Why is that? The answer is here now: it’s a psychological effect.
Let’s come to the situation of any foreign language learner: You are very excited about a new word you have just learned. It could be any word, about anything, as long as you pay attention to it.
This phenomenon makes everything familiar.
But then, you start to see it everywhere, in magazines, on product labels, in a book, on Facebook… It shows up more and more and makes you wonder: “Why really Incidentally and unexpectedly, everyone uses this word? Is it a trend? Or a “classic” jargon?
If you have been in this situation and never had an answer, today we have it. Everything comes from a psychological phenomenon, called Baader Meinhof.
Basically, Baader Meinhof can be understood as an illusion of frequency when you first learn about new information and then it appears everywhere.
This phenomenon happens to most of us, with the simple explanation that when we don’t know, we often don’t notice. Once you know it, the brain will pay more attention to it, so you will have a feeling that the information appears more often than usual.
For those who don’t know, there are many psychological processes that take place when we learn, including information selection.
In essence, the reason we have to filter information is because our attention span is limited, so the brain needs to ignore the unimportant details and focus only on the really valuable information.
You learn something and remember it, which also means that the information has gained your attention. Screening takes over the next job, and this is the crux of the story.
Once the information has been selected, you will pay more attention to it each time it appears. Before that, the frequency of that information was still the same, but because you didn’t pay attention, you never noticed.
The Baader Meinhof phenomenon is not necessarily bad.
That’s when you take a point of view and believe in it. This causes your brain to subconsciously look for examples that support that point of view, only to have the Baader Meinhof effect happen again. That’s called “cognitive bias” – you tend to pay more attention to the things you want to see.
The Baader Meinhof phenomenon is not necessarily bad. On the contrary, see it as a measure to encourage us to step out and explore new things, helping to open up unexpected possibilities that the brain does not know.
Because if we don’t learn, you’ll be stuck looking at the same old detail over and over. And if you really understand the complexity and vastness of this world, you will find yourself needing to learn as much as you can.
Only that way, you can see interesting and new things around.