The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon: Heard About It Before?

Ever heard of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon?

Well, the chances are that you’ll hear about it again soon.

The Baader-Meinhof phe­nomen­on (also known as “fre­quency illu­sion”) is when you notice some­thing, per­haps some­thing out of the ordin­ary, like com­ing across an unusu­al name, hear­ing a song, or learn­ing the name of an act­or you have nev­er seen before.

Suddenly, that thing you noticed for the first time just yes­ter­day star­ted appear­ing from nowhere, both here and there, like some short-term déjà vu.

What’s going on here?

The Brain’s Quest for Novelty

Most of us have exper­i­enced the Baader-Meinhof phe­nomen­on — I know I have.

I exper­i­ence it all the time.
And that’s not an exaggeration.

Since I’m not super­sti­tious, I’ve always taken for gran­ted that it has some­thing to do with a psy­cho­lo­gic­al fal­lacy or bias — like con­firm­a­tion bias. ¹Confirmation bias is when we hear or see what we want to hear and see. We don’t want to see or listen to things that we don’t seem to register as quickly.

However, con­firm­a­tion bias, a widely known and well-stud­ied psy­cho­lo­gic­al fal­lacy, doesn’t account for the whole exper­i­ence of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

Let’s say that I walk by a store, and from with­in that store; I hear a rather unusu­al song from the ’80s that I haven’t heard in ages. I used to love it, but I had for­got­ten about it.

I hear the song repeatedly in the fol­low­ing weeks — and always by chance. How weird.

Suppose we were to explain these occur­rences using the fal­lacy of con­firm­a­tion bias alone. In that case, we must con­clude that I’ve always encountered this rel­at­ively rare song from the ’80s without con­sciously noti­cing it.

But how can that be — espe­cially if the song is rel­at­ively obscure?

The Frequency Illusion

According to Stanford lin­guist pro­fess­or Arnold Zwicky, who coined the term fre­quency illu­sion for this phe­nomen­on in 2006, some­thing else hap­pens before your con­firm­a­tion bias kicks in. ²Many would say that Arnold Zwicky is one of the most influ­en­tial lin­guists in the United States, if not the world. After receiv­ing his PhD in Linguistics from Stanford in 1955, he began teach­ing at … Continue read­ing

When some­thing nov­el sparks an emo­tion­al reac­tion, your brain act­ively scans for what you notice. Unconsciously, your brain is act­ively seek­ing that song — wherever you go.

How does the Baader-Meinhof phe­nomen­on affect us?

The Baader-Meinhof phe­nomen­on made it into the open inter­net and has become pecu­li­ar. It could fuel para­noia and oth­er unhealthy states if you have a men­tal illness. 

But there are pos­it­ive examples, too.

“In 2019, third-year med­ic­al stu­dent Kush Purohit wrote a let­ter to the edit­or of Academic Radiology to talk about his own exper­i­ence. Having just learned of a con­di­tion called “bovine aor­tic arch,” he went on to dis­cov­er three more cases with­in the next 24 hours. Purohit sug­ges­ted that tak­ing advant­age of psy­cho­lo­gic­al phe­nom­ena such as Baader-Meinhof could bene­fit stu­dents of radi­ology, help­ing them to learn basic search pat­terns as well as the skills to identi­fy find­ings that oth­ers may over­look.”
Source: Healthline

The German Terrorist Group

Why do we call it the Baader-Meinhof phe­nomen­on and not the fre­quency effect?

A com­menter in the St. Paul Pioneer Press online for­um used the more pop­u­lar term Baader-Meinhof phe­nomen­on after hear­ing about the ultra-left-wing ter­ror­ist group Baader-Meinhof Gang, also known as the Red Army Faction (RAF), twice in 24 hours. ³In the 1970s, a rad­ic­al group called the Baader-Meinhof Gang wreaked hav­oc in West Germany. Led by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, the group sought to bring about drastic social and polit­ic­al … Continue read­ing

The Baader-Meinhof phe­nomen­on has noth­ing to do with the ter­ror­ist group that wreaked hav­oc in Germany in the ’70s. One could make the case that it’s not ideal to ref­er­ence a group of ter­ror­ists. The phe­nomen­on could have as well have been named any­thing else. But it stuck.

Perceiving Patterns Amidst the Noise

So, what about that obscure song from the ’80s, then? The Baader-Meinhof phe­nomen­on, the cog­nit­ive bias that impacts our per­cep­tion of fre­quency, might be at play. 

Our brains are con­stantly scan­ning for new and recently dis­covered stim­uli. In the pro­cess, we may encounter hun­dreds of poten­tial instances of the Baader-Meinhof phe­nomen­on over a week. However, only a hand­ful of these instances will resur­face with­in that time frame. This select­ive per­cep­tion can be attrib­uted to our brain’s inher­ent desire for nov­elty and abil­ity to fil­ter out less per­tin­ent inform­a­tion subconsciously.

When we notice a pat­tern, such as hear­ing the same obscure song repeatedly, the Baader-Meinhof phe­nomen­on kicks in. Our brains focus on this spe­cif­ic stim­u­lus, mak­ing it seem as though we are encoun­ter­ing it more fre­quently than before. In real­ity, the song may have been play­ing in the back­ground of our lives all along, but we failed to notice it until our atten­tion was drawn to it.

As we nav­ig­ate our lives, our brains sub­con­sciously fil­ter out inform­a­tion that does not imme­di­ately per­tain to our interests or exper­i­ences. This cog­nit­ive fil­ter­ing plays a crit­ic­al role in the Baader-Meinhof phe­nomen­on, allow­ing us to hone in on spe­cif­ic stim­uli while dis­reg­ard­ing oth­ers. Consequently, we may per­ceive that we encounter cer­tain instances of the phe­nomen­on more fre­quently than oth­ers, even though they may all be equally pre­val­ent in our lives.

Cognitive Filtering and Its Impact on Perception

We live in an inter­con­nec­ted soci­ety. We shouldn’t under­es­tim­ate the chaot­ic net­work effects.

Maybe many people in your area heard that same song on the radio that day. Maybe lots of them reacted in the same way I did.

There’s a pos­sib­il­ity that your ini­tial feel­ing indeed is right; a tiny spark could lead to a but­ter­fly effect and increase the like­li­hood of you encoun­ter­ing the same thing soon again due to this spread­ing chain of events. ⁴We all get caught by cook­ies while search­ing for vari­ous web pages. And we’ve crossed paths on this par­tic­u­lar web page, right? Without noti­cing it, algorithms might amp­li­fy the Baader-Meinhof … Continue read­ing

The Baader-Meinhof phe­nomen­on, a fas­cin­at­ing cog­nit­ive bias, influ­ences our per­cep­tion of fre­quency and pre­val­ence, often leav­ing us with the impres­sion that we encounter newly dis­covered stim­uli more often than we are. 

By under­stand­ing the under­ly­ing mech­an­isms of this phe­nomen­on, we can bet­ter appre­ci­ate the com­plex work­ings of our brains and the subtle ways in which cog­nit­ive biases shape our per­cep­tion of reality.

The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon