“It comes back to the issue of overinterpretation. Human cognition is geared toward finding patterns; that’s what we do, and we do it well. As infants, we track the changing conditional probabilities of sounds in human speech, which allows us to learn where the boundaries are between words. As children we learn new words at a rate of several per day. We hear the patterns in music, see the objects in images, understand the logic of a story in a sequence of sentences. We can’t help ourselves. We even do it when it isn’t appropriate. Sure, we learn to recognize the faces of our family members and our friends. But we also see faces where there aren’t any, in the moon, in clouds. We see causality where there is only coincidence—when a supplicant’s prayer is answered, or when the rain dance is followed by rain. And we hear coherent language use where there are only snippets of canned text.”