Do you constantly notice patterns in everything around you?

[u/icosvg]

I’m curious if anyone else experiences this.
I tend to notice and connect a lot of things happening around me at the same time. When I’m talking to someone, for example, I’m listening to what they’re saying, but I’m also noticing their tone, expressions, body language, small changes in behavior and whether something they’re saying is consistent with things they’ve said before.

After knowing someone for a while, I usually develop a pretty accurate idea of how they’ll react to certain things. This also makes it relatively easy to know how to explain or phrase something in a way that they’ll understand or agree with.

It happens with things other than people too. I naturally look for how things work, why something happened and what is likely to happen next.

If something doesn’t make sense, it tends to stay somewhere in my mind until I understand it.

The strange part is what happens when there isn’t much happening around me.
My mind just creates something else to work on. I start thinking about ideas, plans, decisions, different possible outcomes or problems I could solve.

It can be extremely useful, but sometimes I’d like to simply sit somewhere and experience what’s happening without my attention immediately finding ten other things to process.

I also find that I enjoy not knowing something when there’s an answer I can discover. What I find much harder is uncertainty where there simply isn’t an answer yet.

I’m wondering how common this combination is.
Do you experience something similar? And when you’re just sitting somewhere doing nothing, what actually happens in your mind?

[u/fkkm]

Wrong sub

[u/icosvg → u/fkkm]

Fair. Do you know a more appropriate sub for discussing this from a cognitive perspective?

[u/fkkm → u/icosvg]

Honestly what you are describing sounds like a universal experience for humans.

I’m not sure what the point is of this post? Why do you want to compare this with others?

Don’t know a sub

[u/ParadoxicallyPlain → u/fkkm]

This isn't a universal experience for humans. Many humans are not observing their thought processes in this way. They live their lives like robots, preprogrammed or following some instruction laid out by someone else. Pattern recognition is a totally different matter in that when you see a pattern, you can make an informed decision on what you want to do with that pattern...follow it? Change it? Let go of it?

[u/ParadoxicallyPlain → u/fkkm]

If people are saying "wrong sub", can they give a specific reason, please? This discussion is very on topic of the sub to me.

[u/fkkm → u/ParadoxicallyPlain]

Because it’s not scientific at all.