Our brains recognise patterns unconsciously without thinking. This may explain a lot, for example that we see patterns where there are not any and perhaps also our tendency to confuse correlation with causation...

Human hippocampal and entorhinal neurons encode the temporal structure of experience - Nature

Single-neuron recordings from intracranial electrodes inserted into human brains for clinical reasons suggest that the temporal structure of human experience is encoded in human hippocampal and entorh...