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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Just wanted to throw this in the mix. A video from Kurzgesagt on YouTube in this case about beauty, however it does briefly cover symmetry and patterns.
Michael shermer gives my favorite explanation for this. It makes the most sense to me, anyway.
[Type 1 vs Type 2 errors](https://youtu.be/1AjLmU0Sfu4), and how that shaped our evolution.
It’s really as simple as: if there weren’t patterns, how could you know anything? If everything in life was completely unique, and happened only once, every event totally different from every other event, it would all seem random and unknowable. Patterns are the only way we can do any better than random chance with life!
It’s an evolutionary trait. We are human, (by our standards) the intelligent and dominant species of our planet, because natural selection rewarded the select few of our very distant ancestors who were good at noticing patterns.
Amongst many other benefits, it allowed us to recognise seasons, knowing when to it preserve food for the coming winter, for example
Recognizing patterns is what has helped us to survive as a species. Recognizing that plants flourish after rain leads to irrigation and farming, things like that
The easiest way I can describe it is. If you see a pattern in the bushes. Our brains have adapted to two thoughts. Can I eat that, or can that eat me.
Because the human brain is a pattern recognition engine. It seeks out patterns that it recognizes and avoids patterns that it doesn’t recognize.
We are descendants of the small upright walking apes in Africa that could distinguish the pattern of the sound of the footfalls of a Big Cat in the tall grass from the pattern of the rustling of the grass caused by a breeze.
We are stuck with a thing for patterns because they have real survival value.
Dude you’re in a bar making a reddit post, just put down your phone and enjoy the moment lol
Our ancestors who weren’t didn’t live long enough to reproduce. Or random chance. It’s about 50/50
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