Hey, I just learned about that phenomenon!

This morning, not long after I woke up, a friend texted me a link to a news story. In the wee hours of the morning, a truck had crashed into a pole in my neighborhood leaving 3,000 people without power. It was only then that I realized that my power was out. It came back up about 3 hours later.

And thank goodness it did, because I needed the Internet today — not only to send out today’s update on last week’s newsletter, but also to do some overdo research.

As you’ve probably noticed if you’ve been reading regularly, this is not a heavily researched publication. I really enjoy research. A library full of microfiche and journal archives would be my ideal, but for speed and volume, you can’t beat Internet research. When I wrote last week’s heavily hyperlinked exploration of apparent coincidence in media, I was able to quickly cross-reference my points with online transcripts, episode listings, and image searches. But all of those references were in service of a larger point: the description of a familiar phenomenon. As I wrote about my personal experience of that phenomenon, I wondered: does this have a name? Should I look into what’s been written about this already?

Ultimately, realizing that life was short and this newsletter is free (and more poetry than science, to boot), I didn’t even attempt to research the phenomenon itself. I sent out the newsletter, and by that very evening, the research I’d left undone had been done for me, in part. I’d gotten both a comment and a text message letting me know that what I’d described is known as the “Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.” Also known as the “frequency illusion.”

Now that I had my search terms, the research began in earnest. Baader-Meinhof is a kind of a crowd-sourced term coined in a ‘90s discussion board and named after a ‘70s-era German militant organization, solely because a commenter had heard about the group repeatedly in the days after learning about them. Ironically, a search for “Baader-Meinhof” will now turn up far more results about the phenomenon of frequency illusion than about the German guerillas.

I read about selective attention, recency bias, cognitive bias, and red car syndrome. I read about how doctors who learn about a new medical condition can sometimes start to over-diagnose that condition (when you’re a hammer that just learned about red nails, suddenly every nail looks red, or something like that) and about how sometimes that can actually be a good thing, because people really DO have that condition. (A radiology student who wrote a paper about how he discovered three cases of “bovine aortic arch” in the 24 hours of learning about the condition.)

I think it would be a mistake for us to think that EVERY time we are suddenly hearing or seeing more and more of something, it’s simply a case of Baader-Meinhof. Take meme culture for example: a meme or phrase (like “no bones day”) catches on, and suddenly it’s everywhere. Few people know where it originated, and quickly it seems largely unnecessary to credit a creator at all. Eventually, it shows up on a billboard over the freeway or a Target ad. Trends, in language, in fashion, in culture, in business, are real and the algorithm punches them to ever increasing omnipresence until they are either normalized or shall, we say, “on fleek.”

I have been hearing a certain term bandied about in recent years, and I think it might be more a case of trend than BMP. The term is “explainer.” All the articles I read about Baader-Meinhof phenomenon were explainers. Each one explained what the phenomenon was, why it had that goofy name, and who coined the term “frequency illusion."¹ But none of them included lengthy prose or multiple personal anecdotes on the topic. None of them described how it feels to know that something is not a coincidence and yet still feel its sudden appearance and reappearance in your life as a strange, small miracle. That’s my thing.

So, first allow me to tender my apologies for not doing my research. Next week, I’ll return to you with some more robust musings — there’s certainly no shortage of experiences to talk about these days. If research is called for, I will make sure to do it…and to not let it take over the thing that Metaforia was made for. I’ll leave the explaining to the experts. Or better yet, to the world around us — at least, as I experience it.

1. Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky, in 2005