It’s always good to find out that something you’ve experienced thousands of times in your life actually has a name:

Baader-Meinhof is the phenomenon where one happens upon some obscure piece of information– often an unfamiliar word or name– and soon afterwards encounters the same subject again, often repeatedly. Anytime the phrase “That’s so weird, I just heard about that the other day” would be appropriate, the utterer is hip-deep in Baader-Meinhof.

The coinage of the name is (apparently) explained in the comments. The phenomenon is probably at least partly explained by the recency effect, where the last thing that somebody learns is more likely to be recalled first, but it doesn’t make it any less odd when it happens to you. I most memorably had this with Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division, which is not a bad thing to show a cognitive bias towards.

Of course, reading this post is likely to make the reader now see references to the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon everywhere within the next few days or so. The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon Phenomenon, anyone?

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