the frequency illusion<\/strong><\/em> \u2014 a term far less memorable than the name of a West German militant group. But much more precise.<\/p>\n\n\n\nFrom a newspaper in Minnesota, to pregnancy, the new car, and the word you learned last night<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Since then, the phenomenon has been recognized in countless forms, almost identical in structure, no matter how different their content sounds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The woman who becomes pregnant and suddenly sees pregnant women on every street corner \u2014 even though, obviously, the real percentage of pregnant women in the population hasn't changed at all in the last few weeks. The person who buys a certain car model and starts seeing it parked on every street in the neighborhood, as if it had just rolled out of some secret factory, just for them. The person who learns a new word in a foreign language and hears it, a few days later, in three different conversations, on the radio, and on a product label.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This happened to me with the title of a book I'd never read. I saw it once, in passing, on a shelf. The following week it appeared to me three times \u2014 on a friend's recommendation list, in a podcast I listened to on the go, on the cover of a magazine flipped through in a waiting room. The book hadn't suddenly decided to be everywhere. I had decided, without realizing it, to recognize it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Or, more delicately: the person who receives a diagnosis, their own or someone close to them, and suddenly has the impression that everyone is talking about that illness \u2014 on television, in conversations between friends, on social media. The world hasn't changed overnight. But the way they look at it has.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
None of this is due to any real change in the world. The thing hasn't actually become more frequent. What's changed is much simpler, and much closer to home: our own capacity to notice it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The filter that switches on without being asked<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
The explanation Zwicky proposed involves two mechanisms working together, not separately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first is selective attention.<\/strong> Every second, the mind is bombarded with far more information than it could ever consciously process \u2014 sounds, words, images, seemingly insignificant details. To cope, the brain constantly filters, without consulting us, what deserves attention and what can be left to pass as background. The moment a word or concept becomes, for whatever reason, relevant to us, the filter changes its criteria. What used to pass unnoticed \u2014 because it didn't matter \u2014 suddenly starts getting through the filter, because now it matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe thing doesn't appear more often in the world. It appears more often in our attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The second mechanism is confirmation bias.<\/strong> Once we've noticed the coincidence once, the mind begins, without any conscious intention, to look for further confirmation \u2014 and it finds it, because every new occurrence seems to reinforce the original theory: see, there it is again.<\/em>What we don't notice, on the other hand, are all the moments when the thing didn't appear at all \u2014 and which, naturally, we have no reason to count.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe two mechanisms feed each other. Selective attention brings the coincidence into the foreground. Confirmation bias then turns it into a pattern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What easily gets lost in the story<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
The phenomenon, however, has at least two nuances that easily get lost in the simplified version of the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first is a distinction Zwicky himself drew carefully. There's the frequency illusion<\/strong> \u2014 the impression that something appears more often after you first notice it. And there's a related but different one, the recency illusion<\/strong> \u2014 the impression that, because you just noticed a word or expression, it must be brand new, when in fact it's been around for a long time; no one had simply been listening for it so closely. The two often combine: you notice something for the first time, assume it's recent, and then see it multiplying everywhere \u2014 when really, it had been there all along.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe second nuance comes from Zwicky's own experience as a researcher \u2014 and it's all the more interesting because it catches him in his own trap. He and his colleagues, linguists specializing in spoken English, were convinced their friends used a specific colloquial construction extremely often \u201equotative all”,<\/em> a phrase used mainly to introduce a reaction or a direct line, as in and I’m all, like…<\/em>.<\/strong> The conviction seemed obvious to them, based on what they \"knew\" from listening. When they finally transcribed real conversations rigorously, the actual frequency of the construction turned out to be much lower than they'd imagined \u2014 even professional researchers studying the phenomenon had their perception of their own data distorted by heightened attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe takeaway is simple, and a little humbling: not even expertise protects against the frequency illusion. At most, it makes us more aware of the risk of falling into it \u2014 not immune to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It's worth saying, though, that not everything that suddenly seems more frequent is, guaranteed, just an illusion. In medicine, there's even the opposite situation: a doctor who has just studied a rare disease starts recognizing it more often in patients \u2014 not because the disease has become more common, but because their attention has gotten better. Here, heightened attention isn't inventing coincidences. It's correcting a previous lack of attention. The line between the two situations isn't always easy to draw \u2014 and perhaps that's exactly where a little humility is needed: not everything we notice more often is only in our minds. Sometimes, quite simply, we've finally started to see something that had been there all along, unnoticed.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nWhat might change if you knew<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
That most \"coincidences\" of this kind aren't signals from the universe, but from our own attention \u2014 which, once directed at something, keeps bringing it to the foreground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That the thing we noticed hasn't actually become more frequent. Just more visible to us, who, until now, had no reason to remark on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That not even the researchers who study this phenomenon are immune to it \u2014 a sign that it's not a personal weakness, but a way of functioning common to every mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That, every once in a while, it's also worth checking: not everything that suddenly seems omnipresent is only in our heads. Sometimes we've simply, finally, noticed something that deserved attention long ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The world is, probably, far more stable than we think. What changes, most of the time, is the light we look at it in. And once attention shifts, the same world suddenly starts to look like a different one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nIf you feel you want to explore more of what is happening in your emotional life, there is a space for that.<\/a><\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201eIluzia frecven\u021bei” \u2014 sau de ce, din clipa \u00een care observi ceva nou, pare s\u0103 apar\u0103 brusc peste tot Din seria \u201eMintea noastr\u0103 de zi cu zi” Se \u00eent\u00e2mpl\u0103 mereu \u00een acela\u0219i fel. Afli pentru prima…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3746,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[401,64],"tags":[303,193,430,191],"class_list":["post-3745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-harti-ale-constiintei","category-blog","tag-corp-si-emotii","tag-dezvoltare-personala","tag-mintea-noastra","tag-transformare-interioara"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuliavs.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuliavs.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuliavs.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuliavs.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuliavs.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3745"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/iuliavs.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3745\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3752,"href":"https:\/\/iuliavs.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3745\/revisions\/3752"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuliavs.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuliavs.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuliavs.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuliavs.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}