CONCEPT
The Self-Organizing Pattern Trap
The structural feature of any powerful information-organizing system — biological or computational — by which patterns form through experience and then channel subsequent experience along the paths they carved, producing expertise and imprisonment simultaneously.
The self-organizing pattern trap is de Bono's name for the structural consequence of how powerful information systems organize themselves. Incoming experience arranges itself into patterns through the system's inherent properties — no external organizer, no conscious design. The patterns are efficient: they channel perception, enable rapid recognition, and permit fluent navigation of familiar territory. They are also a prison. The channels that determine where perception goes also determine where perception cannot go. The excluded paths do not register as forbidden. They register as nonexistent. The thinker inside the pattern does not experience the pattern as constraint, any more than a fish experiences water as wet.
In The You On AI Field Guide
De Bono's towel experiment is the simplest illustration. Drop a damp, crumpled towel on a flat surface. It lands in a configuration. Pick it up and drop it again — a different configuration emerges. Each is determined by the material's properties and the