the world is surprisingly flexible. Seeing is not just about the eyes. Our brains, beliefs, and experiences team up to build. what we perceive. Sometimes we can see things in objects that aren't really there, a phenomenon called pareidolia. For our show today, we're joined by Oakland-based musician Malik Mays. The music you're hearing right now is theirs.

Like a lot of us these days, Malik works from home, something that can make our space feel stale. So for our show, they tried pareidolia as a mindfulness practice. Malik, welcome to the Science of Happiness.

of course thank you for having me tell us a little bit about your journey to becoming an artist i have been playing music since i was about eight years old i started with the violin Played that through elementary school up through middle school and high school. And at the end of high school, I discovered that you could make music on a computer. And I never looked back from there.

Right now, I am writing a score to VR dance performance by the artist Cyberspace, generating about 30-ish minutes of dance floor-oriented electronic music. to kind of build a soundscape for a utopian queer experience that's an alternative to drag at the club. Music is more important now than I think has ever been. I find it... soothing in a way that is bigger than just me. And now in light of the world being on fire in many ways, I'm using it more as a means to explore safety.

and my ability to generate a sense of safety yeah patrick savage who studies the deep reasons why we create music is to form community and be strong and safe you know in times of oppression like this it really comes into the focus when i look at the mindfulness world very often it goes inward but when we go outward and look to forms and paintings and nature

And then in particular, when we start to sense the face and a big part of our brain is devoted to understanding faces and seeing them and deriving comfort from them. And I'm curious. Malik, why did you choose this practice of all the things you could have done for our show? I spend most of my time at home. I work from home. I take classes from home.

All of my hobbies are on the computer, so I'm just at home a lot. And I thought of it as being a way for me to kind of reinterpret the space that I spend so much time in. Searching for faces, searching for figures, searching for character in a space that... that i enjoy being in but does sometimes kind of feel a little bit um what's the word what's the word adversarial or transactional or task oriented very much that task oriented it kind of transformed

my apartment for me in a way that i wasn't really expecting my partner is a really avid gardener there are house plants they're everywhere we have like a really beautiful vibrant garden. But even so, because I spend so much time at home, it all feels a bit static after a while. And looking for the faces kind of revitalized my relationship to the space.

It was difficult at first to find the faces, but as I found faces, I found more faces. Wow, that's fascinating. Our spaces around us become so human in some sense or so alive. Can you walk us through... the practice how would you recommend your friends to do this what would you say to them so you take that deep breath you look around you find the pattern you ask yourself what is it that i'm actually seeing here

Are there any alternatives? Could this be more than one thing? And then you ask yourself, how does this make me feel that I have found this pattern, this caterpillar, this face, this rocket ship, whatever it is, how does it make me feel? Just give yourself a moment to look at the space around you and see how the chaos kind of organizes itself into patterns. I think if there's a routine or space that you spend a lot of time in,

This would be a good way to free yourself from what could potentially be a very monotonous experience. Maybe you have an hour-long commute every day and you kind of zone out, but this could allow you to tap into the experiences that you're having that you're maybe filtering out to engage with the world around you in a way that you're probably not allowing yourself to in order to just move from point A to point B. It's very freeing.

We know when you think about how important the face is. I mean, you come into the world and a baby's looking at face. most of the day. And we know with eye contact, you get oxytocin release and we imitate smiles and laughs. It just becomes part of our emotional life to look at a face. when we see faces there are large parts of the brain that are activated it's one of the most important things we look at

like the fusiform gyrus, and then also other regions of the brain that are involved in, even when we see illusions of faces, like you, you know, you're not seeing a face literally, but just the patterns. And those parts of the brain are involved in sort of Almost like social communication, like understanding what people mean to me or saying to me. Did these faces that you were seeing give you messages or things to reflect on?

I don't know that I would say they necessarily spoke to me in that sense, but the stories that I was able to make up for them did. There's some sawhorses we have in our driveway. It's like a little makeshift workstation. And I've been looking at those sawhorses for months. But doing this practice, all of a sudden they were handlebar mustaches for a cowboy who was lounging in my driveway and being able to personify and anthropomorphize.

