Do you know that feeling? It’s quite weird.

When you’re in the packed corridors of your school, trying to get to your next class and you notice that one person. They’ve always got something special about them making them memorable or noticeable. Maybe it’s an earring or they’ve got a specific keyring on their backpack. You think it’s quite different, and you acknowledge it for a moment or two but then get swept away in the crowd before you can count to ten. But then the next day, you see the same person in the lunch line, or the library, or in your favourite teacher’s class. You start to notice them everywhere around the school.

This feeling is known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Originally first recognised by Gigetto en Lincoln, in 1994, when he was discussing a notorious German terrorist group – the Baader- Meinhof group- with a friend many years after the group first appeared in the news. The next day, he received a phone call from his friend, stating that he had he read an article in that day’s newspaper about the Baader-Meinhof group.

Baader-Meinhof complex or phenomenon can be defined as the ‘seemingly sudden awareness of encountering, a word, phrase, fact or thing, one has only recently learned of’

This phenomenon is also known as ‘frequency illusion’- as named by Arnold Zwicky in 2006, a linguistics professor at Stanford. ‘Frequency illusion’ was posited as a crossover of two other fundamental biases. The first one is selective attention – the idea that brains are great at tuning out irrelevant information and suddenly begin to notice surface-related information. The second is confirmation bias- this is a theory claiming that humans love to confirm their suspicions and will prioritise information that supports our personal beliefs.

What actually causes the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon? Well, think about how much information your brain is exposed to in a single day. It’s not possible for our brains to soak up every single menial detail. Therefore, your brain takes initiative and decides which information is worth keeping and which can be filtered out- our brains easily ignore information that doesn’t seem vital, and this happens to us every day.

However, when you notice something brand new and exciting, your brain takes a note of this and decides to remember the information. Since you might be genuinely interested in the new information you’ve learnt- the brain will notice it more often ever since the first time you noticed it.  

Have you ever experienced this phenomenon?