Ep69 "Why do you see something everywhere after you've seen it once?"

What does the Baader-Meinhof Group, a West German terrorist group from the 1970s, have to do with  the front of your brain, attention, salience, and synchronicity? And why might you soon hear about the Baader-Meinhof Group again, not for political reasons, but for reasons to do with your own neural networks? Join Eagleman for a dive into how we take in the world around us -- and how we get fooled about the frequencies of events.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Why am I going to start today's brain science episode
by telling you about the beater Mainhoff group, which was
a West German far left terrorist group in the nineteen seventies.
This political group is fully irrelevant to any modern discussions
and their political positions are totally irrelevant to neuroscience. So

(00:27):
what do these domestic terrorists have to do with attention
and salience and the front of your brain and synchronicity?
And why might you soon hear about the better Minehoff group?
Again not for political reasons, but for reasons to do
with your own brain. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me

(00:51):
David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford and
in these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound
universe to understand the intersection between how the brain works
and how we experience life. So let's start in nineteen

(01:15):
seventy when a far left wing militant group called beater
Mainhoff also known as the Red Army Faction, they took
to the streets in Germany. Now they define themselves as
communist and anti imperialist, and they launched a string of
robberies and then bombings, and eventually assassinations, and this all

(01:37):
brought a lot of bloodshed and pain to Germany throughout
the decade. Okay, now, who cares about the beater Minhoff Gang. Well,
unless this touched your life in the nineteen seventies, probably nobody.
So why am I telling you about this gang? Are
they coming back? No, happily they are long defunct. But

(01:58):
the joy of today's podcast is that I get to
make a prediction that you will hear about Bader Mainehoff
again and it probably won't be too long. And then
you'll think, Wow, I just heard about that on Eagelman's podcast,
and now I'm hearing about it again. Now, how can
I make a prediction like that? Well, the important part

(02:19):
of our story began two decades after the beater Minehoff Kang.
It began with a man named Terry Mullen in nineteen
ninety four. Now, Terry, like probably most people, had never
heard of the batter Minehoff Gang, and then he heard
about them. He heard their name, and then he was
surprised to hear the name a second time within twenty

(02:42):
four hours, and he thought that was just sort of
weird and amazing that he had just learned that name
and then he heard it a second time, so he
informally posted about that on the Saint Paul Pioneer Press
online discussion board, and others immediately chimed in that they
had noticed this general pattern before. There had been times

(03:04):
when they had learned a new concept or name, and
then they began to see it everywhere, and this phenomenon
of learning something new and then seeing it again shortly after,
or seeing it all over the place. Everyone started chiming
in on the discussion board that they had noticed this
kind of thing before. So the original poster named this

(03:26):
the Beaiter Meinhoff phenomenon, and it quickly blossomed into a meme,
first on the discussion board, then nationally, then internationally. Now
you've probably noticed this in your own life. You see
some item or some new term, and then you see
it again and again. It's not necessarily something really popular
that everyone's talking about, but seemingly something more obscure. Once

(03:51):
you've heard of something, you start noticing it everywhere, like
you've just learned a new word when you're totally sure
you've never heard before, and then seemingly out of nowhere,
you hear it several times in a week where maybe
you learn about some obscure piece of technology and suddenly
it appears elsewhere on your news feed, or your friend

(04:12):
mentions it out of the blue. If you chew on
this for a second, you'll definitely be able to come
up with examples where you learned some new piece of trivia,
or you became interested in some new type of shoe
and then suddenly it seems like you encounter that particular
fact again, or you see that shoe everywhere you go.
That is the beatter Minehoff phenomenon. A friend recently reported

(04:36):
this to me. When his wife got pregnant, he started
noticing pregnant women everywhere. Suddenly the world was filled with
women about to give birth. Where were they all before?
And the better Minehoff phenomenon happens to me a lot.
It happens that I'm thinking about getting a new vehicle now,
so I've been paying more attention to car models on
the road around me, and I've spotted a couple of

(04:59):
makes and models where I thought, hey, I kind of
like that I've never noticed that vehicle before, and now
I'm seeing it everywhere. It makes me feel that these
models that I had never seen before, that they're proliferating,
they're driving past me in the street, they're parked in
my neighborhood, they're featured in a movie I'm watching. The
impression is that the universe is echoing what I just learned. Now,

