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In the pantheon of casual dining experiences, few middle-class fancy eateries have experienced a trajectory like Chili's. From their rustic roots to an expansive nationwide chain, this southwestern sit-down has seen all the ups and downs of the industry. But where many casual dining chains have entered a modern age of decline, the big red pepper has somehow re-entered the building. So, how exactly did Chili’s get its groove back?
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From the man on the moon to the fronts of cars
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people see faces in the strangest of places. But have you ever wondered why
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Well, there's a name for that phenomenon, peridolia, and it describes humans' ability to identify discernible images
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in places there aren't any. So today, we're going to take a look at the actual reasons
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why we see faces in everyday objects. Time to face whatever you'll see in this video
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Most of us don't spend a lot of time thinking about how our eyes work
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Because what's to think about? We just look at something and we see it, right
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Well, not really. The truth is, turning an image into a recognizable object
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is part of an incredibly complex biological process. So when a person sees something, say the moon
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light shines into their eye and hits the retina, which is kind of like a receiver
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But when the image arrives, it's actually upside down and reversed. The retina then sends a signal through the optic nerves and the optic chiasm, which plays
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a role in depth perception. Then the signal arrives at the main image processor, more widely known as the brain
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and finally hits the visual cortex, where the data is edited into the final image
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Don't worry, there won't be a test at the end. And even if there were, you could always just rewind this
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So when people see faces and objects, it's their brain taking its best guess as to what
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is there, and then projecting what it thinks it's seeing onto the object
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If the brain picks up what it thinks are eyes, nose, and a mouth in an object, neurological
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activity will happen in the brain's fusiform region, which is, not coincidentally, the
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same lobe that recognizes faces. In the case of pareidolia, the human brain may pick up on certain image patterns, two
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circles that vaguely resemble eyes, for example, and then fill in the rest of the image to see
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a face. In a way, the whole thing is a byproduct of the brain's ability to identify a face based on minimal details
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It's kind of acting like facial recognition software, albeit extremely buggy facial recognition software
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That's always tagging a fish tank as your dad. Professor David Allais describes this poetically
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We know these objects are not truly faces, yet the perception of a face lingers
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we end up with something strange, a parallel experience that is both a compelling face
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and an object. Two things at once. The first impression of a face does not give way to the
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second perception of an object. The point is, our brains see what they think they're going to see
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what they want to see often based on only the sketchiest of details In other words you really can believe your own eyes One of the spookier aspects of pareidolia is that most humans don just glimpse a face in an object
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The face usually has a gaze too. And as researcher Colin Palmer explained
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our brain may actually be able to shift the direction of the image's gaze
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If you are repeatedly shown pictures of faces that are looking towards your left, for example
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Your perception will actually change over time so that the faces will appear to be looking more rightwards than they really are
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Palmer continued, There is evidence that this reflects a kind of habituation process in the brain
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where cells involved in detecting gaze direction change their sensitivity when we are repeatedly exposed to faces with a particular direction of gaze
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In Brain English, the direction of the gaze that humans perceive isn't actually stable
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We learn over time, and the experience affects how our brains interpret the things we see
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Even weirder, researchers Kosuka Takahashi and Katsumi Watanabe have also found that humans actually track the gaze of phantom faces, as if the face is looking back at them
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So basically, if you gaze into the abyss, your brain is likely to see a ghostly face that will gaze back at you
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Sweet dreams! So here's the burning question. Of all the things we could see when we look at inanimate objects, why faces
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Why not roller skates or electric guitars? Or the entirety of the 2002 sequel Men in Black 2
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While there isn't a definitive answer, other than Men in Black 2 isn't very good
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scientists have taken a few guesses. Researcher Kang Lee surmised that it may have to do with the fact that
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as he explained to the BBC, starting from childhood, faces are the most common stimuli that we encounter in everyday life
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And because of its commonality, Lee asserted that it's pretty easy to induce this phenomenon
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To test this hypothesis, which doesn't sound at all like the beginning of a supervillain manifesto
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Lee showed subjects random gray patterns, something like static from an old CRTV
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And even though any contours and movements were obviously fuzzy and uncontrolled
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people reported they saw a person in the screen 34% of the time
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Let's hope none of them got a phone call from a stringy-haired ghost afterwards. There's also a social and emotional component to seeing faces everywhere
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And since humans are social beings, we project humanity onto objects. Which is all to say, your brain may see a face in the moon
