The Psychology of Seeing Faces in Trees

The scientific term for seeing faces in things is pareidolia, which is a brain phenomenon that causes people to perceive faces in patterns or images and make pictures out of randomness. 

Pareidolia is what causes people to see faces in inanimate objects, such as a shape in the clouds or the man in the moon. The word is derived from the Greek words para, meaning something like "instead of", and the noun eidōlon, meaning "image or shape". It is not a clinical diagnosis, nor is it a disorder. The brain has a natural tendency to assign meaning wherever it can.

Often pareidolia is associated with seeing faces but can mean we see something else. It's a common experience that uses the same brain processes that we use to recognize and interpret human faces. For example, someone might see a face-like pattern in a tree or the back of a car. 

 Engaging in pareidolia is itself a creative act: We’re perceiving something that doesn’t (yet) exist, which is the essence of creativity. At the same time, the beauty of pareidolias is that they are effortless and automatic: Our brains create them for us, using what the psychologist Alfred Binet called our “involuntary imagination.”