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In anticipation of the Nobel prizes next month, last week the Annals of Improbable Research awarded the 2014 Ig Nobel Prizes. The Ig Nobels aim to honour “achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.” This year’s winner are no exception, with studies such as the solemnly named “Nasal Packing With Strips of Cured Pork as Treatment for Uncontrollable Epistaxis in a Patient with Glanzmann Thrombasthenia” that won the Medicine prize and a study testing reindeer reactions to humans disguised as polar bears (the Arctic study prize).

My particular favourite of this fantastic bunch of studies was the paper that won the Neuroscience Ig Nobel prize. Chinese and Canadian scientists examined what happens in the brains of people who see the face of Jesus in toast (note: more of these people exist than I’d previously realised). This study was recommended on F1000Prime yesterday by Pharmacology Faculty Member David Triggle, who aptly started off the recommendation with what sounds like the first line of a dad joke – “The Cop, The Stripper, And The Holy Toast,” but was in fact referring was a tabloid story about a woman seeing the virgin Mary in a grilled-cheese sandwich, which she subsequently sold to a casino in Las Vegas for $28,000, no word of a lie (check the refs of the F1000Prime recommendation, go on).

In all seriousness, however, the Jesus-toast study is a genuine study about human face pareidolia, the illusory perception of non-existent faces. Using fMRI, the researchers showed participants images of pure noise but led them to believe that half contained letters or faces. As Triggle reports, “Remarkably, the participants reported seeing actual images of letters or faces some 34% and 38% of the time. Furthermore, the perception of faces, as opposed to letters, was accompanied by specific responses in the right fusiform area of the brain”.

Triggle goes on to describe how the work could have implications beyond tickling our funny bones as improbable science – “This work is of importance not only to our understanding of the neuronal basis of pattern recognition in human perception, but also to the identification of suspects in criminal trials, where it has long been realized that eyewitness identification of suspects is notoriously unreliable {2,3}.”

The Ig Nobels once again fulfil their aim in proving that sometimes even the most absurd-sounding avenues of research can yield useful knowledge. Do check out the rest of the Ig Nobel prizes awarded last week – there is some fantastic, not to mention highly amusing, research honoured.