“We are animals, and it is our tendency to find ourselves in everything we see,” McCloud said. “This is how we survive as a species … Pattern-finding is a basic human capability that we depend on for our survival, and that a cartoonist also depends on.”

To show how people create these patterns, he screened a photo of a church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., with two oval windows sitting above a triangle-shaped ledge. And he noted, correctly, to judge from the laughs in response, that most were seeing it as the face of a “confused chicken.”

Sometimes the wrong visual decisions have consequences, he said. He pointed to something most people have seen in hotels: the diagram reading, “In case of fire use stairs, do not use elevator.” The standard version, he noted, is “a masterpiece of incoherence.” There’s an overlarge stick man who appears to be running toward the fire, and a couple who appear to be getting fished out of an elevator with chopsticks. With a few simple tweaks, he demonstrated, the diagram could be made not only more pleasing visually, but clearer and more functional.

The good news, he said, is that even non-artists are now more inclined to communicate visually, with the popularity of emojis as an example. This in turn prompts people to consider the messages they send in face-to-face communication. “This is what it is to be alive,” he told Kuriyama during a Q&A session after the talk. “Look at what your body is doing to send these messages. That is fundamental; it should be a part of basic education. Also, it is so much fun.”

In a new postscript to his talk, McCloud described a vivid visual experience, a drive that he took with his wife and daughter, Sky, to view last year’s solar eclipse. Like McCloud’s father, Sky is partially blind, and thus has a different experience of the world.

“We all build models out of whatever our senses can give us. She has extreme light sensitivity, and sunlight is not fun for her, so she learns how to get the gist of a scene from split-second exposure.” The eclipse itself, he said, was a wondrous example of how nature creates symmetry. “We know that the sun and the moon are not the same size, we know that they are nowhere near each other and nowhere near us. Yet they keep trying to convince us otherwise. So you have to ask, did we really come to see the sky today, or did the sky come to see us?”