Senack sees faces in things, trees mainly, ghostly apparitions of eyes and mouths in knots of damaged bark or the stains of time on decomposing wood. Seeing a face in tree-bark is an “extreme illustration of how our brain actively interprets the world,” Lee says. And it is the brain that makes the faces in the tree, not the tree itself. A key insight of modern psychology is how the brain creates faces out of the world, illuminating them for the mind. Pareidolia like Senack’s tree people show how much we are seeing the world with the help of higher order cognitive processes, Lee says.

Source: National Post February 28, 2020 18:22 UTC