Saturday, December 15, 2007

Searching for Patterns

So I was watching a beautiful mind, intruging movie, but this post is not about that, its about what it got me thinking. Patterns.. everything around us is a pattern. In fact we have this tendency to find patterns in lfe behavioral, seasonal, regional... Patterns, trends, take language for instance we took some random shapes and assigned a meaning to their different combination and permutations.

Everything in life is a pattern, or else we make sure its a pattern, or we search for a pattern. Patterns are beautiful, they lend a kind of symmetry. Its a nature thing, trees, plants, flowers everything has a certain symmetry to it. At the basic level everything has the same pattern when we come down to it atoms, molecules, cells.

Why is there this need for searching patterns. I believe once we can tag a pattern we kind of know the meaning, it is predictable to certain level thereafter. Therefore it gives us a sense of security in knowing.. Cause we are always insecure with things we dont know and cannot predict.

But every discovery, invention, serendipity, accident requires to step out of the comfortable life of predictable patterns and look for new ones to give meaning and sense of knowing to the unknown anamolies and deduce new pattens

3 comments:

rahul said...

Talking about patterns what is even more interesting is the remarkable human ability to identify patterns :). Since you pointed about language being a pattern. An interesting conundrum is how are kids able to learn any kind of language depending on the kind of environment they're put in . ( An indian kid can learn japanese if brought up in japan. ) Even the most trivial thing like recognizing people's faces is so emmaculate in humans :) . I think the bigger puzzle is not to wonder why we keep searching for patterns but how can we find out and learn patterns with such high precision even in the presence of noise and uncertainly :).

ss said...

well i guess the reason we have to learn patterns is coz of evolution.. u know fire.. hot.. burns hand.. similarly good people with halo's around head bad ppl or pirates with eyepatch :D

Anonymous said...

Well written article.