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Patternicity

January 6, 2009

Patternicity,
The tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise.

I recently read an article by Michael Shermer where he coined the term Patternicity. The article is basically about why people see faces in nature, interpret window stains as human figures, hear voices in random sounds, find conspiracies in the daily news, see faces on Mars, the Virgin Mary on the side of a building, or other such things that you read about or experience almost daily.

Evolution gave us this ability. Back in the day, when we were walking around with clubs and wearing bear skins, the guy that didn't instantly recognize the pattern of a tiger, bear, or other such large carnivore moving in the bushes was soon lunch, breakfast, or dinner for said carnivore. So over a few thousand years, we humans became pretty good at Patternicity. We benefited greatly, and survived more often, from being a little overcautious and having this pattern recognition ability alert us a little too often with false alerts when the bear was not in the bushs, than having it not go off when the bear was actually in the bushes.

The downside to this ability is that the circuitry is hardwired into our brains and continues to analyze all the various inputs (sight, sound, touch, smell, etc.) to find patterns. So no, that's not really the Mona Lisa on your breakfast toast, it just looks like it.

Patternicity is not just for visual inputs; it works for all kinds of events and experiences. According to Shermer - "I argue that our brains are belief engines: evolved pattern-recognition machines that connect the dots and create meaning out of the patterns that we think we see in nature. Sometimes A really is connected to B; sometimes it is not."

Our brains put things together faster than we can actually think about the events around us. Otherwise we would have all been eaten and would not have survived as a species. The next time you jump out of bed when a spider crawls up on top of your pillow, remind yourself that you didn't stop to think, you just grabbed something and beat the stuffing out of your pillow while your spouse looked at you like you'd gone nuts!

It's not only fear based either. I can now explain to my wife why I occasionally (very, very rarely) turn my head towards an attractive female: millions of years of evolution that favored natural selection of causal associations are essential to survival and reproduction of the human species. Ok, so end the end its back to the fear based thing as she whacks me over the head!

So, you may be saying to yourself, what exactly does this have to do with marketing and Internet Business. To which I am going to say: everything!

Even my son, who is almost four years old, gets it. He was riding with me tonight and asked me if I saw a sign (billboard) about a truck. I did not, but he then proceeded to ask me if everyone looked as signs with red on them. So there it is: put the right patterns in your advertising materials and you have people latterly stopping in their tracks to look, or put the wrong patterns and no one even reads a word of it.

But how do you know what works and what doesn't? Some of it is research and experience, and some of it is testing. But once you understand the fact that when someone looks at your sales page, there's a microsecond of time in which their brain analyzes the page for patterns, you're a light year ahead of someone who doesn't. If the pattern recognition returned a favorable response, they'll start to read it. Even once they start to read it, the pattern recognition engine is running in the background, it says, "this is good", "this is B.S", "I need this", or "turn the page". If your copy has long paragraphs it says "skip to the next paragraph, I easily bored and nothing here is important".

Until next time,
Fred

About the Author

Fred Black is an experienced online business operator, programmer, web site developer, father, husband, musician, and songwriter. Visit his Internet Business Blog at: http://www.pqInternet.com.

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Posted by Fred on January 6, 2009 | Printer-Friendly

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Comments:

From: Lynn Sheldon

Hi,

Just read the article....evolution didn't do anything. It's only purpose is to turn people from the living God.

I thought I was hard wired to sin, then Christ broke through and showed me I am not. He can set us free.

However, this is your blog...but I would have you consider one thing...if it's 1 over 50 zeros to make one dna by chance...how big of chance would it be to make enough dna by chance, in each body that strings 600 times from the earth to the sun.

I don't look at the outside and say, yep, we evolved, I look at the inside and say, there had to be a designer for that much dna could never happen by chance.

Lynn
Posted by Lynn Sheldon on January 7, 2009 6:57 AM
From Fred...

Lynn;
You're shooting at the home team!
This is NOT a creationist vs. evolutionist article... I too have trouble with the "we started out as one cell critters and ended up human" theory of evolutionists, however, the type of evolution I refer to in this article IS a fact. You can see it with your own eyes. Evolution of the fittest, not fish turning into man. The caveman with the fastest reflexes and better pattern recognition abilities survived to have little cave-babies vs. the slower caveman that was lunch for a lion before he could have children.

Posted by Fred Black on January 7, 2009 8:02 AM
From: Ryan Healy

When somebody sees your sales letter, you really do have only a split second to get their attention. Malcolm Gladwell talks a lot about how fast we make decisions in Blink. It's a good read.

Also, perhaps "adaptation" is a better word for what you're describing, Fred? The words "evolve" and "evolution" are kind of nebulous and can mean different things to different people.
Posted by Ryan Healy on January 8, 2009 11:54 AM
From: Web Design Seattle

This applies to almost everything in life, including web site design. As stated about us humans, "there's a microsecond of time in which their brain analyzes the page for patterns". This is especially true on the web where the wrong appearance of a web page can cause a visitor to quickly click away, regardless of the quality of the content. Great post!
Posted by Web Design Seattle on January 8, 2009 6:13 PM
From: david

Hi Fred,
Noticing that the last few posts I make are not being posted - what's up?
I actually write intelligent comments that add relevent content to your site. I mentioned I was doing well with keywords like website business and website businesses using some of your suggestions and posting no no follow links here.
Are you black balling me now?
David Fairley
President websiteproperties.com
PS I have invited you to blog about my site and add yourself as an affiliate - we specialize in selling established profitable websites

Posted by david on January 12, 2009 9:59 PM
From Fred...

David - no, I'm not blackballing you. I seem to recall approving comments from you before and I remember your invite - I've not had time to check it out. If you've left comments that were not approved then it's likely that they were flagged as spam. I used to have time to occasionally look at the spam flagged comments but it's getting to the point that I don't now, plus Akismet does a pretty good job at figuring out what's spam and what's not.
Posted by Fred Black on January 12, 2009 11:58 PM