(05:24):
as you've probably guessed because this is a neuroscience podcast,
this phenomenon isn't about the universe making things appear more frequently. Instead,
it's a quirk of your psychology. You are having the
illusion that the frequency has increased to this end. In
two thousand and five, the Stanford linguist ARNOLDSWICKI gave a

(05:47):
more official name to the beter Mainhoff phenomenon. He coined
this the frequency illusion, and that name captures the idea
more precisely. Even though this remains more widely known by
its origine meme name. I've also heard this referred to
by the way as the red car illusion or the
blue car effect, meaning that when you start paying attention

(06:09):
to red or blue cars you see them everywhere. But
whatever we call it, it's all about the illusion of
the frequency of a previously unknown thing increasing, and you
can see this in many guyses. For example, I've noticed
a fascinating conflation between online ads and the beta Meinhoff effect.

(06:31):
It goes like this. A friend is surfing around and
spends a moment admiring a new band or a new
kitchen item, and then she's surfing around the next day
and sees more of these ads for the same thing.
So she blames cookies and invasive adwere and yes, of
course this is part of why she's seeing that thing more.

(06:52):
But this model of big brother can quickly get stretched
beyond sensibility when the new item is next noticed on
a billboard or overheard in a conversation. People will sometimes
make crazy arguments that there's a more devious ad network
at play here, But this is simply the Beater Minehoff

(07:12):
phenomenon in action. Now, just before we move into understanding
why this happens, I'll tell you a quick academic joke.
A student says to her friend, have you ever heard
of the beatter Minehoff phenomenon? And the other replies, that's
so strange. I just read about that yesterday. Okay, So
we have a sense of what the phenomenon is, and

(07:34):
the question we're going to ask today is why does
it occur? Because what we notice and when tells a
deeper story about how we engage with the world around us.
So with the beta Minehoff phenomenon, we're always tempted to say, no,
I'm definitely sure that I've never seen that before. It's

(07:54):
not that I'm having some perceptual illusion. It's that I
really never heard that term in my life before yesterday,
and now I've heard it twice. But that's generally not
the case. It's simply that we don't notice those things
that are not relevant to us. The beta Mindhoff phenomenon
is not some trick of the universe. Instead, it is

(08:16):
the love child of two psychological processes running under the hood.
The first issue is selective attention. Now, people sometimes think
that selective attention just means you're not listening to your
spouse or kids, but in fact, selective attention is our
brain's way of managing the enormous amount of information that

(08:39):
it encounters. Remember that your brain lives in silence and darkness,
and it's trying to make a model of the whole
world out there. But the whole world is way too
complex and it's overflowing with detail, almost all of which
is meaningless to you. So your brain is selective about
what it looks for and what it takes in. So

(09:00):
think about the last time you walked through a crowded marketplace.
The sites, the sounds, the smell. It's more details than
you could ever encode or whatever want to encode. So
your attention acts like a filter. Now, let's get straight
what we mean by a filter. Sometimes you might think

(09:22):
that what this means is that you're taking everything in
and then you're throwing out the stuff you don't want.
But filtering is generally harsher than that. You don't even
take stuff in unless it matches a shape for you.
So think about those children's toys where you have a
box and you put in a square object into the
square hole, or a triangular object into the triangle hole,

(09:44):
or a circular object. Those are filters. And if I
hand you a hexagon, it doesn't even go in. It's
not that the box considers hexagons and then spits it
back out, it's that it doesn't even make it into
the box. Now, from the brain's point of view, how
does it know what things to filter in and out? Well,

(10:05):
you pay attention to certain things because you have networks
housed primarily in the prefrontal cortex for deciding what information
is relevant or salient, and this is constantly updating from
your experience. In other words, your brain is always asking, hey,
what is the important stuff that I need to pay

(10:25):
attention to? What stuff matters here? So when you encounter
new information, like hearing that cool new band or seeing
the cool new shoes, this network updates and subsequently your
brain can take in this information. Now, let's flip this

(11:00):
notion of selective attention and look at what can happen
if you're simply not paying attention to something. This is
called inattentional blindness, and it says though you never even
see the thing at all. So I'll give you an example.
I did an episode some weeks ago about why magic
tricks work, and a lot pivots on exactly this issue

(11:23):
of inattentional blindness. Something can happen right in front of you,
but if you're not watching for it. In other words,
your attention is elsewhere. The photons hit your eyes, but
you don't see it. The magician moves his hand in
an arc, or pretends he's throwing something in the air,
or there's a snap of the fingers right over here,

(11:46):
and suddenly the card slip happens. Right there, but it
says though it didn't happen, why because your attention has
been pulled elsewhere. Now, as an example of this that
I'm guessing most people have seen, consider the Invisible Gorilla video.
If you haven't seen this, search for it on YouTube.

