Comments on: The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon

By: JarvisLoop

JarvisLoop — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 23:02:01 +0000

Why do I feel as if Sheldon Cooper should have pontificated upon this point? Perhaps he did, and I forgot.

By: Suleiman Usman

Suleiman Usman — Thu, 11 May 2023 09:50:38 +0000

I used to see 9:11 when I look at the time mostly.
It’s always 9:11

By: Oskar

Oskar — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 10:22:27 +0000

What are the chances that a psychological phenomenon be named after a terrorist group?

More likely than you’d think!

By: kit

kit — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 22:01:51 +0000

Last week, or the week before, I picked up my grandmother’s magazine and it contained a story called Blue Car Syndrome in which the narrator explained to another character that there hadn’t been a series of psychic forces at work it was just that she was noticing things that she hadn’t been previously attuned to. Like when you see one blue car, then all of a sudden there are blue cars all over the shop. (I didn’t think they were that rare to be honest. I thought yellow cars were quite rare until my children introduced me to the game ‘Yellow Car No Hitbacks’ and then it turned out there were millions of them.) Anyway the point being that I thought to myself, ‘That’s not called Blue Car Syndrome, it’s callled….er….soemthing else.” Couldn’t remember what it was called until tonight when I was doing some sort of word association game to come up with a title for a writing project. One rabbit hole led to a burrow to a molehill and here we are at Baader-Meinhoff.

Thank you!

By: Cricket7777

Cricket7777 — Sat, 08 Jan 2022 23:18:57 +0000

I was just wondering if you did any research on the “100th Monkey Effect.” Do you think it is a real thing or has there ever been a valid scientific explanation for it? I would be very interested in your thoughts on it.

By: ashers1812

ashers1812 — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 15:26:54 +0000

Last month, October 2021, I was looking out of my front window and it occurred to me that I had not seen someone who I would frequently see pass by my house, for many months if not longer. I wondered to myself where they were or what had happened to them that had caused this absence I had only just noticed.

The very next day, while driving with my mother, we came to a T junction on a road that is diametrically opposite to where I live across town. Facing the T-junction is a large rock next to a fairly busy road we were about to turn onto. And on this rock sat a gentleman bizarrely tucking into what seemed to be some kind of lunch. It was an incongruous sight because it was not an obvious location for anyone to sit and eat their food.

But you guessed it, the gentleman who was eating was the very same gentleman whom absence I had only noted to myself just 24 hours earlier. I was blown away by the sheer freakery of this coincidence. I had only ever seen him over many years in my particular neighbourhood and perhaps a handful of times in the centre of town. But never in this particular neck of the woods on the complete other side of town a few miles away. Which is not a part of town I frequent often anyway but have driven down dozens of times in my life.

And yet there he was, sat on this rock alone, eating what seemed to be his lunch in full view of the passing traffic in a town and an area possessing over 125,000 people. Obviously the odds of encountering this one individual in the most unexpected of fashions in the location that I had never seen him before literally blew my mind. Particularly given that I had just thought of him the very same day before. Go figure. It was like the universe was playing a joke on me.

By: Gigimama

Gigimama — Wed, 24 Mar 2021 01:47:12 +0000

Not sure how this fits, but i feel that it does:
While camping one time i found some Indian Pipe, a white plant – Monotropa uniflora. I pointed it out and the person replied that there are likely many more nearby. I looked and saw only very few more. I decided to ask (my brain? the universe? the plant?) “show me more.” As i sat and looked around, i felt like i had “changed planes” because i suddenly saw dozens of them, where until then these small white beacons among the thick green vegetation had been hidden. Just to test, i pointed out the first ones i had seen and asked if the person saw any more. It was the same as my experience. I then asked them to pause and ask “show me more,” and patiently wait a couple minutes. Again, like me, they could see multitudes of the plant. Pretty darn cool! I’ve used this simple question many times for other things and almost always have very interesting results. Patience and intention are key.

By: ParaNoid

ParaNoid — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 12:57:45 +0000

I always thought it was my Alexa, “listening in.”

By: Jimbo

Jimbo — Sun, 05 Apr 2020 17:15:10 +0000

Back in the early 1980s my wife and I had a history professor at the University of Oregon–Edwin Bingham, now sadly passed–who metaphorical referred to the phenomenon as the Capistrano Swallow Effect: first you see one, then five, then fifty, then hundreds! We’re pretty sure he made it up on the fly as we’ve never been able to find it in print since. Great to run into your article and the lively discussion by chance now! But I think we’ll continue to call these all-too-frequent occurrences “Capistrano Swallows”.

By: LH

LH — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 21:07:59 +0000

So how are we supposed to explain it all? I have had this type of thing happen regularly over various periods of my life. Like having a particular word or name of a person pop into my head for no explainable reason and then the next day in some other place and doing something else that word or name manifests itself. An example is that the other day the word goucho came into my mind randomly and I already am in tune to know this is likely one of those episodes where I will see this word or hear it soon after. So I was watching a new episode of Jeopardy the next day and the final clue involved international literature and I thought of that word again. So the answer to the clue is Argentina and the literature involved with the clue had to do with a poem….about gouchos. I have always taken these things to be evidence that I was supposed to be at the place of occurrence, there is no other explanation and this has happened too many times to be explained as coincidence and nothing more. There are forces in this universe at play of which we have no real knowledge of and human science is far to primitive to explain.