pareidolia

Pareidolia is the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern. This is a form of apophenia, which is the perception of patterns or connections between unrelated or random data.123

The human brain is optimized to recognize faces, which can explain why we are adept at finding meaningful shapes in random patterns. For instance, people might see images of animals or figures in clouds or rock formations. This phenomenon is also seen in the Rorschach inkblot test. While the word "pareidolia" is relatively new to English, the concept has been recognized for centuries, with artists like Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Leonardo da Vinci exploring it in their work.132