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 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.
Usually when you buy a car you will start seeing those cars everywhere.
It’s a fun phenomenon, especially if discussing with New Age types who will start dropping numerology interpretations.
If you can reign 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.
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 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.
Wilhelm scream. It’s in everything. It’s memorable in Star Wars and Indiana Jones, but it’s in Soul Plane too.
I’ve watched far too many hours of sitcoms, because I’m recognizing a specific laugh that gets re-used over and over. It’s by far the worst on How I Met Your Mother (where I first noticed it). They’ll repeat the same laugh 2-3 times within the same episode. It’s a specific high-pitched laugh that almost sounds like the person is inhaling while laughing rather than exhaling. HIMYM doesn’t use a live audience so they re-use the same laughs for the entire run of the show.
I can’t watch anything with a laugh track anymore. Growing up I knew it was there, but I never actually noticed it. Now it’s so jarring and fake.
The ONLY show I can watch with a laugh track is “How I Met Your Mother,” and I think it’s because instead of using an actual track, they microphoned an audience who watched the show on a screen and recorded their real laughter.
That ‘70s Show too, it fits perfectly in that show for me. I hate it elsewhere, even if it’s a live studio audience… it ruins the pacing of a show for me.
I absolutely refuse to watch something with a laugh track as well.
“Those are dead people laughing”
Not even Father Ted?
Haven’t seen it, sorry.
It’s worth the laugh track 😁
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I recently learned about how often people say “in front of” It’s constant and sticks out to me. I mean, it’s very useful syntax. Also “just like” is something I’m guilty of. It’s almost like a verbal comma for people
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.
and you don’t seem to understand…
If that’s the name of the show, then i can’t tell if you’re serious or a smartass lol
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.
Wow I had no idea, that’s fricking cool
I was under the impression that it’s meant to set the tempo, but now that you mention it, Linkin Park has used it, The Halloween theme, I think Danny Elfman likes that too. Especially when he’s doing something with Tim Burton
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 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
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
Your aunts don’t like being called old.
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.
As long as it’s properly used, but for me, that’s a discussion for a later date
