Oh, I could tell you a story about understanding breaking wave patterns against a beach. It’s not my story though. A friend of mine was in Hawaii on a beach, alone. He was watching the waves for hours, I guess. Finally (alone), he went in. He judged the waves just right, and managed to get a swim, and then delivered back to shore properly.
Later he found out that many swimmers had gotten in trouble at that beach, because if you don’t enter the waves just right, you’ll be in trouble.
This brings up an interesting point about where pattern recognition occurs in our brains. In my friends case, this was an unconcious thing that was understood physically in his body. Many patterns we seek to recognize can put us into trancelike states. To me, this suggests a different part of our brain—a non-linguistic part of our brain—is responsible for much of pattern recognition activities.