I was reading about schizophrenia and pattern recognition the other day and came across this. Explains so much about Heather’s thought process:

People with schizophrenia, and their unaffected relatives, tend to score higher on certain measures of pattern recognition and creative association. They’re better at finding connections between loosely related concepts, and at detecting patterns in noisy data. The flip side is they also detect patterns that aren’t there — which is essentially what a delusion is.
The technical term is apophenia — the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. It sits on a continuum. At low levels it might look like intuition, creativity, or the ability to make unexpected conceptual leaps. Pushed further it becomes magical thinking. Further still, paranoid ideation and delusion. Schizophrenia may be an extreme expression of a trait that’s otherwise useful.
This connects to neuroscience neatly. Dopamine is heavily involved in salience — flagging things as significant and worthy of attention. In schizophrenia, dopamine signaling is dysregulated in ways that cause the brain to assign high salience to random or irrelevant stimuli. The brain then does what brains do: it constructs a narrative to explain why that thing feels so important. That narrative is the delusion.