Understanding How the Mind Recognizes Patterns, Eating Oden

The human mind is very good at recognizing patterns, which is why we can see floating rabbits when we look at clouds in the sky, or little bears and big dippers when we gaze up at the stars. Pattern recognition is quite important when learning a foreign language, of course, and one of the many skills your brain must acquire is the ability to make educated guesses about meaning that isn’t clearly understood based on a few clues. Kind of like the time I was “randomly” picked to conduct a symphony playing Beethoven’s 5th, but when I got up on stage, I didn’t understand the questions the MC asked me, forcing me to make a guess about what she would likely have said and reply accordingly, all while being watched by a few hundred people. One thing I’ve noticed is that when the brain encounters new information, it tries to break it into familiar chunks like a computer might, but if the the information is totally alien, like an unfamiliar word or phrase of Japanese, the brain can have trouble even registering it, as if it’d heard static. Alternately, the brain may try to force unfamiliar words into similar-sounding holes, like the first time I heard the –san name suffix and was sure it means “song” because that’s what my brain kept insisting. Today we’re posting a rather cool sake bottle set that features the various ingredients of the traditional Japanese soup oden (oh-DEN), like tofu, boiled eggs and squid (aside: I actually married my wife partially because her mother’s oden was so good). Because oden isn’t very familiar to people outside Japan, however, the term might just conjure up images of the famous Norse god, despite there being no relation between the two whatsoever. Does your brain have trouble with new or unfamiliar concepts like this?