Questa volta abbiamo cercato: Every time I learn a new word I swear it pops up in movies and books I have seen/read and never noticed, am I the only one?
I have noticed in my life that every time I learn a new word, I see it EVERYWHERE! But I am more shocked when I rewatch movies and reread books that I see these words and have never actually “seen” when I was younger. I am not someone who prescribes to the idea that we live in a simulation, but sometimes I feel like my past is being rewritten as I learn these words. I logically know that I never paid attention to these words and I filled in the meaning with surrounding words, but I can’t help but feel that these word are being inserted into my life narrative and it ends up changing my understanding of the world then and now (if that makes any sense). As I am writing this it sounds stupid and I feel like I am the only one who goes through this. After three decades it keeps happening and I guess I am wondering if this is a common experience or just a product of being inattentive.
Ed ecco le risposte:
This is a common thing basically everyone experiences. So common that it has a name: Baader-Meinhof phenomenon
The Baader-Meinhof Effect! Basically, learning something new causes it stick in your mind a bit easier than something you already know, making whatever you learned stick out easier when you see it.
Every time I buy a new car, everyone else buys the same car.
It’s not quite the same, but after me and my now-ex broke up, her name seemed to come up everywhere; people I meet, newspapers, books, video games, even my dungeons and dragons DM unintentionally named a character after her.
RAS, or reticular activation system.
Part of your brain that filters out unnecessary or uninteresting info.
Once it’s tagged something as being interesting, or relevent to you, it pings your brain to take notice of it, rather than ignore it, whenever you encounter it again.
It’s why you can hear your own name over a loud crowd talking (sometimes), or when you buy a new car and suddenly notice how many of the same car were on the roads before. When you actively “learn” a new word you train your RAS to look out for it, until it stops being as interewrint/relevent.