Since we can only touch, hear, and see a very small part of the world at any moment in time, information flowing into the brain naturally arrives as a sequence of patterns. The cortex wants to learn those sequences that occur over and over again. In some cases, such as melodies, a sequence of patterns comes in a rigid order, the order of the intervals. Most of us are familiar with that kind of sequence. But I am going to use the word sequence in a more general way, closer in meaning to the mathematical term set. A sequence is a set of patterns that generally accompany each other but not always
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