Sometimes, when I look at the outlet where I insert my computer charger, I can see a sorrowful face looking back at me: two thin slits for eyes and a big, dour, downturned arc of a mouth, surprised and dismayed at its throatful of electricity. There’s a term for the human tendency to see faces where none exist: pareidolia, one of those curious and lovely Greek-rooted words that sounds a bit like a fancy parasol or a rare flower.
We recognize ourselves in a few wisps of nimbus cloud, see the curve of a smile in the night sky and form a man out of moon rock; the religiously inclined might recognize, in the patterns on a Maillard-browned bit of toast, the face of a holy savior. Pareidolia is an ancient phenomenon that’s part of a subclass of a broader set of human behaviors, the tendency to see patterns where none exist.
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Source: How QAnon helps its followers find conspiracy in chaos