UM 01.02 Pattern Recognition

BY DANIEL COMP | JANUARY 25, 2023

We are pattern recognizing beings. We learn by building on memories which form patterns. These eventually become habits. Some are good. Some are not. Some habits come from numerous and long-standing patterns. We drive across UM demonstrating some of our habits - the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors we learned from others. We see things from a menu created by popular notions, search results, and half-truths that might be top-ranked, and also be completely misleading. Understanding how we are 'gamed' and mislead by simple and complex patterns is one step in the journey to self awareness. It is certainly a means out of the UM chaos, rampant emotional triggering, and trending UM panic.

We have a 20 watt brain and an operating system that wants to conserve energy. That's a frightful combination. We usually skip the processing and jump right to a conclusion. Less effort, less energy, conservation... 100% wrong 50% of the time. Yep, a dreadful habit.

 

"Welcome back to another beautiful day in Scotomaville."

"Today we're gonna talk about pattern recognition or pattern seeking. It's a skill set that we develop as we grow up, and then it becomes an undoing. It becomes a liability. It actually becomes something that others get a handle on. They can use it against us because we have a 'bent' in our biology... to use as little of this 20 watts(motioning to the head) as possible and to take other people's recommendation and not do the research."

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RECOGNIZE LEADING HEADLINES and DIRECTIVES

Click the link and get a first impression of the banner image for this episode and book chapter:

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  • You will notice the single yellow dot far quicker than the abundant string of black dots to the left of it.
  • You will notice the missing vertical bar (circled) before you notice the soldiered row of bars to the left/right.

Architects regularly leverage this mental bias for finding fault (what's missing) in the built environment.

Who else does this?

  1. News (if it bleeds, it leads)
  2. Politicians (caustic twitter posts get all the attention)
  3. Children (the louder I cry, the more attention I get...)
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Challenge Your Personal Everest

The greatest expedition you will ever undertake is the journey to self-understanding, as the prize is not in discovering new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.

O·nus Pro·ban·di

"Onus probandi incumbit ei qui dicit, non ei qui negat" meaning: the burden of proof is on the claimant - not on the recipient!