Recognizing Patterns

Let’s look at a simple example to illustrate the value of order and context. Here is a picture of the night sky of the Southern Hemisphere showing 15 stars. For most people, it is just a random placement of stars. If you were asked to put the stars in the correct locations on a blank page, you would probably find the task quite difficult.
Roll your mouse over the image to hide the stars.

However, if you knew that many of these stars form constellations in the sky, you would probably be able to remember where some of the stars belonged and how they were positioned relative to each other. That’s because you’ve conceptualized a way of grouping the stars so that they have more meaning than just random placements in the sky. You would also have a better chance of remembering how many stars there are because the groupings serve to establish a more manageable limit to the number of stars you need to remember. Roll your mouse over this next image to see a constellation map.