… is what you get, right? At least that’s what Flip Wilson’s Geraldine character used to tell us. (If you are old enough to remember Flip Wilson, I’m sure that made you smile. You’re welcome.)

As it turns out, it’s more like, “What you want is what you see.” For example, take a look at the photo of the eye at the top of this article. See it? Oh, wait a minute! That’s not an eye. That’s sudsy water swirling around a drain. You would have sworn that was a picture of a human eye, right? Why?

Pareidolia, that’s why. What is pareidolia, you might ask? Besides being a fiendishly difficult word to spell and pronounce, pareidolia is the name of a psychological phenomenon that causes humans to see faces and other human-y things in objects and scenery that are distinctly human-free. We do it all the time. How many times, as a little kid, did you lie on your back and stare at the clouds, picking out faces, hands, legs, and even images of whole people floating through the sky? We call pansies “monkey faces”. We see a “man” in the moon. We look at electrical outlets like they are miniscule, mildly astonished imps. No? You don’t do that? You will now.

Sometimes, we get fanatical about our encounters with pareidolia. Remember the “Face on Mars”? Remember the oily stain on an office building in Florida that was supposed to be the Virgin Mary? Humans seem to be programmed to find the familiar. Brain scans confirm that our gray matter lights up vigorously whenever it thinks it has spotted something familiar, particularly a human face. What’s behind this? Necessity, that’s what.

It turns out that vision is an incredibly complex thing. First, you have your eyes. They collect data in the form of light as it falls on your retina. Retinal cells get stimulated and generate bio-electrical impulses that speed along your optic nerve, screaming at the speed of light to the vision center at the back of your brain. There, the data must be sorted out. The image that struck your retinas is stereoscopic and upside down. There are two images to invert and stitch together. There are colors to sort out and noise (like the image of your nose) that gets edited out. Seriously, deliberately look at your nose right now. It’s there. Why doesn’t it get in the way when you’re reading or driving? Your trusty brain just erases it from the video feed, that’s why. It does that while simultaneously putting two separate images (assuming you have two working eyes) into one continuous picture that has no double-vision artifacts to distract or endanger you. It’s truly remarkable–and it’s a ton of work.

Luckily for us, the brain has some tricks up its sleeve. Primarily, it has experience. Subconsciously, you know what you are likely to see when you conduct common, everyday activities. You get up in the morning. Your spouse greets you with a familiar face. Your dog whines to be taken out. Your cat begs for her food bowl to be filled. Your kids scramble around and scurry out for school. You hop in your car. The road is lined with familiar landmarks. You arrive at work or school or wherever you while away your days. There are people there. They greet you and interact with you throughout the day. You do your job. It all makes sense to you and you know what is going on around you. It’s familiar. You learn to expect what you will probably see.

The brain takes advantage of all of that. It doesn’t have to process every tiny thing you see because a whole bunch of it is stored away in memory. Those visual memories can just be patched into your field of view in low resolution, never having to go through all of the extensive process that is “seeing”.

I know that's hard to believe, but it’s true. You can find articles all over the internet describing experiments conducted to prove that your brain is cheating all the time. It has to. There’s too much to process. That’s why, if you really notice, you will detect that scenery outside of the very center of your gaze is lacking in detail, and much more blurry than anything at the center of your vision. That’s the old brain, cheating again. It focuses on what is important. The fact that it is designed in such a way to do that boggles the rest of my mind–all while my brain chugs along, processing input from my eyes, and making me see Curious George in a Cheeto.

This article was written by Tilmer Wright, Jr. Tilmer is an IT professional with over thirty years of experience wrestling with technology and a proud member of the Authors Guild of Tennessee. In his spare time, he writes books.

You can find links to Tilmer’s books at the following location: https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3ATilmer+Wright+Jr&s=rele…

His author information web site is here: http://www.tilmerwrightjr.com/