The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon is when you never noticed something or saw something before, and then you see it everywhere.

For example say you see a chipmunk in an area you never noticed them before, and now you just see chipmunks everywhere.

  • I couldn’t recall the name, but was explaining this effect to my son the other day. He was talking about the show The Good Place and joking that people seemed to now often be doing what the show was teaching us not to do, and that the writers must been good at seeing where the world was headed. I explained to him how it was actually commentary on the state of the world at the time, now that he was aware of it, he saw how prevalent it was.

  • I experienced it pretty profoundly when taking a plant systematics and identification course. I had always loved plants as a gardener, so the added knowledge of general plant anatomy lit a fire in my brain.

    Now when I would learn a new plant, I would notice it everywhere, even out of the corner of my eye while driving at speed on a highway.

    I’m still a slut for the thrill of learning a new plant.

  • I bought a car early last year that an odd grey gloss/non-metallic colour. Since then I’ve been seeing a lot of different vehicles in an identical colour across multiple manufacturers. It’s trippy because I swear I’d never seen the colour before (obviously I just hadn’t noticed it).

  • Omg this has a name?! It’s one of my favorite things to happen lol

    Okay so uh…back when I had a really tough assignment and I didn’t wanna study for it and I had just one day left. I was talking to a girl on Facebook about not doing my assignment and she sent me something that she uses to write her homework, well I looked it up and it worked brilliantly, I was able to submit my assignment in time with zero effort.

    Next week everyone was using chatgpt for assignments

  • A while back I set out to watch the entire Disney Animated Canon. (Not in a binge-y way, like a movie per week.) When I reached Frozen II and started looking up trivia about it, I read that the four note sequence Elsa keeps hearing calling to her is something a lot of composers like to reference: Dies Irae.

    A couple other examples were named and it reminded me that I had sort of noticed this once before; I remember playing Aria of Sorrow and noticing that the Clock Tower theme had those four notes repeating in the background and I kept hearing “making Christmas making Christmas”. I had thought it was a coincidence at the time but now knew they were both making the same allusion. Neat.

    Cut to a few years in the future, Dies Irae is my fucking Number 23. It’s EVERYWHERE. I can’t escape it.