Seeing faces in rocks | Forum — The Modern Antiquarian

Hardwired

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PeterH Mar 10, 2006 22:29:52

Replying to Littlestone

Excellent thread, but as ever I'm getting lost. I'm not sure that us seeing faces in rocks and trees is hard wired. I do believe it has more to do with the way we learn to see pictures. It has even more to do with two dimensional photographs than three dimensional reality.

Let me explain if I may. Go into the field and look at the rocks as you walk among them and then take some photographs. You see no faces, but when you look at your photographs later, you suddenly see a face. But that face was just a temporary arrangement of light and shade. Take a photograph an hour later and it looks quite different. Try it. The exceptions are when you come across a strong profile that is face-like in all lights especially as a silhouette.

The thing is that once you see a face in a photo, you can't not see that face in that photo. The pattern has arranged itself in your mind and will not go away. Be warned and take a look at this http://www.megalithic.co.uk/modules.php?op=modload&name=a312&file=index&do=showpic&pid=9156&orderby=

tiompan Mar 10, 2006 23:05:43

Replying to PeterH

In general we can't help but create patterns that are meaningful to us . Possibly because the brain doesn't like chaos and translates all experience into something that we can handle. The reasons given by the hypnotised for their eccentric behaviour is classic , they will come up with perfectly reasonable arguments to explain their odd behaviour .

Littlestone Mar 10, 2006 23:09:54

Replying to PeterH

>I'm not sure that us seeing faces in rocks and trees is hard wired.<

Well I completely agree with you Peter. I've lived a lot of my life outside the influence of Western culture and know that the emphasis on 'self' is just not as strong in some non-Western societies - indeed that fact is even reflected in the language of those cultures. One such culture hardly uses the words I, me or you in normal conversation and questions such as, "Do you understand?" or, "Shall we go?" are simply rendered as, "Understand...?" and "Go...?" (with a rising tone). What is important in a question such as "Go...?" is the level of politeness with which the question is asked and that single verb may have several layers of politeness :-)

I mention this because it shows how different we (mankind) view the world. Each society, past and present, has placed emphasis on what it perceived as important. Which brings us back, yet again I'm afraid, to the fundamental question of this thread - what was important to the creators of rock art?

Hob Mar 10, 2006 23:43:03

Replying to PeterH

That's an interesting and highly valid point Peter.

The hard wired face recognition template is fact, but what you're saying about faces in stones is quite true. I never noticed this:
http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/post/20396
whilst taking the photo, and on many subsequent revisists, I've not managed to find the face again. The bumps that made it, yes, but the actual image, no.

However I'm not so sure that human brains don't construct illusory faces when out in the environment. In fact, it may be that with our modern day familiarity with 2D representations of 3D objects, combined with our general acceptance the extreme verisimilitude of the photographic image, we are actually less likely to see faces in stones, trees or clouds than our predecessors of even a couple of generations ago.

But in reference to Littlestone's original post, where he was drawing a distinction between ourselves and cultures outside the Greco-Roman influence, is it possible that the development of realistic 2D representations of human faces by the greeks was the start of a process which effectively supplied fuel to the facial recognition templates in our brains, ending up at the point where we don't see these things as easily these days? If so, it's a neat example of 'nurture' re-writing the software that ran on the face recognising hardware, thus overriding the 'nature' of the genome which produces the neuronal substrate of the face recognition process.

Which may all be a pile of tosh to some, but fekkit, what do I care? I *like* cognitive archaeology, I just wish someone would fill in the gaps between the appearance of behaviourally modern humans and the time when people started leaving permanent reminders of their existence.