On pattern recognition, the neurodivergent mind, and the strange comfort of a universe that repeats itself.

A hurricane and a sunflower walk into a room.

I’m only half joking. The spiral pattern that organizes a hurricane — that vast, spinning architecture of wind and pressure — is mathematically identical to the arrangement of seeds at the center of a sunflower. Both follow the Fibonacci sequence. Both are solving, in their own way, the same problem: how to pack the most into the least space, how to move efficiently through a resistant medium, how to be as effective as possible given the constraints of physics.

My brain noticed this connection before I had a name for it. Before I knew what Fibonacci was. Before I understood that what I was doing had a word — pattern recognition — or that not everyone’s mind worked this way.

I just knew that certain things felt like the same thing. And I couldn’t stop looking for them.

The Mind That Connects Dots Across Everything

There is a particular quality of neurodivergent attention that doesn’t get talked about enough: the tendency to notice structural similarities across completely unrelated domains.

A conversation has a rhythm. That rhythm resembles the oscillation of a pendulum. The pendulum’s motion can be described by the same equation that describes the behavior of certain electrical circuits. The electrical circuit resembles, in its feedback loops, the way a nervous system regulates itself. The nervous system’s self-regulation mirrors the homeostatic processes of ecosystems.

This is not a metaphor. These are structural homologies — real mathematical relationships between systems that, on the surface, have nothing to do with each other. The universe uses a surprisingly small number of patterns to build an enormous variety of things.

Neurodivergent minds, in my experience, tend to see these patterns with unusual clarity. We are, in a sense, wired for cross-domain thinking. The same trait that makes it hard to stay in one lane in conversation — the tendency to leap from topic to topic, following invisible threads of connection — is the same trait that allows us to notice when a biological system and a social system and a physical system are, underneath their surfaces, doing the same thing.

From the Cell to the Galaxy

The same branching structure that describes a river delta from above also describes the network of blood vessels in a lung. Both are solving a distribution problem — how to move fluid efficiently across a large area using the least possible material. Evolution and geology arrived at the same answer independently, across wildly different scales and timelines, because the mathematics of the problem left only a narrow range of elegant solutions.

Scale up further: the large-scale structure of the universe — the cosmic web of filaments and voids that connects galaxy clusters across billions of light-years — bears a striking visual resemblance to the neural networks of the human brain. The scales differ by a factor of roughly 10 to the 27th power. The underlying organizational principle is similar enough that researchers have begun studying both systems using the same mathematical tools.

I find this genuinely moving. Not just intellectually interesting — emotionally resonant in a way that’s hard to fully articulate. The idea that the universe builds itself, at every scale, using the same small vocabulary of forms. That the pattern inside a shell and the pattern inside a galaxy are variations on the same theme.

That my brain — our brains — might be built to read that vocabulary more fluently than most.

What It Feels Like From the Inside

I want to try to describe the actual phenomenology of this, because I think it gets lost in the abstract.

It feels like a click. Like something sliding into place. You’re reading about mycorrhizal networks — the fungal threads that connect trees underground, passing nutrients and chemical signals between them — and something in your mind goes: yes, I’ve seen this before. Not this specific thing, but this shape. This structure. This logic.

And then you’re following the thread. Mycorrhizal networks to the internet to neural synapses to the way rumors spread through a social group to the way disease moves through a population. All networks. All following the same rules about nodes and connections and thresholds and cascades.

From the outside, this probably looks like distraction. Like an inability to stay on topic. Like going down rabbit holes when you should be doing something else.

From the inside, it feels like reading. Like the universe is a text written in a language you happen to know, and every new fact is another sentence in a book you’ve been reading your whole life without knowing it had a title.

The Gift Nobody Named

No one told me this was a gift when I was young. It was presented as a problem — an inability to focus, a tendency to make strange connections, an annoying habit of derailing conversations with tangents that seemed irrelevant to everyone else in the room.

It took me a long time to understand that the tangents weren’t irrelevant. They were relevant to a different level of the conversation — to the structural level, the pattern level, the level where the specific topic being discussed was just one instance of a much larger thing.

Some of the most important thinking in human history has come from people who could see this level. Who could look at a problem in one domain and recognize that it was the same problem as something in a completely different domain, already solved. Who could borrow a solution across the apparent boundaries between fields.

That’s not distraction. That’s synthesis. And synthesis is arguably the highest-order cognitive skill there is.

The Pattern Underneath the Pattern

I still notice spirals everywhere. In the water draining from a sink. In the arrangement of leaves on a stem. In the way a conversation circles back to its beginning. In the structure of a piece of music, the way a theme introduced early returns transformed near the end.

I used to think this was just a quirk of my perception. Something mildly interesting, mildly inconvenient, not particularly meaningful.

Now I think it might be the most important thing about the way I see. Not despite its tendency to cross every boundary and connect every domain — because of it.

The universe is telling the same story at every scale. Some of us are just built to hear it.

That’s not too much. That’s exactly enough.

— Ptim

Ptim Pellerin is a Houston-based neurodivergent author. Patterns of Infinity: Exploring the Patterns of the Microverse and Universe is available now on Amazon.