Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy blog posted recently about how our brains tend to think that random things aren’t so very random. This motivates us to play the lottery, believe in ghosts, and occasionally see the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich.

The basic mechanism is that the brain is wired to see patterns. This is behavior that even the most powerful computers ever built cannot yet come close to emulating. And while it sometimes leads us to silly things such as a determination that we saw Elvis at the Kwik-Mart, it is also, and far more usefully, the basis of abstract thought. It is our ability to find common threads and patterns that allows us to encapsulate those patterns as concepts or categories, and then use that abstraction to apply our experience and knowledge to new and novel situations. It is that capability which is at the root of all our “intelligence”.

Keep this in mind when someone makes fun of you for finding faces in your flapjacks or seeing dragons in the clouds. You’re just exercising those crucial mental tools. But as Phil suggests in his post, it’s also important to recognize that we can be fooled. We always tend to reach just beyond our grasp, seeking patterns out of randomness. Sometimes those patterns yield useful abstractions. But often they are just the ghost of Elvis blowing through.