I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

You can find anything on social media, anything.

I've seen accounts for amateur mushroom foragers, accounts where one tiny dog is dressed up in a different elaborate outfit each day.

Accounts for cooking with whatever's in your pantry.

I follow one woman who gets dressed in her bright, airy, impossibly clean bathroom each day,

and she looks better in clothes I can't afford than anyone has a right to.

I follow astrologers and philosophers and chefs.

I follow skin care gurus and film directors, and yes, poets, lots and lots of poets.

And some things frequently show up in my feed for reasons I don't understand.

One of those things is an account devoted to finding human faces in inanimate objects.

I don't follow this account, but I see the posts regularly.

The admin shares photos with captions like,

Can you see it?

Sometimes I look, and often, yes, I see the face, the eyes, nose, and mouth in a photograph of tree bark, or a pile of laundry, or some eerie reflection in a window.

And sometimes I don't see it.

As humans, we are hardwired to see faces, to seek faces.

It's a psychological phenomenon referred to as paridolia,

from the Greek para, meaning beside, and idelon, meaning image or form.

Paridolia is often associated with finding or assigning human physical characteristics in nature,

but it also includes objects outside of the natural world, like buildings or cars,

because, well, the human mind developed before we developed the built environment.

But it's not just human faces we think we see.

...