Pattern Recognition

Role

Pattern recognition is what distinguishes the expert from the novice in every creative domain — with the chess grandmaster not calculating more positions than the novice but recognizing more meaningful patterns that reduce the search space, and with the highly creative person not working harder than the less creative but perceiving more structural connections in their experience that provide more raw material for synthesis. The systematic development of pattern recognition capacity — across scientific, historical, social, aesthetic, and natural domains — is the perceptual training that most directly expands the creative connection-making ability, because connections can only be made between patterns that have been perceived, and patterns can only be perceived by a mind that has been trained to look for them.