The tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise
by Michael Shermer
Why do people see faces in nature, interpret dirt stains on the window as human figures, hear voices in the random noise generated by electronic devices and find conspiracies in the routine news? The most likely explanation is a phenomenon called the priming effect, which causes our brain and senses to be ready to interpret stimuli according to a predictable pattern. UFO enthusiasts see a face on Mars. Devout Christians see the Virgin Mary in the wing of a building. People who believe in the supernatural hear the dead speaking to them through a radio receiver. And conspiracy theorists believe the 11/XNUMX attacks were an inside job by the Bush administration. Is there a deeper and more absolute reason why people believe such strange things? There is such a reason. I call it "patterning", or the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise.
Traditionally, scientists consider stereotyping to be a type of perceptual error. A "type one error", i.e. false positive identification, occurs when we believe that something is real even though it is not (finding a pattern that does not exist). A "type two error", that is, a false negative identification, occurs when we believe that something is not real even though it is actually real (not recognizing an existing pattern, or "non-patterns"). In my book "How We Believe" (published by Times Books) I argued in 2000 that our minds are engines of belief: machines that evolution programmed to recognize patterns, connect the dots and create meaning from patterns we believe exist in nature. Sometimes point A is indeed related to point B, but sometimes it is not. When the dots are connected, we learn something new and valuable about the environment that helps us survive and reproduce. This process is called associative learning, and it is a fundamental process in animal behavior, from the humble worm C. elegans to the mammal Homo sapiens.
Unfortunately, our brains have not developed a recognition network to differentiate between real and simulated patterns. We do not have an error detector that regulates our pattern recognition engine. (And hence the need for science, with its self-correcting mechanisms, which are based on repeating experiments and peer review.) But apparently such misconceptions do not remove us from the gene pool and therefore no evolutionary selection works to remove them.
In an article published in September 2008 in the journal "Records of the Royal Society B", entitled: "The evolution of superstition and superstitious behavior", biologist Kevin R. Foster from Harvard University and biologist Hanna Koko from the University of Helsinki examined my theory using an evolutionary mathematical model. They showed that wherever the price of believing in the existence of a false pattern is lower than the price of refusing to believe in the existence of a true pattern, natural selection will favor the pattern. The researchers began to build their model using the equation pb>c, according to which the belief will take root when its price (c) is lower than the probability (p) of the profit (b). For example, the price of explaining that a rustling in the grass is a dangerous predator even though it is only the wind is not a high price, but explaining that a dangerous predator is only the wind may cost the animal his life.
The problem is that we are very bad at determining these probabilities. The price of propaganda rustling in the grass is a dangerous predator when in fact it is only the wind, therefore small compared to the opposite propaganda. Therefore, natural selection favored those who believe that most of the patterns are real.
Through a series of complicated equations that included additional stimuli (a breeze in the trees) and previous events (past experience in meetings with predators and with the wind), the authors of the article concluded that "the inability of individuals - human or otherwise - to determine the causal probabilities for all systems of events occurring around them You will force them to mix causal relationships with non-causal relationships. Hence the evolutionary explanation for superstitions is clear: natural selection will favor strategies that assume many false causal relationships in order to establish the relationships essential for survival and reproduction.
In support of their genetic selection model, Foster and Coco give the example that "predators avoid non-venomous snakes that masquerade as venomous species only in areas where the venomous species are common", and that even simple creatures "like the cells of the bacterium Escherichia coli will swim in the direction of the substance methyl-aspartame, which has no physiological effect, from An evolutionary adaptation to consuming real aspartame.”
Therefore, the meaning of patterned behaviors is that people believe in strange things due to the evolutionary need that developed in us to believe in strange things.
Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com) and the author of the book "Why People Believe Weird Things".
26 תגובות
Hi Michael, you are right, that you said that..but I only saw it after I wrote it. And I wrote this following the title of the article "The tendency to find..."
point:
Regarding responses 16 and 19:
In response 16 you said "Whoever says that we have a tendency to recognize patterns probably has no idea how a neural network works."
Maybe you meant something in the article, but that's not what you wrote.
What you wrote refers to everyone who claims that we have a tendency to recognize patterns and this includes, as mentioned, me as well.
point:
First of all - surely there is a mental action that is not related to pattern recognition.
The feeling of anger, joy, and pain are like that.
The mental action in which the brain commands the hand to rise is also like this.
Beyond that - the question deviates from the topic of the article.
When we talk about a tendency to recognize patterns, we mean something that can be measured.
Some people are better at spotting real patterns.
These people are successful as mathematicians and scientists.
The questions in the intelligence test are designed - in part - to measure exactly this ability.
All series questions (pictures and numbers) test the ability to recognize patterns.
There are, on the other hand, people whose pattern recognition has expanded in a morbid way to the point of not being able to distinguish between reality and imagination.
These are the people the article describes as suffering from stereotypes.
What is pattern recognition?
Is there a mental operation that is not related to "pattern recognition"?
Michael, I was not talking about you but about the author of the article.
In short, an article without a statement.
By the way - neural networks are especially good as a tool for pattern recognition.
point:
And what is this exit?
