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Organisms live making use of patterns and predictions extensively. Children learn to walk without needing to learn the physics behind it. What enable them to do it is their genetics and their ability to find patterns and making predictions. Our genetics enable us to have the bones, muscles, nerves and control over it, for us to walk. The child learn to walk by watching others walk, getting curious, trying to understand it and trying to do it. First the child learn to see the pattern in walking and try to copy it. Then when it put one foot to the front, it won't know how to shift weight on that foot, or by how much, in order for the other foot to come to the front. After doing it for some time, the child learn the pattern of how to shift weight and by how much. But once it is learned then when and how to move or how to shift weight can be predicted and it won't probably have to think about it consciously for the rest of its life. Learning to ride a bike or learning to swim are other similar activities. Our brain is very good in recognizing patterns and making predictions. We don't have to consciously do it, we are doing it all the time and it might be unconscious and automatic. We can also actively look for patterns, but there is always the unconscious and automatic part in it, which can lead to errors and false pattern recognition. That is why we may get frightened when we hear leaves rustling. It is matched against a threat even when we don't really know what it is.
Because of the errors in our ability to see patterns or our ability to pattern match, or both, we may find relationship between events when it is just a coincidence. Suppose there is a group of people who gather under a tree every day in the evening. One day when they were there, there was a rustling in the bushes near them. It caught their attention and all of looked in that direction to see what it is. A black cat came running out of the bushes and ran away. Then after sometime it began to rain. So they all went home. The next day they gathered under the tree as usual. Later a black cat walked past them and some of them saw it. After some time it began to rain and they all went home. The next day a person who saw the black cat walk past them the previous day, was getting out of his house to join the group and he saw a black cat. When he got out of his house and started walking, it began to rain. He shared his experience with the group, the next day they gathered under the tree. When he told this to them, some others in the group began to think about what it meant and recalled similar experiences. So they told each other that black cats bring rain and told about their experience or somebody else’s as an explanation. A cat is not the cause for rains but when some people believe it and they have some reason, even if the reasons are invalid, others may think there should be some truth in it. They may begin to believe it, especially if they are not analyzing the validity of the reasons or if they simply choose to believe it. When the people in the group tell others about it and can somehow convince some of them, the belief can spread. It can get passed on to the next generation and it may get established as something valid. So people may begin to believe that seeing a black cat is a sign that it is going to rain. This belief can transform and it may later become an omen that seeing a black cat is a sign that a fruitful discussion is not going to happen. But all along, they were making mistakes. The people in the group only took into account the last three days exclusively and made the mistake of forgetting the hundreds of days when it rained and they didn't see any cat before it. The truth is they saw a pattern and made a false matching.
Observing our environment and finding patterns enable us to understand nature and its working. We know about seasons, laws of motion, rainbows etc because of it. But when it goes wrong we will have omens, superstitions etc which are misinterpreted coincidences or false pattern matches. There is no truth in it, it only shows the mistakes we have in our pattern recognition abilities or the limitations to our logic.