These objects, those stories brightened up my day. It wasn't just junk that was in the way anymore. It was someone who was smiling at me. I was having a relationship with these objects that I didn't have previously.

Pareidolia often involves seeing more masculine faces. And I'm just curious, you know, our way of looking at things comes out of our identities. I'm curious if you have reflections.

given this historical moment about the relationship between queerness and this thing in periodolia of seeing masculine faces as a queer person myself i would say that i'm experiencing more masculine faces when i'm experiencing pareidolia i do tend to see men more masculine oriented shapes but i think what's interesting is that i tend to see smiling figures And I think we associate masculinity with stoicism, with seriousness, with violence even. And we don't expect men to smile.

And I think it's interesting that when I do see these masculine faces in a cloud or in a wooden fence, that it's a smiling face. It's a masculine figure that is... expressing joy. I do think that there is maybe a queer sensibility about the experience of pareidolia. I think it's what I want to see. I think it's what I want men

to be able to express. It's what I want from them. I think, like I said, the stoicism is what's expected of them. But what I personally want when I go out into the world and I... meet a friend or a new acquaintance or a complete stranger is i want to smile i want the warmth yeah and do we ever need more joy from masculinity right now studies show that this periodolia experience

and your examples illuminate this just seeing figures and faces and patterns of things out in the world makes us creative we get beyond what we see did you feel The experience with periodolia influencing or weaving into your music? I would say yes, in the sense that it primed me to look for a pattern.

So I was able to find them more readily than I would have if I was just starting from zero and having to get up to 60. Yeah, definitely prime the pump in a way. That's fascinating. Somebody might look at it and say, well, that's frivolous. How do you think about that practice? What does it give to people today when we know we work too hard and the economic pressures are tough and the digital media kind of controls our time in some sense? What's important about this?

Foremost is that it allows you to create something that you don't have to spend. I think we're generally in our day-to-day lives at work. Even in our hobbies, which we have transformed to side hustles or whatever, we're trying to build something that we can transform into money pretty much in all of our waking hours. And I think with a practice like this, You're making something that is not currency, that you're not trading for goods, you're not trading for time.

You're making something for the purpose of making something, and it doesn't have to be any more than that. It doesn't have to have any further value than the fact that you made something and you enjoyed it. And I think that's important.

Engaging in this practice reminded me to slow down. I tend to move from task to task, trying to optimize my time so I can be as productive as possible. And while that's fine, I think that there is... an equal amount of value in moving slowly and allowing yourself to just kind of dally a little bit.

Have a moment for some fun to enjoy yourself. You don't always have to be maxing, as the kids call it now. You don't have to be maxing all the time. You can just sit down for a moment and turn your bookshelf into teeth.

or whatever it is you know and that's just as useful for recharging yourself i think we all live very fast lives our phones are always barraging us with distractions And it gave me a moment of rest in between intensive tasks where I'm doing a lot of thinking, making a lot of decisions. Giving myself these moments to walk around my house and see that a window looks like a cyclops gave my brain a break from having to be correct.

Having to be precise, I could see anything, you know, it's just a granite countertop and now there's an astronaut in it or whatever. But there was no wrong answer. And I think having an opportunity, even if it's only for a few minutes or a few seconds, to not have to have the right answer is very freeing.

I'm almost tearing up over here. No, it's so well put. Malik Mays, thanks so much for being on our show. Of course. Thank you. What does science tell us about the link between pareidolia and creativity?

it tells us as well that we construct our reality in some way, you know, that we have a power over what we perceive and that we can change that voluntarily and consciously. We'll hear from Antoine Belmar-Pepin, a neuroscientist who works at the intersection of creativity in the brain, after a short break.

