Do you see hidden faces in the things around you?  I do. And have you thought of numbers as being male or female.  I have. Mostly I see faces in ceramic tiles, woodgrains in doors and sometimes wood floors.  I can often see them in carpets too. Many people can see them in clouds, I think. And there, I can see animals as well.  And every car or truck has a face on the back and front.  

We are all attracted to faces, I think.  When I looked it up on the internet, I found that there is a name for this.  “Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon that causes people to see patterns in a random stimulus.  Usually this is simplified to people seeing faces in objects where there isn’t one.”

It has become a “street art” form for some, who make faces out of objects seen in cityscapes such as trash receptacles and cracks on the sidewalk.  But they are making faces on things for others to discover and be amused by their creative works. I like them.

Neurologically speaking, an article in BBC Future, by David Robson, he explains why the brain constructs these illusions. “We are primed to see faces in every corner of the world.  Indeed, once you start seeing these faces peering back at you, they start to appear everywhere.”  But in an article by Morgan Cutolo, “not everyone experiences this phenomenon.” Morgan is the Assistant Digital Managing Editor at Reader’s Digest.

I am sure that there are more publications that can give you information on this subject.  So I will move on to numbers “Gender is so fundamental to the way we understand the world that people are prone to assign a sex to even inanimate objects. We all know someone, or perhaps we are that person, who consistently refers to their computer or car with a gender pronoun (“She’s been running great these past few weeks!”) New research suggests that our tendency to see gender everywhere even applies to abstract ideas such as numbers. Across cultures, people see odd numbers as male and even numbers as female.”  This quote, from Daisy Grewal, comes from an article in ScientificAmerican.com.

It suffices to say that anything one thinks of as an oddity in oneself is not original.  Obscure perhaps, but not original. That is comforting in a way. Either way, I enjoy seeing faces everywhere.  As for the sexuality of numbers, not so much. Boy, the things you learn just by asking the internet! Actually, I find that to be comforting too.