The puppy mountain and why we see things in other things

Do you think this mountain looks just like a puppy?

This mountain has been around for a while, but it's become a paw-some tourist attraction after a post on social media.

The story began on Valentine's Day when designer Guo Qingshan shared a photo of the mountain on Weibo, China's version of X/Twitter.

He noticed that the mountain's shape looked like a dog resting it's chin next to the Yangtze River.

The post seemed to capture the imagination of others and it got 120,000 likes in just 10 days.

Soon, the hashtag #xiaogoushan, which means "Puppy Mountain," was everywhere, attracting millions of views.

Now people are ruff-ing it in the best way possible, hiking to the mountain to take their own photos.

Pareidolia: Seeing shapes and faces in everyday objects

BBC photographer Jeff Overs captured this amazing image of the "face" of the God of the Sea, Neptune, as waves crashed over Newhaven harbour wall in 2021. These wave sightings seem to be an example of pareidolia - when an image is seen in an otherwise random visual pattern.

There is actually a word for seeing things in everyday objects; Pareidolia.

You say it like this: 'pa-ray-doy-lee-ah'.

That's when our brains see patterns or shapes in things that aren't actually there.

It's like when you look at clouds and think one looks like a dragon or spaceship.

Can you see a face in this cheese grater?

Psychologist Rob Jenkins from the University of York says that your brain is just trying to make sense of the world by finding familiar shapes, even if they're not really there.

And it happens with faces too - sometimes we see faces in things like rocks, trees, or even the moon.

In an interview with the BBC, Rob explained that it starts early: "Babies who are nine minutes old seem to show a preference for face-like patterns."

Experimental tests show that new-born babies spend longer looking at patterns of dots and dashes which resemble two eyes and a mouth than at similar, non-face-like patterns.

It's all about how our minds love to recognise things we know, like faces or animals, in the world around us.