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.
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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).
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 at the time it was a coincidence at the time but now knew they were both making the same allusion. Neat.
Cut a few years into the future, Dies Irae is my fucking Number 23. It’s EVERYWHERE. I can’t escape it.
Serial Experiments Lain. Never heard of it before last year, now I keep seeing it referenced weekly. It’s a good show though, holds up well today.
If that’s the name of the show, then i can’t tell if you’re serious or a smartass lol
The classic example is whenever my mom got a new car when I was a kid, looking for it in a parking lot, suddenly I’d see it everywhere.
Off-topic here, but for those already familiar with the history of the Red Army Faction, this is such a bad misnomer. (It assumes that someone has never heard those weird sounds before. And/or know the story.)
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.
Car. Its always the cars. Parents have a new car and OMG WHY DOES EVERYONE ELSE HAVE THE SAME CAR?
(Are people spying on us? Are they trying to imitate/mock us? 👀)
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.
Happens all the time when I learn new words. Suddenly that word is everywhere and it never occurred to me that I didn’t know its meaning.
I will probably see Baader-Meinhof pop up all over the place in the coming days.
Haha. You’re welcome.
That’s happening with the word “nuance” with me
To be fair, I think “nuance” is genuinely being used a lot more lately because there’s so much backlash against the black-and-white discourse that dominated the internet last decade.
What was wrong with the old ance, that’s what I want to know.
Your aunts don’t like being called old.
ALPRs. I thought where I lived wasn’t that likely to have them. Now that I’ve seen what to look for, I’m noticing they are already everywhere.
There could be a logical explanation for the chipmunks. They are more active at different times of the year, and maybe there happened to be a prolific family of chipmunks near you this year.
During my last semester I learned about the 4 main educational philophies, and now I’m doing a personality test in the back of my head whenever I meet someone who likes children
Please don’t do this to people. Yeah there are way too many pedophiles out there but you’re still so unlikely to meet one. Unless you go to church.
Usually it’s Baader-Meinhof whenever I forget about it.
Student driver or new driver stickers on cars. I swear 20% of the cars on the road in my area have them lately. That said, I do actually think in this case that there has been an increase in adoption of these stickers (possibly to try and hand waive bad behavior of the driver?) but when I first mentioned it to my husband, he blamed it on Baader-Meinhof.
I totally feel that. They’re all over the place here too. I don’t get what the point is
Here it is the law that a Learner has an L sticker/magnet and New drivers have an N. Let’s others know to stay back a bit because they may need more time to complete a maneuvering or parking, or may forget certain road rules.
What?
What’s unclear about that statement?
The ones I’m talking about are just bumper stickers. What’s the difference between a learner and a new driver in your jurisdiction?
Learner has to be with a fully licensed driver, New Driver is licensed to drive but has restrictions, that are removed after a year or so
We do gave Student Driver stickers, but it is on trainer vehicles.
The number 14, seriously, it’s everywhere
It’s a fun phenomenon, especially if discussing with New Age types who will start dropping numerology interpretations.
If you can rein in an immediate “this is stupid bullshit and so are you” reflex, it’s interesting from an for-entertainment-purposes-only perspective.
Some friends and I that hung out in college had this with 11:11 on the clock. Felt like we’d look at the time and it would be 11:11 once or even both times every day.
Mine was just all repeated digits of whatever hour. 1:11, 2:22, 3:33, 4:44, 5:55, 11:11 all “counted” in my mind when I was entering university, and it happened so freaking often it was really weirding me out. It seemed like anytime I glanced at a clock without other intention, it would be one of those times. There were probably times I looked at a clock normally, but of course confirmation bias reinforces things. But it really did seem far more often than you’d expect. My bet is that my inner clock was prompting me to look at those times because I got an adreneline or dopamine or something spike, so my subconscious got trained into finding it.
