Do you ever learn (or relearn!) about something then feel like you’re hearing about it everywhere?!

This happens to me often, especially the more I read. For example, we were watching Mad Men last summer and the 1968 Democratic National Convention (the one in Chicago with rioting) was mentioned in an episode, then it was the anniversary of it shortly thereafter, then I read about it in Becoming.

It’s happened more recently, too. I read about the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster in An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, then we watched a video about it in work training last week, and now the fiction book I am reading (Light from Other Stars) focuses on it too. What a coincidence, right?

Maybe not. There’s something called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon*, which is a term for frequency illusion – “the illusion in which a word, a name, or other thing that has recently come to one’s attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards.” (<— from Wikipedia)

So when we learn something new, it’s fresh in our mind, and we pay more attention to other mentions of it, which is called selective attention. Then, confirmation basis, which makes us search for or interpret information in a way that confirms what we already believe, makes us think this is new information that wasn’t mentioned as frequently before, because we are just now noticing it. But we are really just paying attention to information we were ignoring before. Interesting!

That must be part of what is happening to me, but I also feel like the Challenger mention is coincidental. Sure, it would be in an astronaut’s memoir from the end of the twentieth century, but for it to pop up in training class, then in some random book I chose to read? That seems random.

Whatever causes it, it sure is making me remember things I should have already remembered from history class!

Today in history; the first time Leo ever tried a french fry!

I used to have an amazing memory. It’s really not as good as it used to be. So I gotta keep writing here, and keep putting things in my calendar, and in other notes!

*Click on that link to see why it’s called that – it’s interesting!