Pareidolia

: Newborn ducklings are not the only ones that get to have the pleasure of imprinting on their mothers – or whatever otter, beaver, duck-hunting dog or heaven forbid, snake crawls by. Human infants also have the curious capacity to only be able focus their vision from about 20-25cm away from their own face, which is just the right distance to gaze at their mother’s face and fixate on it while feeding…melatonin from a full tummy and dopamine from a soothing moment will help to strengthen this bond (but if you are of the disposition that love, and any other emotion for that matter, are simply chemical reactions then may I recommend having your circuitry re-wired, or splashing some cold di-hydrogen monoxide in your face and taking a long, hard look in the mirror). Perhaps after completing the aforementioned exercise you will see something that looks like a face, and that is just what we like to see. In fact we are good at seeing them most everywhere: in natural rock formations, like the ‘Old Man in the Mountain’ in New Hampshire, featured on its state quarter, or Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina, and a plethora of others (though I think the Black Hills formation that features four American heroes had a little help from dynamite); in burnt, toast (for some reason it seems the Virgin Mary is partial to this breakfast food); in carpet and tile discolorations and just about anywhere else one would not expect to find a face. This could either be telling of our enormous obsession with ourselves or that, biologically, we are hard-wired to find and fixate on faces (how’d you like that alliteration?). If we could detect anger in the shoulders we would look there to find it (although I suppose they may be tense to a degree) or if we could sense excitement in the fingers we would look there (though I surmise a slight tremor here may be contemporaneous with such emotions) or if we could most acutely detect sadness in the neck we would look there (though it may be slumped more egregiously downward), but the face tends to tell of this at a moment’s glance, and then some! We do not have to look at rock formations on Mars or massive craters o the moon to see interesting faces…we can start by looking at our neighbors; I suspect we will find much more interesting there than any cosmic rock remnant may tell us. “A happy heart makes the face cheerful, but heartache crushes the spirit.” (Prov. 15:13)