(12:08):
But pause this podcast here because what's coming next is
a spoiler. The way this works is you see several
people and half are wearing one shirt color and the
other half is wearing a different color. And each team
passes a basketball, but only two other members of their team,
but they're all intermixed, so they're passing and moving between

(12:30):
one another, and your job is to count the number
of times the ball is passed by one of the teams.
So you count, Okay, there's one pass, Then that person
throws to another person on their team. Okay, that's two.
Then that person throws to another team member. Okay, that's three.
Like that, but it's challenging because to keep an accurate account,

(12:52):
you have to ignore what the other team is doing.
So you get to the end of the video and
you say, great, I got it. This team made twelve passes,
and you're told the answer, And let's say the answer
is twelve you got it right. But then you're asked,
but did you notice the gorilla? And then the video
is shown again, the exact same video, and now you're

(13:14):
not counting passes. You're just looking at the big picture.
You're watching the video with a different context. And now
you see something that blows your mind, which is that
a guy in a gorilla suit walks right into the
middle of the basketball players and he turns and faces
the camera and thumps his chest, and then he struts

(13:34):
out stage left, and all the while the basketball players
are just continuing to pass the balls between them. Now,
almost everybody doesn't notice the gorilla the first time they
watched the video. Why It's because their attention is so
focused on counting the passes. So given that our visual
attention is limited, we miss the things that were not

(13:57):
specifically focused on. And this is why it's known as
inattentional blindness. Now, this can all be seen as a downside,
but it's actually just what a brain needs to do
to navigate its complex environment. It focuses on certain signals
while ignoring others. For example, think about when you're at

(14:17):
a noisy cafe. You have to selectively focus on your
companion's voice and not hear all the irrelevant conversations around you,
even though all of this hits your ear drums like.

Speaker 2 (14:30):
This, But what you attend to is this, Hi, can
I get you something?

Speaker 1 (14:46):
So it's obviously very useful to be able to selectively
attend because the world is a cacophonous flood, and selective
attention allows us to zoom in on the signals of interest.
I'm just gonna take a one second tangent to give
you a sense of something here. Some of you know
that I spun a company out of my lab called

(15:07):
Neo Sensory, And in this company, we make a wristband
for people who are deaf, and the wristband has a
microphone that picks up on the sounds around you, and
then it turns those sounds into patterns vibration on the skin.
So it's doing what your inner ear, your cochlea is doing.
We're just transferring that job to the skin. Now, here's
what I wanted to touch on. Typically, when someone puts

(15:29):
this on for the first time, they say, WHOA, I'm
feeling so much buzzing going on around here, and it
takes them a little while to understand that all this
buzzing is part of this soundscape around them. In other words,
the next time you're at the cafe, pay attention not
just to your companion's conversation, but really listen to all

(15:51):
the sounds that are hitting your ears. The overhead music
and the barista and the coffee machines, and the doors
opening and closing, and the squeaking and every single one
of the conversations going on around you. All of that
is hitting your ear drums. We're so good at ignoring
all of that that we only take in what is
salient to us. And it's only when you push that

(16:13):
information in through a new channel, like through your wrist,
that you realize how much noise is actually out there.
Your brain has to learn how to pay selective attention
to the vibrations on your wrist. Okay, so that's selective attention.
How does this kind of thing get studied in the
neuroscience laboratory. Well, think of something like a card game

(16:36):
like the one called Set or something called the Wisconsin
Card Sorting Task. And in games like this, each card
has some number of shapes of a certain color. So
this card might have three blue diamonds and this one
has four red squares, and that one has two green circles.
And let's say you're trying to match a certain property

(16:58):
between cards, like the blue color and the shapes and
the number of shapes. That doesn't matter. So because you're
holding this rule in mind match the color, the neural
networks in your visual cortex are mostly responding just to
the color you stare at the cards, but really it's
only your neurons involved in color that are shouting off.

