Kang Lee, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study, has won an Ig Nobel prize for explaining why people have a tendency to see faces in ordinary objects, such as the face of Jesus in toast.
In a paper published earlier this year, Lee’s team showed that the phenomenon – known as face pareidolia – is linked with certain hard-wired circuits in the brain.
The Ig Nobel prizes have been handed out annually since 1996 by the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research for projects that “first make people LAUGH, and then make them THINK.”
For more information on 2014 Ig Nobel prize winners click here.
