Why Does the Human Brain Think Something Is There?
I need to know why my brain becomes an asshole after dark.
Because during the day, I can look across a room and see:
A coat.
A pile of laundry.
A chair.
Completely normal things.
Turn the lights off?
Suddenly there is a whole-ass person standing in the corner of my bedroom.
My stomach drops.
My heart does that horrible little oh fuck thing.
I turn the light on.
Coat.
Of course it’s a coat.
It was always a coat.
But for approximately half a second, my brain was completely prepared to accept that someone had broken into my house just to stand silently in the corner and stare at me.
Rude.
And I know I’m not the only person whose brain does this.
A tree has a face.
A car looks angry.
An electrical outlet looks shocked.
Something moves in your peripheral vision and you turn around because you could have sworn somebody just walked past you.
Sometimes there isn’t even anything to see.
You just suddenly get that horrible feeling that—
someone is there.
So naturally, I had questions.
Why does the human brain keep finding people who aren’t there?
Why does darkness make everything creepier?
Why can two dots and a line suddenly become a face?
And, most importantly:
Why is my laundry trying to kill me at 3:00 in the morning?
Down the rabbit hole I went.
🕳️ First of all: apparently, your brain is guessing.
I always kind of thought vision worked like a camera.
Your eyes see something.
Your brain gets the picture.
Done.
Apparently—
no.
Perception is much messier than that.
Your brain is constantly taking information from your senses and trying to figure out what that information probably means.
Most of the time, it happens so quickly that we never notice.
You don’t stare at four wooden legs, a flat surface and a backrest while consciously calculating:
Hmm.
Interesting.
I believe this may be…
a chair.
You just see a chair.
Your brain already handled the rest.
The problem starts when the information coming in isn’t very good.
Maybe it’s dark.
Maybe you only saw something for a second.
Maybe half of it is hidden.
Maybe it’s sitting at the edge of your vision.
Your brain still wants an answer.
So sometimes it gives you one before it has enough information.
PERSON.
…
Never mind.
Lamp.
And suddenly my nighttime stupidity makes considerably more sense.
🕳️ Apparently, everything has a face.
There is a word for one particularly weird version of this:
pareidolia.
Pareidolia is basically what happens when we recognize a familiar or meaningful pattern in something that doesn’t actually contain that thing.
And humans are really good at finding faces.
Clouds.
Trees.
Houses.
Food.
Cars.
Rock formations.
Outlets.
Toast.
Apparently our standards are embarrassingly low.
Two vaguely eye-shaped things and something underneath them?
Good enough.
Congratulations. You’re a face now.
😂
The weird part is that our brains actually respond to these fake faces.
In a 2020 study, researchers showed people ordinary objects containing face-like patterns. The brain initially represented those illusory faces similarly to real faces before very quickly sorting them back into the “actually, that’s an object” category.
Which means there are tiny moments when your brain essentially does this:
HUMAN.
…
toaster.
And I absolutely love that.
There is also an actual neuroscience study called “Seeing Jesus in Toast.”
I’m not making that up.
Researchers showed people visual noise and asked them to search for faces. Participants sometimes reported seeing faces even though there were none actually hidden in the images, and activity in a brain region involved in face processing increased when they did.
So apparently if you give the human brain enough visual nonsense, eventually it will manufacture a person.
Excellent.
🕳️ Turn off the lights and suddenly your coat is a murderer.
Here’s where this becomes October appropriate.
😂
During the afternoon, that pile of laundry in your room is:
laundry I should probably put away.
At 3:00 in the morning?
WHO THE FUCK IS SITTING IN MY CHAIR?
Nothing about the laundry changed.
Your information did.
When there isn’t much light, you lose detail.
Shapes get less clear.
Edges blend together.
Shadows hide parts of objects.
Your brain is trying to identify something while working with less information.
So it fills in some blanks.
And sometimes the answer it lands on is—
person.
It also explains why watching a horror movie can suddenly make your perfectly ordinary house feel suspicious.
The refrigerator makes a noise.
Normally:
Refrigerator.
After two hours of watching people get murdered because they insisted on investigating strange noises:
Well. This is how I die.
Tree branch scratches the window?
Murderer.
Cat knocks something over?
Demon.
Boyfriend rolls over in bed?
Possessed.
😂
Nothing necessarily changed inside the house.
You did.
You’re paying attention to different things.
You’re expecting different possibilities.
And now every weird shadow gets an audition for the role of whatever horrible thing you just watched.
🕳️ Okay…but what if you don’t see anything?
And then I found the part I really didn’t like.
