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?
In: 221
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.
Latest Answers