Chicken hawks and Swiss Army knives

I recall a Tex Avery cartoon where the chicken hawk circles the hen house and when the hen spots the shadow of the hawk on the ground, she squawks the alert. Pattern recognition, in its most fundamental and life prolonging best. I think all creatures that still inhabit the planet are the ones that early on developed pattern recognition. And this early survival 'tool' has become the present Swiss Army knife, multi-functioning, from recognizing patterns on graph paper to recognizing a table as a table and a chair as a chair. Further the patterns that your eyes are now focused on, more than likely very tiny serif letters, patterns identified by most humans, yet patterns that convey meaning only to those that have memorized the language of English.