The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon

"I have been hearing about this pretty more nowadays.."

Have you realized that you saw something or heard about something that you have just seen or heard few days back ?? You might possibly see or hear about that thing again within short period of time. We often call it co-incidence, but this special cognitive bias has a name to it --  
Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.

Don't worry you'll come across this word many times later on..!

Baader-Meinhof is the phenomenon where one happens upon some obscure piece of information -- often an unfamiliar word or name -- and soon afterwards encounters the same subject again, often repeatedly..

 

 

 

Our brains are fantastic pattern recognition engines, a characteristic which is highly useful for learning, but it does cause the brain to lend excessive importance to unremarkable events. 

Considering how many words, names, and ideas a person is exposed to in any given day, it is unsurprising that we sometimes encounter the same information again within a short time. When that occasional intersection occurs, the brain promotes the information because the two instances make up the beginnings of a sequence. 

What we fail to notice is the hundreds or thousands of pieces of information which aren't repeated, because they do not conform to an interesting pattern. This tendency to ignore the "uninteresting" data is an example of selective attention.

When we hear a word or name which we just learned the previous day, it often 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 recent stimuli or observations. This increases the chances of being more aware of the subject when we encounter it again in the near future.

My own most recent example for this phenomenon was that i had seen a car somewhere and then i saw it again at some other place and again at some other place. It was trending everywhere. I saw many other things but i could just point out only to that car model like --

"hey.. i think that car is haunting me.." :P