I think your assumptions are fundamentally wrong.  The examples of repetition you describe are <i>specifically designed</i>, whether by a video game producer, a musician, or a priestly class- to <i>feel important</i> and <i>be generally pleasant</i>.  Video game creators spend thousands of hours researching the best ways to turn their systems into Skinner Boxes, priestly sorts have spent untold amounts of time preparing sermons to instill a sense of the criticality of religious ritual- in other words, no, humanity doesn&#x27;t like repetition in and of itself, but it designs repetitions that it <i>does</i> like.<p>Meanwhile, that dual sense- the pleasure the video game designer tries to create and the sense of importance the priest creates- these are <i>fundamentally absent</i> from our teaching methods in early arithmetic, which, at least in America, we call &#x27;math,&#x27; not differentiating the symbolic thought processes from the repetitive arithmetic, incorporating little if any fun, and constantly failing to appropriately create a sense of importance (the most common teenage question in math classes is, &quot;Why do I have to learn this?  When am I <i></i>ever<i></i> going to use this?&quot;).<p>While there <i>Do exist</i> efforts to instill a video game&#x27;s sense of fun to arithmetic exercises and a sense of near-religious importance to the symbolic thought of math, we are functionally applying a tourniquet to the mathematical understanding of the young by just force-feeding arithmetic drills and emphasizing mistake avoidance instead of proper thinking- and it&#x27;s very little wonder that only some few students&#x27; mathematical passion survives the tourniquet.