Seeing Something Over and Over Again
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You lot may accept heard about Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon before. In fact, you probably learned about information technology for the offset fourth dimension quite recently. If not, then yous just might hear about it once again very shortly. Baader-Meinhof is the phenomenon where 1 stumbles upon some obscure piece of information—often an unfamiliar word or proper noun—and presently afterward encounters the same subject once again, oftentimes repeatedly. Anytime the phrase "That'south so weird, I just heard about that yesterday" would be appropriate, the utterer is hip-deep in Baader-Meinhof.
Well-nigh people seem to have experienced the phenomenon at least a few times in their lives, and many people encounter it with such regularity that they anticipate it upon the introduction of new information. But what is the underlying cause? Is there some hidden meaning behind Baader-Meinhof events?
The phenomenon bears some similarity to synchronicity, which is the experience of having a highly meaningful coincidence, such equally having someone telephone you while you are thinking well-nigh them. Both phenomena invoke a feeling of balmy surprise, and crusade i to ponder the odds of such an intersection. Both smack of destiny, as though the events were supposed to occur in just that arrangement… as though we're witnessing yet some other domino tip over in a chain of dominoes beyond our reckoning.
Despite science's cries that a world every bit complex every bit ours invites frequent coincidences, intuition tells usa that such an explanation is inadequate. Intuition tells the states that Baader-Meinhof strikes with blurring accuracy, and too frequently to be explained abroad so easily. But over the centuries, science has told us that intuition itself is highly flawed, and non to be blindly trusted.
The reason for this is our brains' prejudice towards patterns. Our brains are fantastic pattern recognition engines, a characteristic which is highly useful for learning, but information technology does crusade the brain to lend excessive importance to unremarkable events. Considering how many words, names, and ideas a person is exposed to in any given twenty-four hours, information technology is unsurprising that we sometimes see the same information again within a short fourth dimension. When that occasional intersection occurs, the brain promotes the information because the two instances make up the beginnings of a sequence. The brain'southward reward centre actually stimulates us for successfully detecting patterns, hence their inflated value. In short, patterns are addiction-forming. What we neglect to notice is the hundreds or thousands of pieces of data which aren't repeated, because they do not arrange to an interesting pattern. This tendency to ignore the "uninteresting" information is an example of selective attention.
In reality, we humans tend to grossly underestimate the probability of congruent events. There are then many things happening all the time in our environments that coincidences are not equally rare as they seem, in fact they occur frequently. We but don't notice them most of the fourth dimension, considering our attention is often elsewhere during one or both coinciding events. When something changes the priorities of our attention, nosotros volition naturally be receptive to a dissimilar variety of coincidences, and these will seem novel.
But when we hear a word or proper noun which we just learned the previous day, it frequently feels like more than a mere coincidence. This is because Baader-Meinhof is amplified by the recency effect, a cognitive bias that inflates the importance of contempo stimuli or observations. This increases the chances of beingness more aware of the subject field when we run across it again in the most future.
How the phenomenon came to be known every bit "Baader-Meinhof" is uncertain. It seems likely that some individual learned of the being of the celebrated German language urban guerrilla group which went by that name, and and then heard the proper name over again soon later on. This plucky wordsmith may and so have named the phenomenon afterward the very subject which triggered it. Just it is certainly a mouthful; a shorter name might have more than hope of penetrating the lexicon.
However it came to be known by such a proper name, it is articulate that Baader-Meinhof is however some other charming fantasy whose magic is diluted by stick-in-the-mud science and its sinister cohort: facts. Merely if you've never heard of the miracle before, exist sure to scout for it in the side by side few days… brain stimulation is nice.
Update: Independent reports indicate that the name "Baader-Meinhof miracle" was coined on a discussion thread on the St. Paul Pioneer Press circa 1995. Participants were discussing the awareness, and decrying the lack of a term for it, and so someone asserted naming rights and called it "Baader-Meinhof Miracle" presumably based on their ain experience hearing that moniker twice in shut temporal proximity.
The more scientifically accustomed name nowadays is "frequency illusion," simply 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 article was originally written. And so both terms are arguably valid.
Source: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomenon/
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