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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Looking in the brain, there are two big things that draw us to patterns: Memory and Analysis.
For memory, humans have developed very large amounts of storage. Think of it like a library compared to the singular books worth of knowledge other animals have. Then analysis is just our ability to ask why. So while other animals look at a piece of food and think, “There’s food here,” humans see the food and think, “How did that get there?”
This is best described by the teach a man to fish phrase. If an animal develops to find food, they will generally survive, but if an animal develops to make food, they will thrive.
The memory and analysis work together really well because the more we analyze, the more information we store in our memory. Then when we store more in our memory, we discover more patterns.
A more anecdotal example is feeding my cat. I’ve found if I hold a piece of meat in front of him then move my other hand around, he’ll keep his attention on the meat. This is because he is built to focus on the basic aspects of survival. But if I did the same to you, you would get distracted by my waving hand because you’re built to look at more than just a couple things.
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