Have you ever seen a face on a football?

In a new paper, neuroscientists Gerwin Schalk et al. report that brain stimulation caused a man to experience strange hallucinations. The patient saw faces in everyday objects, including an orange soccer ball and a featureless box. The researchers coined the word “facephenes” to refer to these face-like perceptions.

Schalk et al. studied a 26 year old Japanese man suffering from intractable epilepsy. The patient was implanted with a large number