Pareidolia is the technical term: the perception of meaningful patterns, particularly faces, in random stimuli. Your brain is so committed to finding faces that it will manufacture them out of three dots and a curve. The grille of a car. A power outlet. The shadow on a piece of toast. The standard evolutionary explanation is risk asymmetry. The cost of seeing a tiger that isn't there is small. The cost of missing a tiger that is there is total. So the system errs on the side of seeing. That is a clean story. It is also incomplete. Pareidolia operates at a sensitivity that goes far beyond predator detection. It triggers on objects that no ancestor ever encountered. It is built into the system, not learned. One reading: the brain ships with face-recognition middleware as a foundational feature. Another: the rendering of meaningful agents is so central to the system that even pattern noise gets parsed through it. Either way, the question is not why we sometimes hallucinate faces. It is why the system is so heavily biased toward producing them.