The neural network scanned vegetation in those images and identified repeating circular patterns that resembled patterns of known fairy circles, evaluating the circles’ sizes and shapes as well ...

The significance of a circular pattern within the data depends ... As the rat moved freely about the square box, a regular and repeating pattern of dots emerged, of a kind that mathematicians ...

Then, he’d select a circular area of dots within the image ... but because the image is a repeating pattern, the brain is tricked into thinking that the two spots are the same thing.

Neurons are arranged in periodic patterns that repeat over large distances in two areas of the cerebral cortex, suggesting that the entire cerebral cortex has a stereotyped organization ...