Why Your Brain Sees Patterns Everywhere
There’s, apparently, a prophet on the internet who predicted the hantavirus outbreak.
In 2022, they posted eleven words: “2023: Corona ended. 2026: Hantavirus.” Then, as if that was quite enough for one lifetime, they followed it with three posts about nothing in particular.
The account has 406,500 likes, the account holder has called themselves Soothsayer, and the comments call this person a time traveller. They haven’t posted since, which either adds to the credibility or suggests they forgot their password, but no one seems especially concerned about which it is.
I wasn’t among the 406,500. I read about the tweet in a news article and had to actively stop myself from googling a virus I already knew wasn’t another Covid. Which says something, I think, about the difference between not believing in prophets and being entirely unaffected by them.
But the interesting question isn’t whether you believe in prophets. It’s why, even knowing better the story lands at all. And the answer to that one starts quite a long way back.
The patterns started long ago
Your brain has been spotting patterns since before you were born and it applies that instinct everywhere. In the news you read, the shape of a difficult week, the way someone responds to you, and the story you have come to tell about who you are.
Some of those patterns persist and some don’t, but the ones about ‘you’ tend to last, whether they’re right or not.
I’ve done this my whole life. Someone pops into my mind, often someone I haven’t spoken to in years, and then they call. Even knowing how easily we build stories from the thinnest evidence, there is still a moment where I think, that cannot be coincidence.
There’s a name for what your brain does with patterns. In fact, there are two.
The version that shows up in schizophrenia, where everything feels connected, nothing feels random, and there is a powerful and unshakeable sense that the universe is arranging events specifically around you, is called apophenia. Klaus Conrad named it in the 1950s, which was arguably unnecessary given that this is fairly self-evident in schizophrenia, but he named it anyway.
The everyday version, the one the rest of us are doing without any diagnosis to show for it, got its own word later, patternicity, and the honest answer is that we’re all doing the same thing, just at different volumes.
For most of human history, spotting a pattern fast and acting on it before you had all the evidence was the difference between being alive and not. The brain learned this a very long time ago. If the rustle in the bushes turns out to be nothing, you’ve lost a bit of time. If it isn’t, and you ignored it, the cost is considerably higher. So the brain got very good at patterns and never quite got around to updating its settings for a world where the predator is a negative comment from someone you've never met.
It keeps doing it, whether you want it to or not. Which leaves you in a slightly awkward position, because the part of you trying to make sense of things is the same part joining them up in the first place.
Building a narrative
I have a friend who, if two bad things happen before noon, has identified a pattern.
Last month she was running late because one of her children had forgotten something and they had to turn back. This made her miss her dentist appointment, which was already a rescheduled appointment, already a saga, the chipped tooth having arrived on what she described as one of the worst days she’d had in recent memory. Then she came out to find a parking ticket on the car. Completely unjust, she felt strongly, despite technically being parked under a no parking sign.
By the time she called me she had assembled these three events into a coherent narrative in which the universe was specifically and deliberately targeting her, and had been for some time, and this was clearly going to be one of those weeks. I have known this woman for twenty years. I have known this woman for twenty years and I could not begin to count the number of times I have watched her do this. I listened carefully and said nothing, because some patterns are not worth interrupting.
I asked what had been forgotten and she said a water bottle, which feels like quite a lot to ask of a water bottle. Her brain was doing exactly what brains do, taking three unrelated moments and turning them into something that made sense of her day.
The alarm got stuck on
For most of us, Covid arrived so gradually that by the time we realised nothing felt straightforwardly fine anymore, we couldn’t remember what straightforwardly fine had felt like.
I was supporting ICU consultants at the time, on Zoom, from my home office, nowhere near any of it. These were people deciding, sometimes daily, whether to turn off one patient’s ventilator so another could use it. Who lived and who died. The opposite of everything that had brought them into medicine. I thought about that a lot, sitting at my desk in the same house I’d been sitting in for months, watching the same headlines scroll past. My brain had no idea what to do with the distance between their reality and mine, so it did what it always does. It kept looking for the rustle in the bushes.
