Seeing Something Over and Over Again to and Liking It
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You may have heard almost Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon before. In fact, you probably learned about it for the first time quite recently. If not, and then y'all just might hear about information technology again very shortly. Baader-Meinhof is the phenomenon where one stumbles upon some obscure piece of data—often an unfamiliar word or name—and soon afterwards encounters the same subject once again, oftentimes repeatedly. Someday the phrase "That'southward and so weird, I just heard about that yesterday" would be appropriate, the utterer is hip-deep in Baader-Meinhof.
Most people seem to have experienced the phenomenon at least a few times in their lives, and many people meet it with such regularity that they anticipate it upon the introduction of new data. But what is the underlying cause? Is there some hidden significant behind Baader-Meinhof events?
The phenomenon bears some similarity to synchronicity, which is the feel of having a highly meaningful coincidence, such as having someone telephone yous while you are thinking well-nigh them. Both phenomena invoke a feeling of mild surprise, and cause one to ponder the odds of such an intersection. Both smack of destiny, equally though the events were supposed to occur in merely that arrangement… every bit though we're witnessing yet another domino tip over in a concatenation of dominoes across our reckoning.
Despite scientific discipline's cries that a earth every bit complex as ours invites frequent coincidences, intuition tells u.s.a. that such an explanation is inadequate. Intuition tells us that Baader-Meinhof strikes with blurring accuracy, and besides oftentimes to be explained abroad so easily. But over the centuries, science has told us that intuition itself is highly flawed, and not to be blindly trusted.
The reason for this is our brains' prejudice towards patterns. Our brains are fantastic blueprint recognition engines, a characteristic which is highly useful for learning, only information technology does cause the brain to lend excessive importance to unremarkable events. Considering how many words, names, and ideas a person is exposed to in whatsoever given twenty-four hour period, it is unsurprising that nosotros sometimes see the same information again inside a short fourth dimension. When that occasional intersection occurs, the encephalon promotes the data because the ii instances make upwardly the beginnings of a sequence. The brain's reward center actually stimulates us for successfully detecting patterns, hence their inflated value. In brusk, patterns are habit-forming. What nosotros fail to notice is the hundreds or thousands of pieces of data which aren't repeated, considering they do not conform to an interesting blueprint. This tendency to ignore the "uninteresting" data is an example of selective attention.
In reality, we humans tend to grossly underestimate the probability of coinciding events. At that place are so many things happening all the time in our environments that coincidences are not every bit rare as they seem, in fact they occur frequently. Nosotros just don't notice them well-nigh of the time, because our attention is oft elsewhere during i or both congruent events. When something changes the priorities of our attention, we will naturally be receptive to a different variety of coincidences, and these will seem novel.
But when we hear a word or name which we only learned the previous day, it often feels like more than than a mere coincidence. This is because Baader-Meinhof is amplified past the recency effect, a cognitive bias that inflates the importance of recent stimuli or observations. This increases the chances of existence more aware of the subject when nosotros encounter it once more in the nearly future.
How the phenomenon came to be known as "Baader-Meinhof" is uncertain. It seems likely that some individual learned of the existence of the historic German language urban guerrilla group which went by that proper name, and then heard the proper name again before long afterwards. This plucky wordsmith may then have named the miracle after the very subject which triggered it. But information technology is certainly a mouthful; a shorter name might have more hope of penetrating the lexicon.
However it came to exist known by such a name, it is clear that Baader-Meinhof is nonetheless another charming fantasy whose magic is diluted past antediluvian science and its sinister cohort: facts. Simply if you've never heard of the phenomenon before, be certain to watch for it in the next few days… brain stimulation is nice.
Update: Contained reports signal that the name "Baader-Meinhof miracle" was coined on a word thread on the St. Paul Pioneer Press circa 1995. Participants were discussing the awareness, and decrying the lack of a term for it, so someone asserted naming rights and called it "Baader-Meinhof Miracle" presumably based on their own experience hearing that moniker twice in close temporal proximity.
The more than scientifically accustomed name nowadays is "frequency illusion," but Stanford linguistics professor Arnold Zwicky didn't coin that term until 2006, over a decade after "Baader-Meinhof" was coined, and around the same time this commodity was originally written. So both terms are arguably valid.
Source: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomenon/