About

If You Can See X, You're Left-Brained refers to a type of engagement bait on social media that involves posting a pareidolic image in which one can easily recognize a definite thing and pairing it with a caption that offers a choice between two completely different things that cannot be recognized. The engagement bait format has been used on X / Twitter since early 2022.

Origin

The concept of "right-brained" and "left-brained" people is considered a myth that oversimplifies the tendency of some neural functions to be specialized to one side of the brain or the other.^[1] In popular culture, being a "left-brained" individual has been associated with a predisposition to creative tasks, while being "right-brained" has been linked to analytical capabilities.

On January 8th, 2022, X^[2] / Twitter user @grimmyyyyyyy made an engagement bait post exploiting the concept, posting a pareidolic picture resembling a yellow bird. The caption of the post, however, insisted that right-brained people would see a dog, while left-brained people would recognize a giraffe in the image. The post (shown below) garnered over 6,400 reposts and 860 likes in two years.

Spread

The bait format first went viral in April 2023, after X^[3] user @gavinthomas2015 posted a fake image of a dog-shaped mountain on April 5th that insisted that people would see either two people hugging or a dinosaur in it. The post (shown below) received over 79.3 million views, 11,000 quote tweets and reposts and 7,500 likes in one year, with @gavinthomas2015 admitting to engagement baiting in a separate post.^[4]

In 2023 and 2024, @gavinthomas2015 and other users on X / Twitter made similar posts based on real and fake, including AI-generated, pareidolic images.

Notably, on March 14th, 2024, X^[5] user @pmcaftica posted an image of a wooden plank with a fiber pattern resembling an ostrich, which went viral through quote posts. For example, a March 14th post by X^[6] user @richhimiekhan (shown below) garnered over 9.5 million views, 11,000 reposts and 165,000 likes in six months.

The engagement bait format remained popular on X / Twitter through 2024.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References