(17:22):
Now the rule changes and you have to pay attention
to the number of objects. So you match a card
with three shapes over here to a card with three
shapes over there. Now, what hits your eyes is exactly
the same, but the cells in your brain that are
responding are those involved in numeracy and same when you're

(17:42):
concentrating on matching shapes, like you want to match squares
here with squares there. Your brain now plays a very
different game. Everything hits the eyes, but your brain only
really runs the algorithms involved in shape. So we can
see selective attention directly in the brain. So back to
the beta Miinhoff effect. Our brains encode almost nothing around

(18:05):
us unless it somehow becomes relevant to us. Once something
has been flagged as important or interesting to your brain,
you will notice it more, creating the illusion that it
is suddenly everywhere, And that leads us to the second
parent of the better Minhoft love child, which is another
psychological process running under the hood. The first was selective attention.

(18:30):
The second is called confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is our
tendency to notice everything that confirms what we already believe.
We notice that we focus on it, we give greater
credence to it. So generally we talk about confirmation bias
as favoring information that confirms our pre existing beliefs and

(18:53):
disregarding evidence that contradicts our beliefs. Or we seek out
information that supports our existing views, or we interpret ambiguous
evidence in a way that supports our existing opinions. But
in this case of the beta Minhoff phenomenon, there's a
simpler aspect of this going on. We are simply more
likely to take the second appearance of the new word

(19:16):
or car or shoe as something meaningful. Our brains are
now on the lookout for it, and every time we
see it or hear that word or song or fact again,
that strengthens our belief our conviction that the event is
happening with increased frequency, and lots of research shows that

(19:36):
we remember information that supports our beliefs more readily than
information that contradicts them. So once a new piece of
information is introduced to our minds, like the name of
a band or a new gadget, confirmation bias makes us
believe that the thing is now suddenly ubiquitous. Every time

(19:57):
we see it, we further sum meant this belief into place.
So researchers typically talk about the beta Minhoff phenomenon in
terms of selective attention and confirmation bias. But because I
talk about internal models all the time, I want to
cast what we're talking about today in terms of that.
So as a reminder, your brain works to make a

(20:19):
model of what is going on in the world out there.
That's the internal model. Now, the part I want to
emphasize is just how that actually limits your perception of
the world. So let me give you an example. Imagine
that you're on a hike with friends, and as you're
tramping up the trails, one of your friends is a

(20:40):
mycologist who studies mushrooms, and he notices the colors and
unusually broad variety of the mushrooms around you. Now these
fung guy at the base of trees, these have been
hitting everyone's retinas, but this detail was invisible to the
rest of you. Let's say one of your other friends
as a pediatrist, and she notices something about the subtle

(21:04):
turn of your feet as you hike, but no one
else saw that. And your other friend is a climate scientist,
and he notices the erosion around the tree line, and
that's invisible to all the rest of you, even though
all your eyes are pointing in that direction. The point
is the same, data is laid out before all of you,

(21:25):
but each of you knows how to look differently. Your
internal model is built from the raw materials of your
experience with the world, and each of us vacuums up
the data from our peculiar thin trajectory in the world,
which builds up our models and therefore our interpretations and

(21:46):
our biases based on our experiences. And that's why when
you're hiking, everyone is seeing a different world. So that's
why we notice things more once they have some relevance
to us, because the borders of your internal model have stretched,
so now your brain catches words or cars or shoes

(22:10):
that were previously just noise. These items had no filter
shaped like them, and therefore they're mentioned was as good
as invisible. Now that the model is stretched, you catch
that new thing all over the place. So let's summarize
where we are so far. Although we might swear that
we've never heard a term mentioned before, the shoddiness of

(22:34):
human memories suggests that's generally not true. Instead, what the
beter Minhof phenomenon illustrates is how deeply we filter the world.
We don't notice those things that we have no interpretation for.
So think of walking in a foreign country and hearing
people's speech simply as background noise, something you can't interpret.

(22:57):
If you then learn like the word for good or
for sorry or for thanks, then that constantly jumps out
of the conversation to your ears. Why because you can
now interpret it. It's not that people are saying it
more often, It's that you finally figured out how to
listen for it. As you better model the world, the

(23:20):
more you catch. So even though you may think you
never heard of this nineteen seventies German domestic terrorist group before,
you presumably have, but you were busy with the other
things of salience in your life, and it just didn't register.
You were counting basketball passes and missed this gorilla. If

(23:42):
you don't have a model for things, you just don't
catch them. Now, the fascinating thing about the beter Miinhoff

(24:06):
phenomenon is that it shows up in lots of ways.
Once your attention is drawn to something, some words, some car,
or some shoes, it seems to you to be everywhere.
And the linguist that I mentioned before, Arnold's Wicki points
out that there are several special cases of this. For example,
one is called the outgroup illusion, and this is where

