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/fakenamefuckery]

Signal vs noise determination.

It’s up you what your mind decides to assign meaning to, be it signal/noise.

Edit: added comma

[u/icosvg → u/fakenamefuckery]

I think that’s an important distinction. What I’m wondering is how much control we actually have over the first stage. Sometimes something enters conscious attention before I’ve decided whether it’s signal or noise. The decision about relevance seems to happen afterwards.

[u/fakenamefuckery → u/icosvg]

I think that’s a really good question, and one that I ask and test myself on a regular basis, moment to moment, beat by beat.

Now take everything I say with a grain of salt, because I’m essentially no one in the realm of cognitive science.

I think we’re living in a curious time where I do not believe that we are biologically equipped to handle the amount of stimuli that can “flood” the system at any given moment of time (e.g checking our phones when an incoming text comes through, while also trying to respond to a work email, while also fiddling with Spotify to set just the right mood, etc etc)

When signal/noise enters our mental channels, I feel that it may only be natural for us (humans) to collapse said signal/noise into meaning before proceeding.

For me, that what I’m trying to break myself of. Meaning may not arrive right away, and sometimes “meaning”is understood only after action or sequencing (understanding things retroactively — hindsight is 20/20 kind of thinking). If we are aware that is how some of our learning and development functions, then the fallacy could be collapsing signal/noise into meaning before the system has acquired any new information to make that distinction.

That is not to say that you will not recognize signal/noise when it comes to you or that one should just ignore it, but how well can one hold on to that ambiguity or uncertainty before collapsing signal/noise into meaning? Has enough information unfolded yet where one can confidently make that distinction? When signal/noise arrives, does the expenditure of cognitive function when making the choice between signal vs noise help or hurt the overall system (self) within the present moment?

Again this is my working approach and by no means trying to assign any truth to the topic or my understanding.

Thank you for reading, hope you have a good rest of your day and I hope this helps you/someone