I recently emailed my cousin when I ran across a Web page mentioning the man whom I thought was our grandfather’s business partner in a Tulsa, Oklahoma, menswear store.
No, she said, our grandfather had been the manager but never a partner.
Once again, if I were trying to write a memoir based on my own memories, I would get another detail wrong.
And that is the problem: Our memories are rigged.
We don’t remember what happens, but we let other, archetypal stories shape our memories.
And, as this brief NPR piece also points out, we see patterns where there are none.
I did learn that much as a young guy when I got a job servicing slot machines in a variety of logger bars and VFW halls in western Oregon.
People always thought they saw patterns: “That machine is ready to pay out.”
Nope, every spin is a fresh universe, so to speak.
But if people really understood probabilities, state lotteries would go bust.
But we also discern patterns in contexts in which patterns do exist.
I, for one, attribute our pattern recognition abilities to evolving under threats of predation and requirements to travel to garner recognizable and reliable food stuffs. Looks like Eagle–Hide! Looks like tasty root or rib–Eat!
Also, our ancestors looked at chunks of flint and foresaw their inner tools…
Sure, pattern recognition is useful in many ways, but the argument is that we depend to much on it and see patterns that are not there.
Much of esoteric thought involves claims about patterns, in a broad sense. What is astrology or the Tree of Life but a set of patterns that the skeptic would say are imaginary?