The pattern-seeking machine

Let me take you back a few years. Quite a few years, to be precise. In 2007, I was in 9th grade and I wasn’t exactly what you’d call popular. Neither did I have any intention of being ‘popular’ - but I certainly wasn’t calling for the estrangement and bewildered looks I got either.

So we were enjoying German class. That is, I was. Most others in the room were more or less waiting for it to be over. Our teacher presented us with a poem. No further comment, she just read it out loud, let it linger in the air and asked, ‘What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear this?’

My hand shot up, as always. And as always, she waited a few moments to see if anyone else was participating (a futile attempt that year, most of the time). Finally, she nodded at me. ‘So what was the first thing you noticed?’ And I said, without hesitation: ‘The meter is regular.’

Silence. And then, roaring laughter, somewhere between incredibility and dismissal. Even my teacher laughed - but in her defense, she smiled at me and I knew it came from a place of respect. ‘That’s the first thing you notice?’, someone asked from the back.

Yup. Can’t help myself.

My brain has been a pattern-seeking machine ever since I can remember. In an attempt to categorize an overwhelming world, especially for a neurodivergent child, I used my IQ to find matches and correlations and other logical connections between things all day long. I knew on which step of the staircase my dad usually coughed when going downstairs. I could tell by the sounds of passing trains outside whether it was 1.08 pm or 1.21 pm (there are two at 1.21 pm and from different directions). And by the age of 15, I was first hired to proofread academic texts before publication because I was able to reliably detect double blanks in printed paperwork.

I love when things make sense. And since surprises are kind of an ambivalent thing for me, I also love being able to predict what’s happening. Especially in the realm of great unpredictability - human interaction.

Well, actually, human interaction isn’t that unpredictable, not even in extreme forms like violence (read Gavin de Becker). But it was hard for me to figure it out when I was young and unspoken social rules didn’t come intuitively to me. I remember the looks I got when I was playing cards with a few kids on a vacation and I helped myself to a second biscuit - as it turned out, it had been the last one and no one else had had more than one. I was vaguely aware of that but I hadn’t understood until that moment that this meant I wasn’t supposed to just take the final one. My parents had certainly raised me to be compassionate and forthcoming and I was definitely picking up on that but alas, the world continued to be confusing. All these expectations.

Finding patterns in people’s behavior, in license plates and price tags (I recently figured out which specific number on these printed labels from the butcher’s counter indicate how many customers the store has had that day) will be a live-long endeavor and helps a great deal when you’re very sick and unable to entertain any other distraction. It makes the world more manageable and turns everything into a real-life scientific study.

But as we all know, every study has its flaws. The patterns we see might just be the patterns we always saw, the patterns we want to see - or no patterns at all. And the confidence of your predictions, whether it’s about the number of cars you’re going to encounter on a familiar stretch of road, the response of a loved one to something you say or the amount of pain you will be in two hours from now - this confidence is heavily influenced by the accuracy of your past predictions, especially the high-stakes ones.

As of late, with the divorce and several other personal relationships falling apart, I realize I lost quite a bit of my confidence in my ability to categorize human behavior and to deduct accurate predictions from it. If asked again, I might even question whether that poem’s meter is actually one hundred percent regular. (I’m sure it was.)

There are many more tools I rely on these days to make sense of the world and navigate my own journey, not just pattern-seeking, but it’s still very important for me and I’m sharing this because beneath the obvious impact, drastic life changes and chronic illness also often influence our general ability to make sense of the world, which has vast consequences. Somehow, instinctively, we assume that we must have been fundamentally wrong about many things if we ended up in this painful place.

Well, at least that much can be said with confidence, deducted from patterns I’ve observed for a long time: Everyone can (and most will) end up in a very painful place at least once in their lives. And everyone’s predictions are flawed to an extent. While we don’t have to adopt the idea that we brought all this misery onto ourselves (a rather problematic thing to say, depending on the circumstances), we can still take the opportunity to overhaul our machines, you know, some oil, some tightening of screws, that kind of stuff. It doesn’t hurt to ask, ‘Maybe not all of the patterns I detected were accurate, were they?’

But just because our lives seem to fall apart all of a sudden, that doesn’t mean that every prediction, every network of logical connections we formed in our head (I often picture mine as neural networks or trees) was incorrect. I’m reminding myself that I haven’t been hit by any of the cars whose speed I calculated before crossing the street. I somehow made it through adulthood so far without breaking any major laws (I hope) or starting fist fights with people (I hate fist fights), despite the fact that I sometimes seem to read people ‘wrong’.

My pattern-seeking machine might be off sometimes, but not that far off. It might have led me into treacherous social waters sometimes, but it also guided me in making art, form long-lasting friendships and take care of myself when I realized I really needed to. I think it’s just time for an upgrade and I’m working on that now. And with time, I might be able to regain the confidence I had when I was 15 and all that mattered was a regular meter in a poem from a few hundred years ago.