what is the term for when a word is brought to your attention and then you notice it everywhere

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You may have heard about Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon before. In fact, you probably learned about it for the get-go time quite recently. If not, and then you just might hear about it again very soon. Baader-Meinhof is the phenomenon where one stumbles upon some obscure slice of information⁠—often an unfamiliar word or name⁠—and shortly afterwards encounters the same subject again, often repeatedly. Anytime the phrase "That'south so weird, I simply heard about that yesterday" would be advisable, 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 information. But what is the underlying cause? Is there some subconscious pregnant backside Baader-Meinhof events?

The phenomenon bears some similarity to synchronicity, which is the feel of having a highly meaningful coincidence, such equally having someone telephone you while you are thinking almost them. Both phenomena invoke a feeling of mild surprise, and cause one to ponder the odds of such an intersection. Both smack of destiny, as though the events were supposed to occur in but that organisation… every bit though we're witnessing yet another domino tip over in a chain of dominoes beyond our reckoning.

Despite science's cries that a world as complex as ours invites frequent coincidences, intuition tells us that such an explanation is inadequate. Intuition tells us that Baader-Meinhof strikes with blurring accuracy, and too ofttimes to be explained abroad so hands. But over the centuries, science has told us that intuition itself is highly flawed, and non to exist 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 it 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 mean solar day, it is unsurprising that nosotros sometimes meet the aforementioned data again within a curt time. When that occasional intersection occurs, the brain promotes the information considering the two instances make up the ancestry of a sequence. The brain'southward reward center actually stimulates us for successfully detecting patterns, hence their inflated value. In short, patterns are habit-forming. What we fail to notice is the hundreds or thousands of pieces of information which aren't repeated, because they practice not conform to an interesting pattern. This tendency to ignore the "uninteresting" information is an case of selective attention.

In reality, we humans tend to grossly underestimate the probability of coinciding events. There are so many things happening all the time in our environments that coincidences are not as rare equally they seem, in fact they occur oft. We just don't notice them most of the time, because our attention is often elsewhere during ane or both coinciding events. When something changes the priorities of our attention, we volition naturally exist receptive to a different diverseness of coincidences, and these will seem novel.

But when we hear a word or name which nosotros merely learned the previous day, it often feels like more than 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 being more aware of the subject field when we encounter it again in the near futurity.

How the phenomenon came to be known as "Baader-Meinhof" is uncertain. Information technology seems probable that some private learned of the beingness of the historic German language urban guerrilla group which went by that proper name, and then heard the name once more soon afterwards. This plucky wordsmith may then take named the phenomenon afterward the very subject which triggered it. But it is certainly a mouthful; a shorter name might take more hope of penetrating the lexicon.

However information technology came to be known past such a proper noun, information technology is articulate that Baader-Meinhof is yet another charming fantasy whose magic is diluted by antediluvian science and its sinister cohort: facts. But if you've never heard of the phenomenon earlier, be sure to sentry for it in the next few days… brain stimulation is squeamish.

Update: Independent reports point that the proper noun "Baader-Meinhof phenomenon" was coined on a word thread on the St. Paul Pioneer Press circa 1995. Participants were discussing the sensation, and decrying the lack of a term for information technology, so someone asserted naming rights and called it "Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon" presumably based on their own feel hearing that moniker twice in close temporal proximity.

The more scientifically accepted name nowadays is "frequency illusion," but Stanford linguistics professor Arnold Zwicky didn't coin that term until 2006, over a decade later on "Baader-Meinhof" was coined, and around the same time this article was originally written. So both terms are arguably valid.

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Source: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomenon/

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