“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”
William Blake
Seeing faces in trees is not a glitch in our psyche but a very real feature of our minds called pareidolia. Pareidolia is the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one sees an object, pattern, or meaning where there otherwise is none. Reading the scientific definition of it doesn’t take away any of the meaning for me and I’m fascinated by the scientific work that’s being done on this topic nonetheless. Although a somewhat natural conclusion, it’s been determined that higher creativity is linked with higher instances of recognizing faces in objects or most commonly in trees.
The faces aren’t necessarily really there but we put them there by way of our creative cognitive processes. Recognizing these faces that I or we see collectively has often unconsciously increased my personal connection to many trees, especially those I pass often on my walks. We innately connect to that which looks and feels more familiar but more than that, we automatically try to find connections and meaning in all that we see and do. I love capturing these faces wherever I travel and actively look for them as I would imagine a lot of us do.
There are a number of theories as to the cause of this phenomenon. Experts say pareidolia provides a psychological determination for many delusions that involve the senses. They believe pareidolia could be behind numerous sightings of various strange phenomenon while surely a number of others may be genuine. Carl Sagan, the American cosmologist made the case that pareidolia was a survival tool. He argued that this ability to recognize faces from a distance or in poor visibility was an important survival technique to be able to recognize whether an oncoming person is a friend or foe. Many parts of the brain are involved in vision and recognizing faces known as the fusiform face area. A stroke here can even cause face blindness, known as prosopagnosia. When this area is stimulated, not coincidentally, more faces appear where there may have been none prior.
Leonardo da Vinci wrote about pareidolia as an artistic device. “If you look at any walls spotted with various stains or with a mixture of different kinds of stones, if you are about to invent some scene you will be able to see in it a resemblance to various different landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and various groups of hills,” he wrote in a passage in one of his extensive notebooks.
Many researchers like University of Toronto facial processing expert Kang Lee is concluding even more that the world we see is not entirely determined by what is out there. Instead, much of what we see, or think we see, is constructed through our brain. Lee says seeing a face in tree-bark is an “extreme illustration of how our brain actively interprets the world.” Catherine Mondloch of Brock University in Ontario, studies face perception and recognition and says “You can’t not see it. From the minute we are born, humans have a huge sensitivity to anything that might be face like.”
Isla Skye Herbals 