People talk about gut feelings, or knowing something in their soul. I see those feelings as part of the same spectrum but tuned differently for different events. There is the gut feeling of intuition, when something clicks before the mind can explain it. There is the stomach drop of deducing something terrible, when the pattern resolves into bad news. There is also the excitement of wondering or knowing what might come next, when you glimpse the edge of a new discovery.

  Pattern recognition has always been one of those things I don’t try to do, it just happens. Sometimes I literally see it with my eyes, like a structure or relationship clicking into place. Other times it shows up in my head after the fact, almost like a fluid picture forming later. There is also a feeling to it, a sense of rightness or wrongness, and that comes in faster than anything else. Deduction follows, but it is usually slower than the raw see and feel response.

  One of the clearest moments was during AEFC experimentation when I realized that metals of different kinds, under the right conditions, could carry a one wire AC voltage just by being around RF or magnetic fields. That observation changed how I looked at the coil interactions and harvesting process. In Magic the Gathering deck building, I tend to build by intuition. At first it seems chaotic, but after the fact I notice how strong the deck actually is and how the choices I made create surprising synergies. With people, I notice patterns in micro expressions, eye movement, body language, and overall vibe. Meeting someone for the first time, I would say I have a 95 percent chance of reading them accurately. It is not guessing so much as patterns stacking up so quickly that they just resolve into an answer.

  The same way of seeing plays out in bigger picture thinking. My theory of history, A Return to the Forgotten Future ( Not Public ), came from noticing holes in timelines, inconsistencies in what we are told, and recurring cycles of rise, collapse, and rediscovery. To me, history is not linear but recursive. The gaps are the pattern, and once you start seeing them it changes the way you think about technology, civilization, and human memory.

  I see patterns everywhere, all the time. Machines, people, systems, ideas, even in how information is framed or controlled. Someone once said I had a surprising level of awareness of what is happening around me at any given moment. For me it is natural, a mix of intuition, common sense, and what might not be so common.

  I think of it as both a gift and a skill that has been trained over years of paying attention, experimenting, and refusing to take things at face value. Everything has a pattern, right down to the smallest thing imaginable. Recognizing that feels like carrying around a map that other people cannot see until it is drawn out for them.

  Everything has a pattern down to the smallest conceivable thing and the largest as well. If you don’t see it, zoom in or out a little more. It is like micro and macro assessments of perception, and once you learn to shift your view the patterns reveal themselves everywhere. That is also what drives my projects here, like the AEFC, which are built on exploring the patterns hidden in energy, materials, and the world around us.

-Rhea Rae