I’m a reader. I like to read about technology, finance, politics, or anything that is well-written. One of the benefits to reading is you come across some fancy name for something that you figured already had a fancy name but you just didn’t know how to look it up.
That fancy name is Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. This is apparently another one of those cognitive biases that, in my opinion, has its roots in the human mind’s inability to deal with abstract concepts particularly surrounding numbers.
I’m almost certain I’ve read something about that numbers thing but can’t find out what it’s referred to as.
It reminds me of something like the cognitive dissonance experienced when reasoning from certain anthropocentric opinions. I’m not formally trained in any of this, however, I’m not convinced that the experts are much better either (particularly in psychology or psychiatry).
Baader-Meinhof phenomenon
This is that weird feeling of noticing things. The problem comes about because before you knew what something was, or had a name for it, or every put even a modicum of thought into it, that there wasn’t a solid memory of it for your brain to compare to when you see it again.
As something becomes more recognisable, you remember it specifically, which then creates a sort of positive feedback loop and you feel like you’re suddenly seeing the thing everywhere.
This can have some very unfortunate side effects. As the above linked Heathline article points out, if a doctor spends all their time poring over medical journals to learn about new techniques or diseases, the doctor will be more likely to misdiagnose patients with those new conditions as they are fresh in the mind.
The name of the phenomenon actually refers to a terrorist group active in the 1970s. This is because someone noticed a mention of the group somewhere, then suddenly starts seeing references all over to the terrorist group. Part of this is is likely ascribed to just how bad we are at recalling details:
What does the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon have to do with Japanese?
If I’ve done a halfway good job of describing the BMP, then hopefully you realise that this happens all the time with Japanese, especially if you’ve spent time in Japan.
Once you spend some time learning about a kanji, or a grammar point, then you go and have a conversation with someone and that exact thing comes up. Now, if you didn’t know the word, it would just be an almost meaningless sound in a conversation, on top of how many meaningless sounds that you’ve already sat through in trying to learn the language.
So why pay any attention to it? The point is you don’t (or maybe more accurately, can’t). However, once you’ve learnt that word, now it will pop out at you, and you’ll perhaps even have the feeling of deja vu wash over you, making it even more memorable.
This is the way you reinforce things. Reading 1000 words a day and trying to learn is unlikely to work that well. Will you recall any of them even 10 minutes later? That’s why I like to spend time looking over past lists than trying new ones. A word that I want to learn and saved in a list and get tested on is going to stick in my mind much better.
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