Research since then suggests that prolonged exposure to a real threat can leave the brain’s alarm system a little too good at its job long after the danger has passed. The radar stays sensitive, so when something vaguely similar comes along, it starts chiming in unbidden. Psychologist Steven Stosny called it ‘headline stress disorder’, the body reacting to alarming news as though it is not merely news, but an actual event happening to you, right now.
Your story
But the prophet and the pandemic are just the visible version of what your brain does with patterns. It’s been doing the same thing to you, about you, for much longer.
The brain’s desire to find patterns starts as early as in the womb. Not in the most sophisticated of ways at first, but gradually it builds stories about you through finding patterns about how you experience the world and how the world seems to respond to you.
Over time those stories can sound like I’m not very good at this, or things don’t quite work out for me, or the one that’s stopped feeling like a story entirely, I always end up here.
The evidence doesn’t have to amount to much. A water bottle, a missed appointment and a parking ticket was enough to convince my friend the universe was after her. And that’s just the external version.
The stories we build about ourselves can start from even less. Perhaps a mean boy at school said your artwork looked like a mess and that same day a teacher said your classmate was really amazing at art, and you concluded that must mean you were not. Or you tried to add something up as a child in front of a family friend but were getting muddled up, and they said, never mind, we can’t all be good at maths, and you decided that combined with your 6 out of 10 on your last maths test, when you normally got a 9 out of 10, that actually you weren’t very good at maths after all. Just a few data points make a pattern and a conclusion is formed.
Interestingly, the same brain that built a case against you from a bad maths test is also the one responsible for every genuine leap of human insight. Every person who ever walked into a room and saw something nobody else had seen, who made a connection that shouldn’t have been obvious but was, who followed a hunch that turned out to change everything, that was this. The pattern-finding that misfires on parking tickets and childhood art classes is the same thing that makes certain people see around corners. It just fires, constantly, on everything it encounters, the parking tickets and the paradigm shifts alike. What it can’t do is tell you which is which.
Why the people like the prophet
Knowing, even if it’s knowing the worst, is a far more comfortable state for the brain to be in than not knowing. We are wired, very deeply, to prefer a wrong answer to an open question, which is why 406,500 people found a stranger on the internet and made them a prophet.
Most of us who didn’t ‘like’ or even know about the tweet still felt something when the hantavirus story broke. What we were actually hearing was ‘a virus, a death toll, health authorities in emergency mode’. A brain that had spent considerable time learning that this kind of thing is real, and that nobody saw it coming last time, was always going to struggle to hear the reassurance over the alarm.
I know all of this, yet have had to actively stop myself from googling it several times, choosing instead to trust the doctors who say this isn’t another Covid. This feels very much like an act of willpower and discipline rather than the obvious response of a rational adult. But thinking it through for this piece has made me feel less smirky, if that’s even a word, about the 406,500 brains who want a prophet.
Why any of this matters
Your brain wrote a story about you before you had enough evidence to write it accurately. It’s been defending that story ever since, keeping the confirming details, setting the contradicting ones aside, finding new evidence to support what it already believes, and never once flagging that this is what it’s doing.
The soothsayer remains unavailable for comment.
What to actually do with this
1. Notice the pattern before you trust it. Next time you find yourself thinking “this is just how things go for me” or “this always happens” pause. Ask how many data points you’re actually working from and whether any of them are actually facts. A water bottle, a missed appointment and a parking ticket is not a pattern.
2. Trace it back. Find one story you carry about yourself e.g. I’m not someone who gets things right or I’m someone things don’t quite work out for. Ask when you first decided that and what the evidence actually was. Chances are you were quite young and working with very little.
3. Ask the question. When something confirms what you already believe about yourself whether it’s good or bad, ask: is this something I’ve identified, or something I needed to find? The brain will not ask this on your behalf, that part is down to you.
Links:
Media overload is hurting our mental health. Here are ways to manage headline stress
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/11/strain-media-overload
Overcoming Headline Stress Disorder
Apophenia
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/apophenia
Patternicity: Finding Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless Noise
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/patternicity-finding-meaningful-patterns/
