A cognitive bias called pareidolia leads people to see a face in this tree Piter Lenk/Alamy
The Science of Weird Shit
Chris French (MIT Press)
DURING a TV show in the early 1990s, a man describes waking up in the night with a weight pressing on his chest. He could neither move nor breathe. He says this is the result of a visiting ghost. Later that week, on another TV show, a different man tells a similar story of waking up in the night with a weight on his chest. He, too, could neither move nor breathe. For him,…
