Steve in Neenah, Wisconsin, says he’d not heard the term suss out in a long time, but then suddenly he was hearing again it in several different places. What he’s experiencing is the frequency illusion, also known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon or blue car syndrome. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Noticing Something and Then Seing It Everywhere”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hey, Martha.
Hey, who’s this?
This is Steve Pable in Nino, Wisconsin.
Hi, Steve. What’s going on?
Well, I was wondering about a seemingly strange phenomenon a number of weeks back. I had run across a rather obscure phrase that I had heard before, to suss out. And it seems to me I heard it on the 1A with Joshua Johnson. And that’s it. And anyhow, I heard the expression, OK, I don’t know what that means. But then I saw it, I think, in an article not long after and then heard it on the radio again.
When you saw in the space of maybe three weeks, I thought, that’s just bizarre. How does something I have not heard for years and years and years suddenly crop up in the space of a few weeks? And I thought it was somehow somebody decided it was time to resurrect that phrase again. Or I’m not sure what was going on there. And I didn’t know if that was just me noticing. But I have not seen it since, that I recall, and I had not encountered it for years before that.
Well, there are a couple things at play here. One is, it’s interesting, most people do what you do. They suspect that the world around them has done something clever, and it’s not them.
Yeah, right.
And usually it isn’t the world that did something clever. It’s usually our brains did something clever to our consciousness, and I think that’s what’s happened to you.
There are a lot of names for this, but it is sometimes known as the blue car syndrome, where you buy or you see a blue car of a particular kind, and then you start to notice it everywhere. It’s also called the Bader-Meinhof phenomenon. There’s a story about someone who had never heard of the Bader-Meinhof gang. He’s a terrorist, and then they started seeing the name everywhere.
But it’s more commonly known in linguistics as the frequency illusion, which is an expression coined by the linguist Arnold Zwicky. And he kind of explains this, and I’m going to abbreviate this, but there’s two parts to what happens in our brains when we have the frequency illusion.
One is we have selective attention, which means in our given day, we don’t notice very much that’s going on around us. Most of us are not hyper aware. We’re focused on the things that we need to be focused on and the things that we have to do. But when we do notice something and believe it to be important or somehow it seems significant to us, often just because it’s new, then we become consciously aware. We’re cued. We’re primed, as they say in linguistics. We’re primed to be even more aware of it.
So on top of that, the fact that we’re now even more aware of a thing that seems to be important because it’s new, we have confirmation bias, which means that every time we see that thing again, we begin to feel that it’s significant. And this is kind of tied into the way that many of us believe that coincidences are somehow important, even though they’re just coincidences. They’re just chance, luck, and they don’t have a larger significance to anything spiritual or anything at all in the world.
So there’s a kind of another term here from psychology. There’s a kind of synchronicity happening here in that we’re drawing a conclusion about the repeated appearance of a thing. We’re assigning it an importance it probably does not have. It’s not a deep state thing or anything.
No, it’s nothing like that. Now, terms do have a vogue. Many of us do read the same authors and we read the same journalists. And so if a journalist in the New York Times whose story is read by 700,000 people uses a particular word or phrase that is unusual, it is possible that some of those readers will then begin to use it. But generally what’s happening here is our brains are tricking us into thinking that something is newly important when it is not newly important.
Yeah, well, very, very interesting. I suspect it could be something along those lines, but yeah, I’ll be keeping an eye out for it and see if it was just merely coincidence.
All right, cool. So, well, what a pleasure to talk to you both and enjoy your show so much, obviously. And, yeah, glad you bring so much passion to it.
Steve, thank you so much.
Thank you. That means a lot.
Take care now.
You bet. Take care.
All right. Bye-bye.
Bye-bye now.
