Secret of Evermore's Greebles

[/snes]

So if you've played very far in Secret of Evermore, you're probably familiar with the greebles. They're strange creatures which initially just lurk in the forest and watch your progress. Later on, it's revealed that they have shapeshifting abilities, and they can actually take on human form, mimicking your own appearance, and using your own abilities against you.
Today I discovered that two years after Evermore was released, some students at Yale conducted a study on the fusiform face area region of the brain. This is the part of the brain responsible for recognizing human faces. They created a series of artificial objects which were similar to faces in that they had a small number of parts in a common configuration, while otherwise not resembling faces at all. Then they trained participants to recognize these objects, and monitored their brains while they looked at them--and they found that the same fusiform face area was involved in recognizing these objects, even though they were not faces.
These objects which the brain treated as if they were human faces? They called them greebles. And they gave greebles two genders, one of which they named "plok".
Probably a coincidence. According to the paper, the greebles were named by a professor, not one of the students who likely grew up on SNES games and might have actually played Evermore and Plok. Still a fun coincidence though.

submitted by /u/estebandesoto
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