Because sometimes people don’t mistake anything for a person.
There’s no coat.
No shadow.
No face.
Nothing moves.
They simply feel like—
someone is there.
Researchers call this a felt presence or sensed presence.
It refers to the experience of feeling that another person or being is nearby without clear sensory evidence that anyone is actually there.
And apparently this is a whole thing.
It has been reported in very different situations—including under psychologically or physically demanding conditions and alongside some neurological and psychiatric conditions—and researchers don’t think there is necessarily one explanation that accounts for every version of it.
It isn’t limited to people with a diagnosed condition either.
A 2024 study surveyed 10,447 people from the general population. About 1.6% reported experiencing a felt presence during the previous month. Poor sleep and loneliness were among the things associated with the experience in that sample.
Which is fascinating.
I hate it.
But fascinating.
Because apparently your brain doesn’t even need to bother making the coat look like a person.
Sometimes it can just quietly announce:
Someone is behind you.
And provide absolutely no further information.
Thanks.
Very helpful.
🕳️ So…is your brain lying to you?
Not exactly.
And I think this might be the part I find most interesting.
Your brain isn’t sitting inside your skull intentionally making shit up because it’s bored.
It’s interpreting.
Constantly.
The world doesn’t arrive in your head with helpful little labels attached.
Coat.
Tree.
Shadow.
Not a murderer.
Your senses give your brain information.
Your brain has to figure out what probably caused it.
Usually, that works so well that we don’t even realize it’s happening.
But sometimes?
The information is incomplete.
And the first answer is wrong.
That also doesn’t mean we can slap pareidolia onto every strange experience anyone has ever had and call the mystery solved.
Sometimes we don’t have enough information to know exactly what somebody saw, heard or experienced.
But we do know that the human brain is extremely good at finding recognizable patterns inside incomplete information.
Especially faces.
Especially people.
Especially things that seem important.
Which means the creepy part might not be that our brains occasionally get it wrong.
The creepy part might be realizing how much guessing they’re doing when they get it right.
🕳️ So about that person standing in your bedroom…
There probably wasn’t one.
The coat never moved.
The tree outside your window does not have a face.
Your electrical outlet isn’t horrified.
Your car is not pissed at you.
Probably.
😂
For that first split second, though, your brain was trying to answer a question before it had all the evidence:
What am I looking at?
And its first answer was:
Person.
Then you stopped.
Looked again.
Turned on the light.
And gave your brain enough information to change its mind.
Coat.
Just a coat.
Which means the next time something vaguely human-shaped is standing in the corner of my room at night, I now know exactly what I should do.
Turn on the light.
Not because something is there.
My brain just needs more information.
And honestly?
So do I.
Well.
This was supposed to be a fun little question about why coats turn into murderers after dark.
Instead I learned that my brain is constantly interpreting incomplete information, will recognize human faces in completely inanimate objects, and can apparently decide that another person is nearby without even showing me the imaginary person.
Excellent.
October is off to a great start.
Rabbit hole successfully entered. 🐇🕳️
Until next time,
— Destiny
P.S. What’s the creepiest thing your brain has ever turned into a person for half a second? 👀
Sources & Further Reading
For this one, I kept the sources fairly small because this isn’t History After Dark and nobody needs my entire neuroscience research trail. 😂 These were the strongest sources I used while trying to figure out why our brains insist on finding people in coats, toast and dark corners.
Susan G. Wardle et al. — “Rapid and Dynamic Processing of Face Pareidolia in the Human Brain.”
Published in Nature Communications in 2020. This study looked at how quickly the brain responds to illusory faces in ordinary objects and found that those fake faces initially receive processing resembling that of actual faces before the brain rapidly distinguishes them as objects.
Jiangang Liu et al. — “Seeing Jesus in Toast: Neural and Behavioral Correlates of Face Pareidolia.”
Published in Cortex in 2014. Researchers used visual noise to study what happens when people perceive faces that aren’t actually present and found involvement of the right fusiform face area during illusory face perception. Also still one of my favorite research-paper titles. 😂
Joseph M. Barnby et al. — “The Felt-Presence Experience: From Cognition to the Clinic.”
A 2023 review examining felt presence—the experience of sensing another being nearby without clear sensory evidence—and the different neurological, psychological and environmental contexts in which it has been reported.
Sanne G. Brederoo et al. — “The Experience of Felt Presence in a General Population Sample.”
Published in The British Journal of Psychiatry in 2024. The study surveyed 10,447 people and found that 1.6% reported a felt presence during the previous month, showing that the experience isn’t confined to unusual expedition stories or clinical populations.