(24:27):
there's some characteristic of a group who you don't like,
and you start seeing that characteristic more often. So, for example,
imagine that there are two groups who live on opposite
sides of the track, the Augustinians and the Justinians. So
let's say you're an Augustinian and you think the Justinians

(24:49):
are very selfish. So then anytime some Justinian happens to
act selfishly, you're noticing that, just like you would notice
the new word or the shoe chooser the car. Your
confirmation bias says, yes, I knew that was true about
those guys, but presumably you don't notice as diligently the

(25:11):
equivalent behaviors in your own group. And on the other
side of the tracks, the Justinians look at the Augustinians
and think they are very immoral. So whenever an Augustinian
behaves poorly, a version of the better Meinhoff phenomenon takes
place here, and it seems like this is a characteristic

(25:31):
that is seen a whole lot in those Augustinians. And
of course the Justinians will tend to notice less when
immoral behavior happens in their own group, because their internal
models suggest, like everybody's internal models, that their in group
generally behaves well, behaves within certain moral boundaries, but that

(25:53):
outgroup they are capable of anything. Now, relatedly, there was
a paper a couple of years ago out of Duke
Universe where they showed that if there's some group that
you feel is threatening to you, they seem more populous,
as in, there seem to be more of them, presumably
because your internal model is noticing them more. Look, there's

(26:16):
one on the sidewalk, there's one in the clothing store,
there's one in that restaurant. So just like the beta
Minhof phenomenon. Your estimates are off based on the details
of your internal model. Why does this happen Because you're
not noticing the groups that you are not threatened by.
You're noticing those individuals who belong to the group that

(26:36):
you attend to. Now, by the way, this doesn't always
need to be groups that you're threatened by or you dislike.
This can generally happen with anything you notice about groups
that are not your own. As one example is which
He also points out that some people who speak English
in one country notice things about English speakers in another country.

(26:58):
One example is the double use of the word is.
For example, someone says the thing is is that blah
blah blah. So speakers of different English dialects like Australian
or Irish or British or American will say that they
notice that other speakers use the double is, but that

(27:20):
their own country does not do this. But it turns
out that's generally not true. It's simply that you can
notice things more easily that you take to be features
of this other group that you think are unusual or
exotic features, and you notice them all the time, while
in fact it is just as common in your own
group and all this is consistent with the fact that

(27:41):
we as humans are pattern imposers. We try to capture
the world, not by writing down every megabyte of data
like a computer would, but instead by summarizing situations into
patterns that we can recognize. And one of the ways
we can see this is in how brains will impose

(28:02):
patterns onto random noise. I talked about this in previous episodes,
for example, about faces. It's so trivially easy for us
to see faces all around us because faces carry enormous
social information and we are highly pre programmed to spot faces.
And that's why you see a face in the electrical

(28:24):
outlet in your wall, or in the burn marks of
a piece of toast, or on the face of the moon.
Anything that even vaguely resembles two eyes and the line
down and a line across will generally trigger your attention,
because your brain thinks there is a face out there,
and for reasons of threat or opportunity, it really cares
about that. Now, in the visual domain, we call this paradolia,

(28:48):
but this is a subset of a more general phenomenon
called apophenia, which just refers to imposing patterns on noisy data.
For example, participant in the lab will impose voices onto
random noise, and in other studies, investors tend to see

(29:08):
trends and patterns in stock prices that are essentially random,
and that leads to over confidence in predicting future stock movements.
And this is exactly what happens to us all the
time we erroneously detect patterns. One particularly egregious example of
this is when people claim that they have good or

(29:30):
bad red light karma or parking karma. Now, I don't
need to tell you that there is no such thing.
The electronics underlying the city traffic department does not keep
a light green or red for you, nor, as far
as we can tell, are those electronics influenced by any
sort of deity to help you at the expense of

(29:52):
others to make a green light. No matter how much
your deity likes you, he presumably doesn't manipulate the electronics
lying your local city traffic department, and certainly none of
the engineers who work there have ever noticed an anomaly.
And it's the same with your parking. Your deity, although
a fan of yours does not force a close parker

(30:15):
to leave them all because he sees that you're coming. Nonetheless,
we impose patterns, and if you have three lucky lights
in a row or three lucky parking spots, then you
start to feel like there's something larger than you happening here. Okay,
so we've been talking about the beta Mainhoff phenomenon and

