After discussing whether Pamela Anderson is predator or prey (with R. on “Familiar Stranger” comments, below), I got thinking about how and why we recognize patterns (faces, expressions, etc.).
Here’re a handful of my condensed thoughts on the matter--or, my inital attempts to make a pattern out of the swirl stirred up in my brain.
1. It serves human survival (like, on the savannah where we evolved) to be able to recognize patterns:
zebra zebra zebra zebra
zebra zebra zebra zebra
zebra zebra lion zebra
zebra zebra zebra zebra
2. Behaviors that increase payoffs (such as food) and decrease cost (say, blood loss) we often experience as pleasure, as play.
Surprise, variation, and practice hone our pattern recognition skills.
Thus, we enjoy games based on pattern recognition:
Duck, duck, goose. (Or gray duck.)
1, 3, 5, 7…
3. Storytelling, which serves social bonding (and hence increases payoffs), also works with pattern recognition:
husband
wife
lover
4. When the pattern games get more complex and less easy fun (bigger payoffs, bigger costs), we call them something else.
For instance, the Olympics, calculus, literature:
husband
wife
lover
train
5. The less immediately recognizeable the patterns are (or the less equipped we are to read them), the more likely we are to find them threatening. Lion? Zebra?
And that's why some ill-equipped people don't like Pamela Anderson to read academic books while she wears a bikini.
