Amaani Ziauddin

There have been way too many times when someone says “hi” to you in passing, and for whatever reason your mind is elsewhere, and your brain processes it by a few seconds late. By the time you’ve registered what happened, it’s too late, and now you look like a jerk who intentionally ignored them. It feels awkward and very guilt-inducing. You might just think that this is just you being “awkward” or “zoning-out”, but it goes beyond that.   Image Source: Walt Disney Pictures, Alice in Wonderland...

A lot of us say that we don’t like being scared, but we still end up watching horror movies, serial killer documentaries, and jinn or ghost stories late at night. Fear is like a fishing line that just slowly reels you in, even when you claim you don’t like the bait. It might be the thrill you feel when your heart begins to race, or the sudden jumpscare, or just the fact that you’re feeling scared, but you know you’re in a safe place. Fear isn’t just something that lives in movies or...

In the middle of the night, specifically around 1-3 a.m., you might wake up and see something resembling some sort of demon staring you in the face. But then you realize that it’s just the pile of laundry that you actually never ended up folding. This is actually called pareidolia .  Image Source: Pinterest (artist unknown) Pareidolia is when the brain perceives patterns or faces in random things. Pareidolia is driven by the fusiform face area (FFA), which is the part of the temporal lobe,...