Easter Island head (sort of)

This mysterious character gazes out over your room, much like an Easter island head. He waits patiently for the universe to conspire to deflate your tire, but then he is ever at the ready to lend you a hand (or, rather you lend him yours).
...but yes, he is really jut a pump.

Dog-fan

Aww, this little dog/alien-like thing is so cute and happy! He's a real ^fan^ of your company. If you tweak his buttons he pants with excitement and heats up the room - what a handy little fellow indeed!

Skull in the sand

Scary! This rocky is a bit like a scary skull. I actually see 3 faces in this, do you?

Koala sweat patch!

Weird...

Angry speaker!

I met this very angry speaker in Hogan's pub in Dublin last week. I was chatting to my friend Neil and Mr. Angry Speaker just shouted at me. To be honest, he just kept shouting at everyone, that's sort of what he does...

Funny face

I say funny because this dude - the roof of a bus - has three sets of eyes. Depending on which you look at, he's got a different expression. Complex guy.

Big mouth pottery

Wow, this dude has a big mouth! Looks a bit like an angler fish. Think he's pretty happy though, nice hat!

The happy-faced spider

...or Theridion grallatora, for long! While not Faciomorphism in the strict sense (face-like human made objects), this is Sooo cool! I might put more of these up. It is curious though why the spider chose to be happy, why not really really angry?!!

Dead pink face

Shaun Purcell noticed this guy in his office. Don't know how the poor fella died :(

Blue-nosed bucket

This nosey individual sits on a shelf in the lab. He helps out sometimes but generally just wants to hear all the gossip. In fact once he leaned over to try to hear Lydie when she was whispering and fell off the shelf - that's how his nose got bent!

Mr. Fancy Hat

Check out the cap on this guy. Very fancy indeed! Weird earrings though.

Scary helmet

This cucumber-like bike helmet looks surprisingly angry and scary for one with such a nobel role. Even mouth is a nutcase! I like to think that he is tying to scare the dangerous cars away so that Lydie (his owner) is safe.

Happy sausage!

Pat the pattie was happy to be eaten :)

Carrot love!

Aw...these guys looking are out for each other. True love :) Orange you glad to have a friend...

Spooky, happy, octopus house thing

Ok ok, bit of a vague description there! But what is it? I'm pretty sure it's harmless. Maybe that's a moustache and its mouth is a big "O". Maybe it's trying to figure out what we are...in-ter-est-ing...

(Thanks to Lydie for this one)

Ugly But Happy!

My, what a big nose this guy has. But he doesn't care one bit. His job is very important; he makes sure there's lots of hot water every day so that people can keep themselves nice and clean - a very nose-bel job!

(Thanks to Lydie for this one)

The Black Swan

There's always one in every family, isn't there? Well, plug sockets are no different. This guy look like he was adopted - he definitely didn't get that nose from his parents!

(Thanks to Lydie for this one)

The big-eared angry pepper!

DO NOT mess with this guy. He is really angry. With that big mouth and four nasty teeth, you know you're in trouble if he gets a hold on you! Of course, I wouldn't be too pleased either if someone cut me in half...

A ghost in the water...(thanks Lydie)

At least that's what I think it is. Very scary guy indeed. Perhaps he is lurking underwater, waiting to eat you if you fall in......

At last, recognition!

Yippee!

Finally, we have good information on how us mad faciomorphically-tuned weirdos are tuned. The following is taken from http://m.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/brain-face-recognition/

Enjoy!

How the Brain Spots Faces

• By Wired UK
• January 10, 2012 |
• 10:00 am |

By Mark Brown, Wired UK

Our brains are made to find faces. In fact, they’re so good at picking out human-like mugs we sometimes see them in a jumble of rocks, a bilious cloud of volcanic ash or some craters on the Moon.

But another amazing thing about our brain is that we’re never actually fooled into thinking it’s a real person looking back at us. We might do a second take, but most normal brains can tell the difference between a man and the Moon.

Neuroscientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wanted to investigate how the brain decides exactly what is and is not a face. Earlier studies have shown that the fusiform gyrus, located on the brain’s underside, responds to face-like shapes — but how does it sort flesh from rock?

Pawan Sinha, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, and students created a procession of images ranging from those that look nothing like faces to genuine faces. For the ones in the middle — structures, formations, smudges and shapes that give us a pareidolic reaction that causes us to see a face — they used photographs that machine vision systems had falsely tagged as faces.

By doing a series of one-to-one comparisons, the human observers rated how face-like each of the images were. And while the subjects sorted out the photographs, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to scan their brains and look for activity.

The neuroscientists found different activity patterns on each side of the brain. On the left, the activity patterns changed very gradually as images became more like faces and there was no clear distinction between faces and non-faces. The left side would flare if someone was looking at a human or an eerily face-like formation of rocks.

But on the right side, activation patterns in the fusiform gyrus were completely different between genuine human faces and face-like optical illusions. There was no fooling the right side of the brain, no matter how much they resembled a face.

The researchers could conclude that the left side of the brain ranks images on a scale of how face-like they are.The right side makes the categorical distinction whether or not it’s a human face.

The left side of the fusiform gyrus actually flared up before the right side supporting the hypothesis that the left side does its job first and then passes information on to the right side. (Though because of the sluggishness of fMRI signals, which rely on blood-flow changes, the timing does not yet constitute definitive evidence).

“The left does the initial heavy lifting,” Sinha says. “It tries to determine how face-like is a pattern, without making the final decision on whether I’m going to call it a face.” The right’s job is to make the final call.

This clear distribution of labour is one of the first known examples of the left and right sides of the brain taking on different roles in high-level visual-processing tasks.

Alien face in the bathroom!

As I innocently attended the bathroom, I stumbled (literally, I was in a pub) upon this little guy. He stared at me, somewhat bewildered and perhaps a little sad or shocked. Maybe he should have chosen a better destination for his first visit!