The Four Lenses of Innovation: A Power Tool for Creative Thinking

The pattern-recognition principle

There’s another reason why our creative senses tend to become dulled as we get older—this time a neurological one. It has to do with the way we think.

At its very essence, all human thought is based on patterns. Inventor Ray Kurzweil, in his book How to Create a Mind, describes the neocortex structure of the brain, which is the area where we do our hierarchical thinking, as “a large pattern recognizer.”¹ We use this innate ability of pattern recognition all the time, without even being aware of it, to identify faces, forms, voices, language, words, musical melodies, images, stories, concepts, and so on. All of these things are patterns.

As we grow up, get an education, and gain experience in a particular line of work, the brain organizes whole bundles of information into fixed patterns known as scripts, frames, or schemata, which we store in our memories for rapid access and use. It is these cognitive maps that enable us to make sense of our world every day without too much mental effort, because they allow us to automatically recognize and even predict familiar patterns—in objects or situations—while we concentrate most of our brain’s processing capacity on tasks that seem more important.

In effect, this is how the mind saves energy. If it were not the case, we would literally be overwhelmed by everything that is going on around us all the time. Every piece of sensory information would be like a completely new and potentially bewildering experience ...