The science behind why we see faces of famous people in food and on spoons and in pizza boxes

Any of these boring, ordinary objects smirking, gawking or shouting at you? (Picture: Getty Images/Metro.co.uk)

Stu Goulden has seen it all on his morning runs: elephants, dolphins, mythical creatures and everything in between.

The marketing worker and blogger is never shocked to see these wild animals eyeing him up in York, North Yorkshire. He’s even come to expect it.

‘Weirdly enough, it was on the day England played in a Euros qualifier, so it struck me even more,’ Stu, 43, tells Metro.co.uk of the time he saw a fluffy lion up in the clouds.

‘Finding faces in everyday objects and clouds is just a fun little game I like to play, and it turns runs into a bit of a treasure hunt.’

Stu isn’t alone. Seeing the faces of animals and people in inanimate objects like shocked plug sockets, sleepy-looking coffee machines and mean-eyed Jupiter storms has a name: pareidolia.

Or, for seeing religious icons like Jesus in your toast, the ‘Nun Bun phenomenon’.

Paul McInnes, 42, who works at traffic management company Metro Traffic Services, is among them. He found his name brought up on The Jonathan Ross Show last March after finding Harry Styles in a slab of bacon.

We wouldn’t blame you if you couldn’t tell the difference (Picture: Getty / Paul McInnes)

These are the Gallagher brothers, by the way (Picture: Paul McIness)

To his friends, he’s the ‘bacon whisperer’ and he’s since seen bacon that looks a fair bit like Noel and Liam Gallagher from Oasis. (According to Paul, at least.)

‘It has only been people’s faces I’ve been,’ Paul says. ‘I have a pretty good imagination and have studied art at college which is where I think I get this from.

‘I am always looking at things differently and critically with my artist’s eye.’

Indeed, our brains – even those without art degrees – have a brilliant ability to recognise faces. Your grey matter can identify a face in a few thousandths of a second, same goes for recognising familiar animals.

But why is it that some steam on a teaspoon is the spitting image of Freddie Mercury, or why was one man convinced the grease on his fish and chip wrapping had a striking resemblance to the singer Lewis Capaldi?

Behind this are specialist neurons that, when you see a face, shoot off electric signals with glee.

Do you think this looks like the Queen frontman? (Picture: Kennedy News and Media)

Some experts know them as ‘Jennifer Anniston’ cells after the face cells of an epilepsy patient undergoing surgery in 2005 fired off when seeing a photo of the actor – but couldn’t have cared less when seeing images of Brad Pitt.

All these face cells call the ‘fusiform face area’ of the brain home, according to brain-imaging scans, though it’s more of a team effort.

‘There isn’t just one bit of the brain that does this but rather a distributed network of brain areas that work together to be especially sensitive to processing faces,’ Punit Shah, a psychologist at the University of Bath, explains.

‘We know this because if some of these areas get brain damaged, face processing suffers, as well seeing this range of brain regions light up – when we put research participants in brain scanners and show them faces.’

Scientists have spent years trying to figure out what, in particular, about objects manages to trick these cells into believing what you’re looking at is a face. (They don’t think it’s because they have art degrees, though.)

One study suggests it’s less one specific thing that makes a face a face but a list that the cells tick off from.

A woman last year was convinced this onion was smiling right at her (Picture: Jam Press)

Some felt that this image of Jupiter looked like a creepy face (Picture: Nasa et al/Tarasov/SWNS)

Adam Waytz, a professor and psychologist at Northwestern University in Illinois, has spent years studying the thinking behind anthropomorphism, or why we instil boring old objects or non-human animals with human-like characteristics.

He says that, outside of our grey matter, there are three reasons why we sometimes see an onion as an onion and other times we see a rather suggestive-looking face smiling at us.

‘One, the concept of human is often top of mind for us simply because the self is so accessible for us and the self represents the prototypical human,’ Waytz says.

‘Second, when we need to make sense of the world or an object we often do so by treating it as something we are familiar with – a human.

‘And third, when we are deprived of social connection from humans we will seek it in other sources, including nonhumans.’

‘Humans are top of mind,’ adds Waytz, so when certain factors in the face-decoding process are heightened, such as your five senses or feeling lonely, ‘seeing humans in the world is more likely.’

Apparently, this grease in a pizza box is Jesus Christ – Jesus Crust Superstar? We’ll work on the pun (Picture: Kennedy News)

Waytz knows this feeling well. ‘I see faces everywhere,’ he notes.

The tendency to be super attuned to stimuli has given humans quite an evolutionary advantage, as our ancestors didn’t need to spend several minutes figuring out whether that sabertooth cat sprinting towards them was actually a sabertooth cat.

As Shah says: ‘Humans have evolved to process visual information that is most useful to our survival.

‘Social information, like faces, is extremely important for successfully existing and thriving in social groups – which is exactly what we as humans need to do.’

People who live in large cities, he adds, have a better knack for recognising faces. But experts aren’t 100% certain about why some are more likely than others to see faces in things.

So when people like Stu crane their necks and see a lion in the sky, their brains whiz through a catalogue of memories to figure out what it is he’s looking at and recognising a lion faster than a cloud is more advantageous.

This man’s bruise seemingly depicted Jesus’s moustache, beard and long hair (Picture: Kennedy News and Pictures)

For Stu, however, seeing the faces of animals and people doesn’t leave him spending hours on the couch contemplating the architecture of his brain or the evolutionary history of his species.

It’s a bit simpler than that.

‘Running teaches you to zone out of everyday life and be more attuned to your surroundings, almost treating the outdoors as a playground,’ Goulden says.

‘The more you look, the more you see.’

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