It's all in your mind

Today we are looking at cognitive biases.

Cognitive being sensory input and bias being unfair favoritism. In other - less fancy - words how we skew how we experience the world around us.

When I decided to write this, I tripped over this list on Wikipedia and was really surprised at how many different biases there are.

From Ambiguity Effect: the tendency to avoid options for which the probability of a favorable outcome is unknown.

to

Zeigarnik Effect: that uncompleted or interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones.

There are so many odd things that we do in our brains with no one really thinking about it, it's staggering.

But today I want to look more specifically at The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. It was named in 1995 on a message board after the left wing terrorist group, and is also known as Frequency Illusion.

This phenomenon is when you encounter something relatively obscure, and then fairly quickly encounter it again and again. Say you're watching a TV-show, and they mention Frederick the Great. Then the next day, you read a newspaper and see an article about Frederick the Great. Later, passing through a bookstore, you find a large display for a new book about Frederick the Great... You get it. You get a bit freaked out, don't you? Well, there is a perfectly reasonable explanation.

Essentially, we are bombarded with input every day from thousands of places. Everything we read, hear, watch etc. We automatically ignore most of this input, but our brains love patterns, and every time you notice a pattern consciously or subconsciously, you get a small reward of feel good hormones from your brain. That's why we react so strongly to this phenomenon.

But there is a second part to this, namely Synchronicity. This is where, say you think of someone and then they call you or you run into them on the street. It is shocking and amazing, right?

But it's all coincidence, and it's the fact that it happens within a short period of time, that makes it seem more important.

If you combine the Frequency Illusion with Synchronicity, you get a strong feeling of meaning, maybe even destiny. Whether it is destiny or not is up to you, but it's most likely brain chemicals.

That's that. Until next time, have a great and maybe destiny filled week!