Baader Meinhof Phenomenon and Apophenia

The Baader Meinhof phenomenon,recency illusion,frequency illusion,this particular phenomenon goes by a lot of names.It's a nifty little illusion that most of us encounter on a daily basis,in fact since you have read about this,expect to see this word pop up in the near future.Seeing or hearing things that we recently encountered is one of the many cognitive biases we experience all thanks to our brains constantly trying to decipher new information and find new patterns in everything.

Some even argue coincidences themselves are a result of our flawed perception of reality.One may say Baader Meinhof Phenomenon and other coincidental events are a special case of selective attention.

The brains awesome power to decipher patterns in random data is apparent in certain other phenomena we experience daily:

• It's the reason we see faces in seemingly random things,an effect we know as Pareidolia.
• Gambler's fallacy,also known as The Monte Carlo fallcy is the belief that if something happens more frequently,the chances of the same event occurring in the future are lessened.
• The famous 27 club and 23 enigma are also famous examples

All of the above are examples of Apophenia, the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena.

Cognitive biases are one of the most interesting things to study,our brains control the very nature of our reality and how we perceive it.Even though we actively know about these effects,we can't help but be affected by them.