【2004 Archives】

On Tuesday004 Archives TV critic Margaret Lyons tweeted the following photo of a dog named Kimchee that bears a striking resemblance to actress Laura Dern. It was, objectively, the greatest tweet of 2018.

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More than 5,000 retweets and 25,000 likes later, it's safe to assume others agree. Even Dern sees the resemblance!

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We loved it, we wrote about it, but we couldn't stop thinking about it. Why, exactly, does this dog remind us of a beloved human actress? Is it the silken ears, the partially hidden eyes, or something else we can't quite identify?

It all comes down to the natural human ability to make rapid-fire connections between the unfamiliar and the familiar. Research has shown that at a mere hint of a face, our brains will perceive a visage looking back at us, even when there are none. Everyone has experience with this -- we've all seen the Virgin Mary-on-a-slice-of-toast stories, or thought we saw a face looking back at us from a pile of rumpled clothing.

"What's special about people is we have this amazing capacity to symbolize...and a need to humanize," says Dr. Philip Muskin, professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center. "We humanize things that aren't human – computers, cars, etc. – and we also like to see in non-humans human qualities."

This naturally reflects the ways in which we interact with animals. We love to anthropomorphize our dogs, to connect their behaviors to human emotion.

Which leads us, as Muskin explains, to the brain -- specifically, to the hippocampus, or "the emotional center of the brain." It helps its owner make rapid survival decisions, assessing our surroundings for safe and unsafe scenarios.

"It appears to have access to everything we know," he says. "In some remarkable way it creates a 360-degree vision around us all the time." When we see something -- a plant or an animal, for example -- our brain pulls immediately from our experiences and memories to 1) recognize what's before us and 2) determine how we should react.

And because our brains are built to make these immediate, unconscious connections, we tend to land on the things we know best. We recognize elements of faces we know, even if every element isn't there.

It's like caricature drawings, Muskin says. An artist need only hone in on a few defining features to make a recognizable portrait.

Which brings us back to Dern and Kimchee. We see the blonde coloring, the appearance of a side part, the partially hidden eye and our brains make the natural connection. This, coupled with the prompt to see Dern in this dog's face, makes for a strong, unshakeable perception.

The best recent example of this in viral culture? Muskin ties it all back to the infamous "what color is the dress" meme of 2015. Those who initially saw the dress as white and gold had a challenging time seeing it as anything but.

"Once you’re convinced of it, then it’s hard to break the image," he says.

What can we say? The brain is capable of making wild connections. It sure makes for fun viral stories, though.

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