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because at some level, it wants to be friends with it. Scientists have also attempted to understand what role facial recognition played in human development After all if our brains are wired to recognize faces it probably serves some kind of purpose
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Well, researcher Colin Palmer, who's working so hard he deserves an Arnold Palmer
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has a guess to at least one way facial recognition may have helped early humans
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His hypothesis? Our brain has evolved to facilitate social interaction, a process that has shaped the way we see the world around us since we inherited these traits
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from primates. Moreover, there is an evolutionary advantage to being really good or really efficient
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at detecting faces. It's important to us socially. Anyone who's ever forgotten an acquaintance's face
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at a party can back this one up. Palmer also points out that facial recognition is important
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in detecting predators. And while that's obviously very important, he argues there is a relevant
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side effect. If you've evolved to be very good at detecting faces, this might then lead to false
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positives, where you sometimes see faces that aren't really there. In other words, it's better
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to have a system that's overly sensitive to detecting faces than one that's not sensitive
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enough. In that sense, our overability to see faces in inanimate objects is really a feature
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rather than a bug. It's evidence of how well-wired our brains have become
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Although pretty much everybody experiences pareidolia to some extent, some can spot faces
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and objects more readily than others. This raises an interesting question. What makes one person better equipped to make those neurological connections than another
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For example, scientists Alice M. Proverand and Jessica Galley discovered a difference
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in gender, noting that women were significantly more inclined to perceive faces in perfectly
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real object photographs than men. They went on to cite numerous studies that have demonstrated that women have
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a greater ability to decipher emotions through facial expressions, suggesting a more general
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sex difference in empathy. Conversely, their male subjects' lessened ability to perceive faces
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may suggest a lack of processing of the socio-effective content of the incoming visual
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input in the male brain. So, men are from Mars, and women are from a planet that, if you squint
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just right, looks exactly like a human face. Other neurodevelopmental factors can affect one's
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pareidolia. In his research, Colin Palmer discusses conditions or traits like face
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prosopagnosia, which is the inability to recognize faces, and the autism spectrum
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which can include difficulties in reading information like emotions from other people's faces. He explained, the longer-term goal of this kind of research is to understand how
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difficulties in face perception and everyday social functioning can come about So he not just looking into why we see faces in toasters because it a cool weird phenomenon Although that probably part of it Even more bizarrely a study from researcher Topani Rieke found that religious people tend to be more prone to seeing faces in everything
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but also more prone to false alarms. How many times have you heard about someone who claimed to see the face of Jesus in their morning toast
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with a Virgin Mary and a ketchup stain on a napkin? In these instances, it seems as though a person's desire to find mysticism in everyday life is likely shaping their perceptions about the world
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Either that or some of these religious figures are hella bored and are making a lot of surprise appearances
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Pareidolia certainly has a scientific explanation, but researchers point out there is a behavioral component as well
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As Professor David Allais explained, the evolutionary need for recognizing faces meant that human brains must also quickly interpret them
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In other words, it's in our best interest to be able to quickly identify a face and interpret its expression
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You need to know whether that person sprinting towards you is a friend or a foe, and whether they are smiling or scowling
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It's one of the first things they should probably teach you in football practice. What this means for paraidolia is that our brains don't just see faces and things
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They also quickly make up emotions to go along with them. We see happy faces, angry faces, surprised faces, even skeptical faces with that little raised eyebrow like in the Emoji movie
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This is partially about survival calculations, but there's more to it. As humans evolved over time to be the social beings that we are
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our tendency to attribute personalities and emotions to inanimate objects reflects our own emotional worlds
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which is to say that humans just don't see faces and things and make up random emotions for them
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We actually project our own emotions onto them. So really, that happy face you see was yours all along
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In this world, the only guarantee other than death and taxes is that if there's a way to make money off of something
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some slick business person is going to figure it out. True to form, businesses have found a way to use pareidolia to their advantage
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Some companies have intentionally staged objects in advertising to resemble human faces
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And it actually works. One 2018 study concluded that ads featuring faces or face-like images resulted in increased
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brand recognition and advertisement preference. And pareidolia doesn't just work in advertising campaigns
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Another study similarly claimed that when houses and other structures include face-like
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aspects, they trigger emotional responses in observers. So before you buy your next house, ask yourself, do I really like this place
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Or do I just like it because my brain told me it looks like a friendly face
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And where can I watch Men in Black 2