I’m sitting here and noticing that almost every bar tender is dancing to the almost exact beat to the music. So in general I’m wondering if anyone knows why we’re so addicted to patterns? From visual to audio and so on, what drives the brain to find and replicate patterns so much? Are other animals addicted to patterns?
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Pattern recognition is a major factor in evolution and is a major reason that our brains are so complex. We’ve almost specialized in pattern recognition.
It is why you can see faces in toast or make a conspiracy out of said face in toast. We can even find patterns where there are none and that can lead to issues when we don’t temper that pattern recognition against reality.
This is how everything from a squirrel trying to see a cat through the grass and how we could make out a tiger in a bush by seeing an eye and a few lines. Suddenly the rest of those “find the pattern” neurons start testing against previous patterns until finding the one that goes “Tiger!” It was key to survival in a world of increasing camouflage.
More, as always, here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_recognition_(psychology)
Edited to add survival notes as someone else helpfully pointed out!
Our addiction to patterns is the secret to human success. We dedicate a lot of our energy-hungry brain to figuring out and storing patterns.
Patterns allow us to store knowledge, first in song and later in writing. This allows us to learn from the people who came before us and then build upon that knowledge. This is how we develop both technology and society.
Patterns can backfire. The gamblers fallacy is us trying to apply patterns to something without one. Just because we lost many times doesn’t mean the next chance has a higher chance to win. Likewise, some beliefs can be wrongly associated with patterns. For example, sacrificing humans doesn’t help us with a better harvest.
Because the ones who were biologically predisposed to recognize them survive to have kids, who then inherit that trait.
As far as dancing goes, we’re designed to sync up in physical movements. When we walk in pairs, for example, our strides come into sync. When we have engaging conversations, our respiratory systems and even our heartbeats come into sync over time. That’s less about our big pattern making brains and more about our hormonal and central nervous systems.
At the extreme, in a large crowd for example, human beings can become so deeply entrained that they can act before impulses even make it to our frontal lobes. Durkheim referred to this as “collective effervescence.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_effervescence
Just to add some depth to what people are saying about humans being pattern seeking animals and our survival:
Humans used pattern recognition to remember animal migration, fish spawning, plant ripening, and other natural patterns. That allowed early humans to create a more diverse diet than other animals. If you depend on a small number of food sources, you are more likely to starve if a single source fails. Humans had a diverse diet and seasonal migration to maximize food sources.
What humans did that took this to the next level was linking sky patterns to seasonal food. There are abundant surviving calendars that mark sun and moon positions to land markers (mounds, monoliths, hills, etc). So humans could mark patterns and link them, teaching them to following generations. That is why patterns are so important in our evolution.
Patterns help us feel safe and maintain social order and connection. It’s why teachers teach with repetition. It’s also why sometimes we may ask for someone to repeat their question or statement so we can choose the appropriate response. It’s like priming the fight or flight response. Patterns let you know what you can ~relatively~ predict based on what you observe.
1) It comes naturally to humans to try to recognize a common pattern in words, symbols, numbers, shapes, etc
2) Once a known pattern is discovered or recognized by the subconscious mind, the brain seeks out confirmation of the pattern
3) After being consciously aware of the pattern occuring, every time that the recognition of that pattern is reinforced, your brain rewards you with a mild hit of neurologically pleasing chemicals, making you feel good about finding this pattern
5) When the pattern is disrupted, even if it’s not consciously noticed, the brain senses that the pattern is off and it creates a negative feedback; the feeling that ‘something is off’ may occur
8) Eventually the disruption in the pattern becomes large enough that it breaks past the subconscious to the conscious mind and the brain reacts in two ways – irritation that the pattern has been broken and some sense of relief in having find out what was ‘off’ about things
In the book, Reality for Atheists, the author explains how humans evolved the ability to recognize behavior patterns so we could emigrate north through the African desert together. We developed a hypersense for conspiracy (seeing pattens that aren’t there) so we could understand who was to be trusted by the group, and who wasn’t.
Purely speaking from experience, patterns make things more predictable. And there’s just something about knowing what’s about to happen is a comforting idea that I find myself pursuing
Brains (humans and otherwise) are pattern-based systems. That’s the primary (arguably ONLY) thing that brains do, and it’s the basis of everything that makes us who we are.
Specifically, brains store the relationships between observations and compare new observations to what we’ve already seen, and find commonalities. And we find patterns in the patterns, and patterns in the patterns of patterns, and so on, and we give these abstractions names like “concepts” and “trends” and “history” and “expectations” — but in the end it’s all patterns, because patterns are the basic building block of how we construct our understanding.
Patterns in art and nature and all that — it’s the patterns that we notice, because that’s how we work. There’s just as much randomness, just as much linearity or homogeneity, but it’s the patterns that catch our attention because we’ve got a brain doing the analysis, and brains deal in patterns.
We *like it* when we find patterns because that’s our brain’s basic feedback that we’re on the right track, so creating art or activities that embed some obvious patterns for people to find and identify is going to be very satisfying to engage with.
As for dancing, that’s an interesting special case. You can talk about the patterns in the music and all that, but that’s the part we’ve already covered. The OTHER interesting bit is movement. We like to synchronize our movements to sound, and we’re not the only ones. You’ve probably seen the beginnings of this in a few extremely-domestated animals like certain dogs, but they usually can’t dance worth crap and are mostly just playing along with the humans.
But birds — birds LOVE to dance to music, and they’re naturally good at it, and will do it on their own. But not *all* birds. What’s interesting is that the birds that dance to music share another trait with humans: they talk. Or rather, they can accurately reproduce sounds, just like us. There’s an odd parallel that seems to consistently hold that if you can teach an animal to talk (out loud, not sign language) then that animal will also enjoy dancing to music entirely independent of people.
Why? Donno. The common theory it has to do with the brain areas necessary to synchronize sound to vocal muscle movement also making us want to synchronous sound to other movement too. But there’s not enough science yet to say for certain.
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