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Pareidolia is a phenomenon that many of us have probably experienced, and it goes at least as far back to when ancient astrologers saw stars through the lens of pareidolia, creating a world of myths and stories through constellations. Antoine Belmar-Pépin is an artist and researcher, someone who is curious about how neuroscience helps us understand perception. His lab studied pareidolia by showing people images and asking them,

to come up with as many shapes and forms as they could. So if you see a face, you see a cat, you see a dragon, anything that you can identify in these images, and you try to find the highest... number of these meaningful forms in the images. These images had a high fractal dimension, which basically means they had a lot of repeating patterns. Imagine a broccoli crown.

If you cut one of the stems off, it looks like a mini version of itself. We're surrounded by fractal images all the time, but there's one place in particular where we tend to find a lot of them. When we walk in nature, trees have fractal structures. When you look at almost anything that come up from nature, it's made of fractal structures. After viewing these images and talking about what they saw,

participants were asked to come up with a list of 10 words that have zero association with one another. And this task is super simple but can be highly complex as well because if I tell you, I don't know, like a hummus, fire... and entropy. And then, oh, actually, entropy and fire are somewhat related. This task was a way to measure creativity. And we show a really high correlation with the propensity to find

meaningful pattern in ambiguous images. This means like, in other words, if you're highly creative, you're able to experience pareidolia in more complex or more ambiguous images. And neuroscience shows us that there's a part of our brain that helps us recognize faces really fast. The fusiform face area, or FFA. The area in the brain that

is activated when you perceive faces will be activated when you experience piridalia. Antoine's work shows creativity is not just about making things, it's about our ability to work with ambiguity. And seeing things in new ways, revealing our own powers of perception. And what neuroscience tell us now is that our perception is not only a bottom-up phenomenon. It's not only a passive.

phenomenon we're filtering information there's a bunch of different subconscious decisions that are taken in our brain when we receive information before we get to conscious experience So a simple example is if I have different beliefs about the world, definitely this will change the way I will experience the world and the type of information I will focus on.

So in the same visual scene, depending on what is my background or what is your background, we will not attend to the same element in the signal, while actually the information that comes into our brain might be the same. Our brains don't just receive information from the world. They help create what we see. When we're studying neuroscience, this is really important because we're trying to understand how

perception emerge from our interaction with the world. I think it matters because it tells us as well that we construct our reality in some way, you know, that we have a power over what we perceive. and that we can change that voluntarily and consciously it opens the door to okay i'm not just a passive viewer like if i'm in a certain environment i have no control over that environment and no actually

you can change your way of seeing the world. And this is the lens that you put in front of you when you see the world. Earlier in the show, Malik talked about how practicing pareidolia gave them a way to take control over their time.

infusing fun and wonder into daily life. But it also renewed their perception of their environment. And that's something we can all tap into. I think that anything can be learned. So definitely some people might... have a higher propensity to experience pareidolia naturally

But I think for a lot of people, they're just not aware that Paris Delea is something, that this mechanism of interacting with ambiguity. So I think that from the moment you learn about it, and then if you seek... pareidolia you will find it you know it's just i think an effort to put of like and really the best way of doing it is in nature the experience of pareidolia especially in nature is connected to the experience of all

We think of nature as being wild, but it has a remarkable way of showing us symmetry, complex patterns, and meaning. When you walk in nature and you find a tree that looks like a dragon, i mean you can tell yourself oh that's funny look there's a tree that looks like a dragon but you can also go a step further and say okay there's a story behind it there's like

There's the spirit of the dragon in the forest and so on. And I think this is how also indigenous people are experiencing their connection to nature through these different signs and through this way of speaking with nature in some way. And I think Pareidolia is a door towards that. Next time on our show, we'll talk about forgiveness, how we can do it. and why it could be good for us. I don't want people to feel like they're being coerced to forgive in some way.

What we find is that very often people naturally forgive when they experience a sense of restoration and reconciliation. Thanks for joining us on the Science of Happiness. Our research assistants are Emily Brower and Dasha Zerboni. Our producer is Truk Quinn. Our sound designer is Jenny Cataldo of Accompany Studios. Our executive producer is Shuka Kalantari. I'm Dacher Keltner. Have a great day.