Any student of music, and especially anyone who's studied their John Cage, knows that if you listen hard enough, you can always discover patterns. Producer Brian Eno once described recording a walk in the park, and taking a 3 min.-30 second segment of it and listening repeatedly: patterns emerged, the rhythms of footsteps, the on-off burble of chatter, the bird that chirped every 22 seconds.
This is not surprising: the human ear is trained to find order in chaos, to take random input and find ways to make sense of it. In music, this is a beautiful and fascinating game to play. But when our pattern-recognizing ability goes into overdrive in our daily life, there's another word for it: paranoia. The paranoiac has a fantastic ability to find connections and relationships between disparate input; unfortunately, these connections are all evil, menacing ones, part of a vast, unseen conspiracy out to get him.
Paranoia may not be a fun mental state to go through, but it's sure inspired some great films, such as "Memento," "The Game," or "Jacob's Ladder." "The Number 23," a new thriller starring Jim Carrey, seeks to join this legion of mind-warp movies, but comes up short.