What is Baader-Meinhof? Well,
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 ( definition source: www.urbandictionary.com).
Does it sound strange? Or, did
you experience this phenomenon earlier? However, if you didn't experience it before
in your life then you will experience it soon :). Usually, people express such coincidences
by making a surprise remark like “OMG.I just heard about that or we just talked
about that.” People caught in such situation is known to have experiencing
Baader-Meinof effect. For example, you have just heard about a person or his
name and what happens is within a short period of time you start noticing that
person almost every day. But, the weird thing in such incident is that you have
never noticed or seen that person at any time in past before you have heard the
name of that particular person.
Lots of people experience this
phenomenon a few times in their lives. Now, the question arises, what can be
the underlying cause of Baader- Meinhof? The answer is very simple. It’s
somewhat like experiencing a highly meaningful coincidence, or almost bearing
similarity to synchronicity which invokes a feeling of mild surprise and
coincidental intersection of events which cause someone to think about this bizarre
reality.
Who termed this phenomenon? What
is the Baader-Meinhof history?
It is said that after hearing the
name of the German left-wing militant group Baader-Meinhof twice in 24 hours, a
commenter, on the St. Paul Pioneer Press online discussion board, has coined
the term Baader-Meinhof. And this wordsmith’s termed phrase has become popular
afterwards and with time its popularity spreads through newspapers and finally
spreads to the World Wide Web. However, earlier people used to call this phenomenon
as Baader-Meinof group.
The scientific reason behind the Baader-Meinhof
syndrome, which is also known as frequency illusion, is very simple. The human
brain is a fantastic pattern recognition engine as it collects and stores so
many words, names, and ideas each day and thus, by considering this fact, as a
result what we see is that we come across and encounter the same information
again within a short interval of time. But the interesting thing is that we
only come up with those events which has certain impact on our mind. The reason
behind Baader-Meinhof or repetitive event is nothing but it's a kind of our
brains' prejudice towards patterns and the tendency of ignoring the
uninteresting information and sticking to interesting and selective attention
which lies within our deep unconscious mind.