(30:37):
the details of our psychology, like selective attention or confirmation bias.
So now let's zoom out to the big picture of
how the quirks of our psychology craft, in part, how
we navigate our lives. And we can get into this
by asking how does a simple psychological phenomenon touch on

(30:58):
profound philosophical ideas an artistic expression? And this matters because
the beta Meinhoff phenomenon isn't just about noticing something frequently
after first encountering it. It's about how those repeated encounters
feel surprising, almost like they are signaling something significant. So
some decades ago, the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung proposed this

(31:22):
concept of synchronicity. When events seem meaningfully related, like you
are thinking about an old friend that you haven't spoken
to in a long time, and just as you're reminiscing
about him. Your phone rings and it's that friend calling
you out of the blue. This unexpected coincidence where the
inner thought and external event line up in a meaningful way.

(31:44):
This is what young meant by synchronicity. And lots of
people see these coinciding events or random encounters and they say, look,
there must be a deeper cosmic pattern here. There's something
I'm meant to notice now. This is a poetic thought,
and the notions of serendipity and coincidence often show up

(32:04):
in books and poetry. For example, in Ruki Morocomi's novels,
the characters often experience strange synchronicities that guide their actions.
These patterns are essential threads and the tapestry of life
that pull us towards our destinies, and poets like Charles
Bodelaire or ts Eliot they explore these themes of fate

(32:27):
and coincidence and the search for signs and the chaos
of urban life. But while this universe we live in
is certainly much bigger than us and still full of mysteries,
this is a good example of the way that our
own psychological peculiarities might lead us to bark up the
wrong trees. What simple psychological phenomenon like the better Meinhoff

(32:50):
effect expose for us is the way that idiosyncrasies of
our minds determine the way we interpret the world, both
on a daily basis and in our life literature. What
we see in the beta Minhoft phenomenon, which is a
result of selective attention and confirmation bias, often convinces us
of synchronicity in the universe when we're just seeing the

(33:13):
exhaust of our own engines. So our literature gets shaped
by the details of our psychology. If you can imagine
an alien civilization that maybe has their own quirks, but
doesn't have inattentional blindness and cognitive biases like our own,
they might have a very different literature. If we're a commune,

(33:35):
Baudelaire and Elliott got on a spaceship and went on
a book toward to this other planet, they might find
that their works aren't so popular because without the particular
attentional quirks that we have, the aliens would not find
stories about synchronicities so compelling. Like many things in science,
understanding the details of our minds gives us a way

(33:57):
to pull the camera back just slightly wider than our
parochial view of the world, so that we can see
the ways that we so often seek and impose meaning
even when there is none. For the record, I'm not
saying life is not full of meaning it is. I'm
only pointing to those places where we can reliably demonstrate

(34:18):
that patterns are being erroneously imposed. So what we talked
about today was this weird feeling of learning something new
and then suddenly noticing it everywhere. In the case of
the beta Minhoff phenomenon, it is a bias where our
attention and then our subsequent recognition are heightened, which leads

(34:39):
us to believe that these newly discovered items are occurring
more frequently. So does the beta Minehoff effect reveal a
deeper spiritual reality in which everything in the universe is connected?
Or is it merely our minds seeking patterns in the
randomness of existence, asking these questions and chasing down the answers.

(35:02):
This improves our understanding of reality and our place within it,
because we see that it is less about the objects
or the information themselves and more about the intricate dance
of attention and memory. It's a reminder that your perception
of frequency is not a perfect mirror of reality, but

(35:24):
is shaped by the interplay of new information and existing knowledge.
The cognitive mechanisms that we come to the table with
color our experience, sometimes with misleading hues. We don't see
the world exactly as it is out there, but is
filtered through the lens of what we have experienced. As

(35:47):
the writer on ais ninput it, we see things not
as they are, We see them as we are. I
hope today's exploration will make you more aware of your
of the world. Try to notice instances of the better
Minehoff phenomenon in your life. Ask why certain information suddenly

(36:08):
stands out to you. You won't always be able to
answer this, but sometimes something interesting will surface, turning a
bit of your unconscious experience more conscious. Go to Eagleman
dot com slash podcast for more information and find further reading.

(36:30):
Send me an email at podcasts at eagleman dot com
with any questions or discussions, and if this is your
first time hearing about the better Minehoff effect, I'm quite
sure you'll hear about it again soon. Pop me a
note when you do, and check out and subscribe to
Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and
to leave comments until next time. I'm David Eagleman, and

(36:52):
thank you for joining me here in the inner Cosmos.
I hope you to part