Somewhere between kindergarten and now, something important went missing. Not stolen. Not smashed. Just… quietly shelved. We were told pattern recognition was about colors and shapes—red, blue, red, blue; triangle, square, triangle, square—and then, once we proved we could do it without eating the blocks, the lesson ended. Sticker earned. Moving on. No one bothered to mention that what we’d just been handed was not a child’s game but the operating system for human intelligence.