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What has you experiencing the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon?

The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon is when you never noticed something or saw something before, and then you see it everywhere.

For example say you see a chipmunk in an area you never noticed them before, and now you just see chipmunks everywhere.

52 comments
  • Omg this has a name?! It's one of my favorite things to happen lol

    Okay so uh...back when I had a really tough assignment and I didn't wanna study for it and I had just one day left. I was talking to a girl on Facebook about not doing my assignment and she sent me something that she uses to write her homework, well I looked it up and it worked brilliantly, I was able to submit my assignment in time with zero effort.

    Next week everyone was using chatgpt for assignments

  • I bought a car early last year that an odd grey gloss/non-metallic colour. Since then I’ve been seeing a lot of different vehicles in an identical colour across multiple manufacturers. It’s trippy because I swear I’d never seen the colour before (obviously I just hadn’t noticed it).

  • Gilles Deleuze, once I learned about him for some reason. It was an odd experience.

    • Gilles Deleuze

      I only found out about him within the past couple years, and I probably have only scratched the surface of his philosophy. But I almost immediately understood that he was a person of tremendous genius, and historically recent enough that his ideas have yet to be fully comprehended. His synthesis of Marx and Freud is like a wet dream for me, I couldn't imagine a better topic of inquiry. This article provides a pretty good summary of some of his major ideas and theories.

      https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/#AntiOedi

      • To this day, I haven't the foggiest what the fuck he and Guattari were trying to say, but think the concept of the rhizome can be useful insofar as I think I understand it.

        sigh Gonna have to try again. Started reading Benjamin's Arcades Project recently in a similar fit of "shit you referenced in grad school and successfully bullshitted your way through because no one else actually understands it either" guilt, may as well do it for the big D too.

        My experience re: this phenomenon was "I stared at A Thousand Plateaus for a while, then all of a sudden every fucking thing I read afterwards mentioned this guy."

52 comments