We are pattern-matching machines. We do it so compulsively and automatically that we have the word "pareidolia" to talk about it, especially when we're doing it wrong. We have jigsaw puzzles, and logic problems, and games like chess or Go or poker, and sports where we analyze our opponents' habits.
When I worked at Danger, I was half the team working on the database layer of the service: a Perl XML-RPC server—not my choice, but it worked fine—that other services called into. We logged a lot of detail for each call, various elapsed times at different stages and such, in a simple format akin to what Etsy developed with statsd. This was a lot of logging, but we were able to watch logs fly by in a kind of soft focus, and have an intuitive sense of whether the system was healthy. The logging, 2-4 screenfuls per second was too fast to process consciously, but we would get a vibe to help us decide what to look at next. It was invaluable.
One day a mail carrier delivered a package, and we chatted a bit. The large Rottweiler puppy next door barked.
"Ooh. Rottweiler"
The dog barked again.
Ooh. Big one.
Me and log files
Mail carrier and dogs
You’ll never beat a man at his own trade