Facial pareidolia is the belief that we see human faces in inanimate objects. A new scientific study reflects the neural process by which we see faces.

It opens the door to understanding diseases such as autism, schizophrenia or Parkinson's. We are programmed to see faces in some way and are obsessed with them, says a neurologist at New York's State University of New York, Susana Martínez-Horta. But what happens when we see Elvis on a French fry? The dialogue that occurs between different areas of our brain sometimes works like the game of telephone and sends erroneous information to our heads, says MartíNEZ-HORTa. The study can open the doors to understanding autism spectrum disorders, schizophrenia and Parkinson's, she says. The results of the study will be published in the journal PNAS a few days after the publication of the paper in which the study was published, on June 14. The full study is available on PNAS' website.