English to Russian Medical Psychology

Context:

Are you saying that we learn to navigate the world by recognizing patterns?

Yes and no. The fundamental problem that your brain evolved to deal with is uncertainty—the ambiguity of information. Information doesn’t tell you about itself; it doesn’t tell us what to do. So the first thing the brain does when you look at an image is it finds the pattern, which is nothing other than a statistical relationship. The pattern by itself is meaningless in the same way that the image you are looking at is meaningless, because you have no idea what it is, nor does it come with instructions about what to do. But then when you interact with the world, you generate either a good behavior, such as staying alive, or a bad behavior, such as dying. And your brain associates the behavioral value with the pattern. It’s the behavioral value that you see. Or it could be the behavioral value that your ancestors saw before you. As humans, we encode our cultural history as well as our evolutionary history.