Why A Journal for Patterns Recognised?

Put your fingers on your closed eyelids and press gently: you can 'see' in the dark. We can look at a stone or a wall and observe what Leonardo da Vinci described as: "several things like landscapes, battles, clouds, uncommon attitudes, humorous faces, draperies, &c. Out of this confused mass of objects, the mind will be furnished with abundance of designs and subjects perfectly new". Pattern recognition is a subject of huge importance. Nobody is sure how big exactly. Our minds are constantly involved in the unintentional bringing forth of patterns, even, as the sensory deprivation tank shows, without stimulus. It was Samuel Taylor Coleridge who famously identified this ability to make something out of nothing as the source behind 'imagination' as opposed to mere 'fancy'; a distinction between copying existing patterns a little different and recognizing entirely new ones.

By repairing and augmenting the senses, man has always sought to create new tools to improve the ability to recognise patterns. Science introduced spectacles, telescopes, microscopes, x-rays. and statistics are scientific examples of such tools; altered states, dream interpretation, automatism, the cut-up and the dream machine are just a small collection of fringe methods to recognise patterns different.