What a friend we have in cheeses

If you’ve ever spotted the likeness of Jesus on your grilled cheese or Elvis on your potato chip, rest easy — you’re not crazy, though researchers might say it’s all in your head.

That’s because human brains are actually wired to recognize faces, according to a new study on what’s called face pareidolia, or the spotting of face-like images in everyday objects.

“Most people think you have to be mentally abnormal to see these types of images, so individuals reporting this phenomenon are often ridiculed,” Kang Lee, a professor at the University of Toronto's Institute of Child Study and co-author of the study, said in a release.

But his group’s findings suggest that pareidolia is common. Lee, along with researchers from several Chinese universities, scanned the brains and observed the behavior of study participants while they looked at images.

They’d been led to believe that half the images contained faces or letters, though they really just contained “pure noise.” Even so, they reported seeing faces 34 percent of the time and letters 38 percent of the time.

“Human brains are uniquely wired to recognize faces, so that even when there's only a slight suggestion of facial features the brain automatically interprets it as a face,” Lee said.

It’s a normal function of the frontal cortex, a region of the brain that is important for executive functioning and planning responses to stimuli, which signals to the brain’s posterior visual cortex to help it interpret what’s being seen, the study said.

It was published in the April 2014 issue of the journal Cortex.

Spotting religious imagery on everyday objects seems to be fairly common, particularly on iterations of bread. For example, online casino GoldenCasino.com reportedly spent $28,000 on eBay for a grilled cheese sandwich where the face of the Virgin Mary appeared on the toasted bread.

Odd Stuff Magazine compiled a list of such incidents, including the face of Jesus in the leftover burn marks in a frying pan, Christ’s likeness on a KitKat bar and a Jesus-faced piece of naan.

And then there was the “holy sock,” spotted by a British woman who thought she saw a bearded man who looked like Jesus in the folds of a sock drying on her clothesline.  She and her boyfriend discussed creating a shrine for the sock, but when they moved it, the face disappeared.

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