Last year, a team of Chinese and Canadian researchers wanted to test the incidents of two different kinds of pareidolia, one in which people specifically see faces and another where they see letters and words. The researchers showed participants images that were pure, visual static but they told the subjects that half of the pictures contained either faces or letters. Even though the pictures were pure gibberish, more than a third of the subjects reported they distinctly saw something, 34% said they saw faces and 38% said letters. And brain scans conducted during the test showed that in the people who reported seeing faces, brain activity spiked in what's known as the right fusiform face area - the region that's activated when we try to recognize someone's face.