Have you ever noticed that when you talk (or even been thinking) about something you like (or even don’t like), and then you start noticing songs, quotes or even strangers talking about that particular thing; it could be flowers, perfume or even an electronic device.

Let’s take another example, you talk about moving to a certain city, and then articles, ads or people mentioning the name of the city, billboards showing the name and even the newspapers headlines just appear to have the same city name in them. This and so many other coincidences make you feel like the world is somehow conspiring around the thing you liked (or disliked).

But in reality, it was all always there — you just weren’t paying attention. The difference is that now your brain has decided it matters, so suddenly it starts noticing it everywhere.

This real and pretty cool psychological quirk is called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon — weird name, weird pronunciation and the phenomenon itself is kind of weird, too!

The term was coined in the 1970s, when a person read about a German militant group called the Baader-Meinhof Group for the first time in a media report following the armed prison escape of Andreas Baader, with the assistance of journalist Ulrike Meinhof. This event attracted widespread media attention and led the Baader-Meinhof term being used as the label for the organisation, overshadowing its official name, the Red Army Faction (RAF). The term kept reappearing for one reason or the other. People started talking about this as “it keeps appearing everywhere” feeling and called it the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (although the militant group had nothing to do with the phenomenon).

Later, scientists gave it a simpler name: ‘frequency illusion’, because it’s really about your brain noticing something more often, not that it actually appears more. In short, your awareness has been activated, so now your brain flags it as ‘important,’ and makes you notice it more.

So, what’s the deal?

Now you know that it’s not the magic happening around you. But your clever grey cells are behind this all and they do it in a two-part process.

Selective attention: Once your brain gets hooked on something, it quietly scans for it in the background. Like you normally don’t pay more attention to the colour of cars on the road. But if your dad tells you that soon we’ll buy a new red-coloured car. From that moment onwards, you’ll start seeing red cars more. On your way to school, coming back, at a café, near your friend’s house or perhaps parked somewhere. Did the number of red cars suddenly increase? Nope. Your brain started scanning the red-coloured cars more.

Confirmation bias: Every time you notice the thing again, you take it as proof that it’s happening “all the time,” even though you’re just more aware of it now.

But why does this happen?

Our attention is limited to the things present around us, and we subconsciously ignore a lot. But the moment something aligns with our thoughts or emotions, like a word, a colour or even a feeling, our brain takes it as important and cuts every distraction along the way; shows us that particular thing or make us aware of its presence more. And then we naïve feel like ‘it’s everywhere’.

Thus, in short, the ‘frequency illusion’ shows us that what we perceive as reality is often shaped by our own awareness and attention. It was always there — it’s just that our brain plays tricks on us. When it thinks something isn’t important, it ignores it, but when it decides it matters, it fills in the information and makes us notice it more.

Published in Dawn, Young World, September 6th, 2025