Shock! Horror! Amazement! All obviously and immediately recognisable from two dots, a straight line, and a circle. Quite clearly, it’s a drawing of a human face.
Except, honestly, it doesn’t look anything like an actual face. Nobody’s face remotely resembles that tiny and grossly simplistic handful of symbols. People’s eyes have curved edges surrounding white-ish pools inscribed with a flecked ring of colour containing a central circle of black. If any of these details is missing or misplaced or misshaped, even in a relatively minor way, it would make for an unreal or unsatisfactory image of a human eye. If somebody’s nose was really nothing more than a thin straight line directly down the middle of their face, you’d assume they’d had a terrible accident. And nobody’s mouth really just forms handy geometrical shapes to convey easily recognisable emotions, without the rest of the face changing by a single pixel.
Clearly, those smiley faces which abound across the length of the intertubes look nothing like actual faces. But they do to us. They leap out at us and into our consciousness, often long before we register the bits of punctuation and alphabet that they’re made of, giving us the impression of seeing another human person :-O looking surprised, :-D grinning happily, ;-) giving us a cheeky wink, o_O boggling at something that disconcerts or troubles them, D: wailing at something distressing, and so on.
We readily see human faces in these shapes, because our brains are particularly good at recognising them, spotting the shapes and fitting together the patterns that comprise the visage of another person like us. There’s science about it somewhere. Probably on the internet. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that our synapses are sometimes a little too keen to slot things together into familiar shapes and patterns, and can end up excitedly pointing out what looks like a human face, when actually all we’re looking at is a bunch of crap which just happens to have some features in roughly the right places to set our face-sensors twitching.
This is pareidolia. It doesn’t only apply to faces or human-looking shapes, but that’s perhaps how it’s most commonly perceived. Sometimes, in a cluster of chaotic visual or aural stimuli, patterns of some sort will leap out at you and seem significant.
It’s a fun game to look at clouds and decide what the vague fluffy shapes look like to you, but you don’t generally interpret this as a sign that anyone’s sending you a secret message, which might be something to do with a tiger… or maybe it’s more like a racing car. You should expect recognisable patterns to crop up amidst random stuff from time to time, if you’re looking for them in a place where lots of randomness is floating about, like among the clouds.
Sometimes, things just look like faces, for no particular reason. It would be weird if things didn’t randomly bunch together into a sort of smiley shape once in a while. When they do, you have to think whether it really means something – whether some external force has really shaped reality in some impossible way to create this pattern for some unfathomable purpose – or whether it might just be a fluke, a trick of the light, a lucky smudge. Is it impossible that it happened by chance?