Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to I do wonder sometimes...

A feature, or a bug?
Tom Brosz — (archived)

The human brain evolved over a million years to be a thinking, reasoning instrument. Part of the hardware for this is the ability to see patterns, a feature of the primate brain that long preceded intelligence (stripes in the grass? No, tiger!), but is required for intelligence. This deeply hard-wired machinery is why you can see a dog in the picture below.

http://www.umich.edu/~newsinfo/MT/94/Jun94/dalmat.gif


Of course, more common than the dog illusion is the phenomonon of "seeing" pictures in random images. How many of us have looked at a spattered tile floor, or the grain on a door, and picked out an image that, once seen, doesn't go away easily?

Many optical illusions are the result of the mind forcing something into a pattern that doesn't have a pattern in reality.

It isn't just visual. Thinking works this way, too. To oversimplify, the human mind is allergic to chaos, and will force a pattern on the world around it if it can't find one already there. In a world defined by chaotic and random events, this gets interesting.

My theory is that a LOT of human history, including most religions, and an unfortunate tendency toward regimented societies, is a result of this. Small wonder the idea of an unregulated free market gets such a difficult reception. Who's RUNNING things?

In your particular situation, Lee, I suspect the synchronicity is your brain snapping to a connection of events and bringing it to the forefront of your consciousness while thousands of events that don't seem to connect fade into the background. Everybody notices when you hear a name on the radio, and see it written on a billboard next to the road. Nobody notices the millions of times the name and board don't match.

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