Anthony Liu Week #16: The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon

I first heard the term “Baader-Meinhof phenomenon” in a psychology podcast I half-listened to while pretending to clean my room. It’s that strange thing where you learn about something, whether an idea, a word, a random object, and then suddenly, it starts popping up everywhere. You hear one Arctic Monkeys song, and now it’s in every Instagram reel, highlight , and Spotify suggestion. It’s not magic. It’s just how our brains work.

Still, the first time it happened to me, it did feel like some kind of cosmic joke.

I remember in middle school, a friend casually mentioned a fruit called a persimmon. I’d never heard of it and laughed, thinking that a fruit called "per simon" could not possibly exist. But the very next day, I saw persimmons—actual persimmons—on the kitchen counter. My mom had never bought them before but had because of a sale, and now they were waiting on my countertop as if manifesting themselves there just to prove me wrong. After that, they were everywhere:  diet recipes, a tree growing in my friend's backyard, and even a weird smoothie that I had never noticed on the menu of a local cafe.

At first, I chalked it up to coincidence. But it kept happening. Hear someone mention a niche philosopher? Now they're quoted in a book I randomly pick up. And it always feels personal, like the universe is winking at you.

Psychologists say it’s just your brain being selective. It’s not that the thing is happening more often; it’s just that you’re paying more attention.

But even knowing that, it still feels kind of magical.

While I was surfing YouTube and making an excuse to myself that I was looking for a good background playlist to study, I stumbled across a video affectionately titled, How to Get an A Even If You’re Bad at Studying. Finding it intriguing (and just a bit personally attacked) I clicked on it. Throughout the video, the guy talked about the same effect, but applied to studying.

See, while the traditional way of studying is often sitting at a desk for a given amount of time, fully locked in and focused on the subject, he proposed an alternative. By reviewing a concept many times throughout the day, this kind of continuous spaced repetition might actually be more beneficial to the brain.

Now, you may be thinking it’s impossible to study effectively 20+ times a day, but simply applying concepts you’ve learned to the real world can be review enough. For example, considering whether me struggling to get my locker open was an example of encoding failure or retrieval failure.

I think there’s something really human about that, how we find patterns out of chaos. Whether it’s a fruit, a philosopher, or a study trick on YouTube, once you notice it, you start to realize how much was already there—just waiting for you to pay attention.

The Yellow Car Theory