I understand how a neural network works and I have even built working neural networks.
I strongly argue that we have a tendency to recognize patterns.
And anyone who says that we have a tendency to recognize patterns probably has no idea how a neural network works.
point:
I suddenly noticed that you were talking about social conventions.
This is of course irrelevant.
Pattern recognition occurs in the brain. Sometimes the pattern is of something decided by social convention (such as writing) and sometimes the pattern is of something else (such as the moon, a human face, symmetry, a repeating chorus, rhythm, mother, signs of a heart attack, facial expressions, signs left by animals that passed by more and more)
point:
What you are saying now is true and….trivial.
In other words - the error is also in the mind and not in reality.
Nobody talked about anything else here.
In general, we are not talking about wrong patterns here, but about the wrong identification of patterns.
Identification is also by definition an action that takes place in the brain.
Hahahaha All nature and the universe are built on intelligent patterns.
Only creatures afflicted with pride bordering on severe scientific backwardness are unable to recognize a basic and fundamental fact that created them.
The writer's example is not appropriate because it involves a different mind.
I am not aiming for any hidden place.
My argument is simple, there are no patterns in nature, all patterns are created in our minds, therefore it is not possible to say that the pattern itself is wrong. Either they are all wrong or none of them are.
The error can only be attributed in relation to other things, such as social conventions.
point:
I don't understand what you are trying to do. After all, it is clear that the term "wrong" does not at all fit the things we do rightly.
If I recognize the letters you wrote and if my recognition corresponds to your intention, then there is no error here and to call it an error is an error.
There is a correct identification and there is an incorrect identification.
When someone sees a weather forecast balloon, the identification they make is more correct than if they see the same object as a UFO (a term that is a contradiction in itself because an object cannot be simultaneously unidentifiable and identified as an alien vehicle).
Anyone can make a mistake in identification but any reasonable person is able to recognize the level of certainty of their identification.
If you see a human face attached to a living human body, you recognize it with great certainty.
If you see them on a statue in a museum - here, too, the identification is largely certain.
If you recognize them as a huge structure on Mars that you cannot see except from a certain direction you should be more careful.
Likewise if you recognize facial patterns on the bathroom tiles (tiles that naturally get more looks than other tiles).
Evolution has instilled in us mechanisms that allow us to quickly identify common and vital patterns.
These mechanisms "fire" immediately (because many times an identification of this type requires an immediate response) but anyone who has been gifted by nature with a thought and who also has the time to activate it knows how to filter out the wrong identifications and stay only with the reasonable identifications (as the above implies - Part of the filtering is based on the identification of a wider pattern - a view from several directions, etc.).
Michael, every pattern we recognize is wrong in this sense.
Hi Michael, read what I wrote again..
The author seems to have distinguished between "real patterns" and not real ones, and in fact he claims that only real patterns should be given meaning.
And all in all I explained that there is no such thing as a real template and therefore it is meaningless (according to the author's claim).
The cool commenter:
Right.
I was going to mention this, but then I saw the response of Punka and I thought that there were more important things than this mention. I assume you are talking about this article:
https://www.hayadan.org.il/meta-beuty-2911082/
This relates to Raanan's words:
Everything should be in moderation.
When we talk about "patterns" here we are talking about the excessive expression (=> morbid) of our natural tendency to recognize patterns.
When is the tendency excessive? When the tendency is so strong that many times a pattern is "recognized" incorrectly.
but what? When the identification is wrong it is always wrong.
For example - it will never be correct to "identify" a statue of a man in the shape of the surface of Mars. This proved to be wrong and so it will remain.
In the same way - all the patterns that people associate with God if they are wrong once - they are always wrong.
The "good" distribution of the cases in which a pattern should be recognized versus the cases in which it should not be recognized is not determined by some kind of lottery but only by reality.
Discernment is a quality that is neither good nor bad. It depends on the situation.
There are situations in which you should be standard and there are situations in which you should be non-standard.
And so there are situations where belief in God pays off and other situations it doesn't.
The article reminds me of something Michael once wrote
point:
I don't understand this nihilism.
Are you planning suicide?
Surely things have meaning! We give them meaning!
For example - see it's a miracle - we manage to read your words.
This is because we attribute to the letters that you write the same meaning that you attribute to them and to a large extent - the same goes for the words, the syntax and the entire sentence.
you for example 🙂
(The anonymous user was me… sorry again, I was visiting the parents and forgot my username was not saved there)
Everything can be considered noise.
point,
Don't argue points... all he meant was the tendency of people to identify noises into shapes that are meaningful to the viewer, shapes that he recognizes and can "name". It does not mean shapes/patterns that have an important meaning in his life, but that have some meaning - that is, a defined shape: a face, a house, a dog, etc.
What is meaningful?
The fact that the author decided that something is significant for him (for example, science) does not mean that it has more meaning than that one who decided that he bows to a stone.
There is no real pattern in nature (and certainly not one that has meaning). Also the laws of physics, we live in a world where the laws of physics could have created us. And it is certainly arbitrary in relation to all the possible laws..therefore it has no meaning.