Patterns.

Perhaps what most distinguishes us humans from the rest of the animal kingdom is our ravenous desire to find structure in the information we pick up in the world. We cannot help actively searching for patterns — any hook in the data that will aid our performance and understanding. We constantly look for regularities in every facet of our lives, and there are few limits to what we can learn and improve on as we make these discoveries. 

Read the rest at Brain Pickings.

Get a copy of Daniel Bor's book, The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning, here.

Bor's site is here.