Happy links of the day.

[baratron]

I am stressed and headachy. If anyone else is also feeling this way, please enjoy this photo of a bear falling from a tree onto a mattress, with accompanying story.

Machine pareidolia - exploring the tendency for humans to see faces in inanimate objects. (I'm curious - do people with faceblindness also recognise faces in inanimate objects?). Very nerdy. If you prefer the art version to the computer science version, please enjoy the Hello Little Fella! pool on Flickr. My favourite so far is this (though this, er, human brain has to be a close second).

I have a particular reason, even beyond loving Portal 2, for approving of the Perpetual Testing Initiative video. And yes, it HAS SUBTITLES.

I also have lots of political-type links that are anger-making, but my head hurts too much to want to inflict those on anyone else just now.

Comments

[quiet000001.livejournal.com]

I don't know re: face blindness, but I found it interesting when I was still studying psych that apparently people who have dogs (or had dogs a lot growing up, I don't think current dog-ownership was a requirement) use the same part of their brain to identify dog faces as human faces. This does not seem to apply to other animals even though people can tell cat A from cat B or whatever.

/random trivia :)

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Wow, the machine pareidolia stuff is wonderful! My impression with face blindness is that people still notice other people have faces but can't take the next step, to being able to identify that face as a known person using those dedicated neurons. If that's true for people (and I'm sure there exist multiple versions of prosopagnosia), they should notice the faces. Now I want someone to study that!

[dannilion.livejournal.com]

I'm face blind (don't recognise myself in the mirror, can't identify my daughter or husband by their faces in real life, but tend to do better with photos) but I do see generic faces in inanimate objects sometimes. The worst was the curtains at the local psychiatric unit :P That said, I also see other things in inanimate objects, like animals and such so maybe that's connected?

*Squishes* I hope headachey stuff calms down so you can feel better.

[nitoda]

Another comment on face-blindness. As I understand it people with face blindness struggle to differentiate faces and recognise individual people based on their faces alone. They would probably not have trouble identifying the presence of a generic "face". It might be interesting to look at thresholds and see if people with face blindness perform differently from normal controls in a test of whether a particular image contains a "face" or not.