There are a few skills that are hard-wired into the brains of infants that are so fundamental, and so critical for survival, that they’re operative from the moment of birth — if not sooner. One of them is pattern recognition, which is how infants recognize their mother’s faces. Even the youngest child is capable of matching a new stimulus with an event that’s previously established in their memory, and alter their behavior accordingly. Of course animals do the same thing.
But a funny thing happened to pattern recognition, starting around the middle of the last century. Pattern recognition transformed from a fundamental feature of human psychology to something far more sinister. To paraphrase the author Steve Sailer, a “war on noticing” commenced. Over the past several decades, we have been told that we are not allowed to notice patterns of human behavior, and if we do…
