Baader-Meinhof

Picture from Nancy Dauffenbach.

It doesn't matter how odd our Christmas gift theme is, all of that year I'll start noticing it everywhere. This year it's 'Cephlapods' and obviously my friend Nancy is experiencing the same phenomena. There is a name for this - when a subject seems to be cropping up improbably often - it's the Baader-Meinhof Effect a/k/a The Frequency Illusion. Your brain sees something you were told about. It gets excited. "This is cool." your brain says, "I'm going to look for it some more w/o thinking about it." Since it's looking for it albeit subconsciously, your brain likely finds it and a 'confirmation bias' kicks in. Voila, it feels like you are seeing it all of the time. Interestingly, Baader-Meinhof' is the name of a militant West German terrorist group that operated in the 1970's. Some twenty years later a St. Paul commentator dubbed this phenomena 'The Baader-Meinhof Effect' when he heard the group's name randomly twice in a 24 hour period.