Seeing faces and figures is merely a consequence of the brain's tendency to match stored information with new stimuli. To triumph in strange places, Voss says, the brain must be able to quickly process unfamiliar visual stimuli-like new shapes and lines-and figure out what's worth paying attention to. Think of the human brain as a flexible, all-purpose machine meant to succeed in whatever random environment it inhabits. Perhaps recognizing faces, even in vague shapes, was evolutionarily advantageous, Sagan suggested: 'Those infants who a million years ago were unable to recognize a face smiled back less, were less likely to win the hearts of their parents, and less likely to prosper,' he wrote. Why do our brains do this? In The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, astronomer Carl Sagan offered a possible explanation. 'Your brain is very happy to treat those things as the same thing.' 'To your visual system, there's no difference between a picture of a frog and some weird collection of dots and lines you've never seen before that vaguely resembles a frog,' Voss said. He found that the same areas involved in processing actual, meaningful images lit up when the squiggles were viewed. Voss used fMRI-a neuroimaging procedure that measures brain activity by tracking changes in blood flow- to study the brain regions activated when a person sees the squiggles. 'About half end up being meaningful, on average,' Voss said. In studies, he has presented research participants with computer-generated squiggly lines-meaningless shapes derived from triangles or circles-and asked subjects whether the shapes resemble something meaningful. Joel Voss, a cognitive neuroscientist at Northwestern University, Chicago, is studying how our brains help us ascribe meaning to otherwise random assortments of shapes and lines. The phenomenon of seeing faces where there are none is a form of information-filling called pareidolia.

'We try to find sense in the noise all the time, and we fill things with information.' 'The brain is really a predictive organ,' said Nouchine Hadjikhani, a neuroscientist at Harvard University. In the contours and colors of the lunar surface, people can find meaningful figures for the same reason that we 'see' the face of Elvis in a potato chip or Jesus in a grilled cheese sandwich. The dark areas are volcanic-the mare, which is Latin for 'seas.'' 'The lighter areas are the mountains, often referred to as the highlands. 'When you first look at the moon, you pretty much see light areas and dark areas, and some are more gray than others,' said planetary geologist Cassandra Runyon of the College of Charleston, in South Carolina. They collected hundreds of pounds of lunar soil and rock samples, conducted experiments and installed equipment for follow-up measurements.Please be respectful of copyright. On July 20, 1969, NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first people to set foot on the dusty surface of the Moon. The Moon is the only other planetary body that humans have visited. For example, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been circling the Moon and sending back measurements since 2009. Today, we study the Moon using telescopes and spacecraft. Later, people used their observations of the Moon to create calendars. How do we study the Moon?Įven thousands of years ago, humans drew pictures to track the changes of the Moon. The impact sent chunks of Earth and the impactor into space that were pulled together by gravity, creating the Moon. Scientists believe that the Moon formed early in the solar system’s history after Earth and an object about the size of Mars smashed into each other. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State University How did the Moon form? This image is based on data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft. Notice how few dark areas the far side has. The 'far side' of the Moon looks very different than the near side (see the first photo in this article).

Man on the moon pictures from space