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This is Scientific Americans, 60-second Science. I'm Karen Hopkins.

It's probably happened to you. You look at a parking meter or a pickle slice or the foam in your cup of cappuccino, and you think, hey, that looks like a face.

It's a phenomenon called paradolia, and it's something we humans

tend to do. Now, a new study suggests we also do something else. We tend to see those illusory

faces as having a gender, and most often, we think they're male. The findings appear in the

proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Growing up,

my sister Jenny and I had our own word for examples of face parolalia, beesups. Susan Wardle, a cognitive

neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. Her term is total nonsense, but

Wardle must have felt some connection with beesups. As a grown-up, she set out to study

them after a conversation she had with her colleague Jessica Talbert. We were talking about

face neurons in the brain, which respond preferentially to images of faces, but they also sometimes

respond to pictures of round objects, such as apples or clocks. That reminded us of the experience

of seeing faces and objects, and we thought it would be

fun to find out whether the face regions of the brain respond to illusory faces in a similar

way to real faces.

Indeed, in an earlier study, they found that the same brain regions activated by actual

human faces were also triggered by faux faces in inanimate objects, like potatoes or teapots or

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