The Innovation Diaries

Ever get that strange feeling that everyone is sharing the same collective thoughts as you? The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon is the strange instance where a person learns something new (usually some obscure fact or addition to their lexicon) and have it related back to them shortly after hearing it for the first time. Many put this down to some sort of synchronicity, or the belief in something bigger is going on in the world - the work of the Flying Spaghetti Monster perhaps? But it’s all just a side-effect of our bored brains using up it’s underemployed processing power …

The reason for this is our brains’ prejudice towards patterns. 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 (quote via Damn Interesting).