On North Clinton Avenue, here in Rochester, there sits a tree. Normally this would not be a cause of great concern to most people. True, humanity seems to have waged a war on woody plants, attempting to wipe them out with a variety of cutting devices, but this tree had, until recently escaped notice.

In 2005 someone look at the tree and thought that they saw Jesus. You might find that odd because by most Christian accounts, Jesus did not belong to the kingdom Plantae. (Many accounts wouldn’t place him in the kingdom Animalia either, but that’s a different story altogether.) Actually, what they claimed was that the pattern of lighter and darker spots on the tree resembled Jesus.

Of course no one can go back in time to see what Jesus looked like, if he existed. Photography wasn’t invented until almost two-thousand years after Jesus’s death. Artwork depicting Jesus dates back as far as the 3rd or 4th centuries CE. That’s right, three centuries after his supposed death. Early artistic renderings were highly symbolic, and could not agree on his age, or if he had facial hair.

Medieval artwork often depicted him as a white European, usually with a beard and long hair. Artwork depicting Jesus seems to match the cultural expectations of the people producing the art, so one accepted image of Jesus.
When people say that the tree looks like Jesus, what they really mean is that the patterning of light and dark spots on the wood resembles traditional European artistic interpretations of Jesus. Does it really? That’s a matter of opinion, but if it does, there’s a sound explanation for why it does.

Pariedolia is a psychological effect where a vague image or sound seems to much clearer than it is. The man on the moon is a good example. Of course there isn’t an actual face on the moon, but when told what to look for, many people can perceive such a face. Similarly we can perceive faces in a stimulus as simple as a yellow circle with a curved line and two dots. Some scientists believe that we are genetically hardwired to recognize faces. In fact we have an area of the brain that seems dedicated to doing just that. When this are of the brain is damaged, patients loose the ability to recognize faces. Often they must rely on other subtle cues to establish the identity of friends and members of the family.

Recognizing faces is such an extraordinarily common behavior that it’s possible for people to see faces when they aren’t there, like when looking at the man on the moon, or looking at the Jesus tree.
To be continued, where we investigate the Jesus tree in person.

Image from: http://rocwiki.org/Jesus_Tree