❄️ Freezethawed: The Newsletter #041 - What is a frequency illusion?

Hello everyone!

Did you know?

2021 has been designated as the International Year of Health and Care Workers (YHCW) in appreciation and gratitude for their unwavering dedication in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. WHO is launching a year-long campaign, under the theme – Protect. Invest. Together. It highlights the urgent need to invest in health workers for shared dividends in health, jobs, economic opportunity and equity.

Quite an initiative, isn’t it? I came across this only this morning and thought it prudent to share it with you all.

Baader Meinhof phenomenon

Have you ever felt your mind gets sharper at noticing things in your surroundings?

The frequency illusion, also known as the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, is a cognitive bias in which, after noticing something for the first time, there is a tendency to notice it more often, leading someone to believe that it has a high frequency (a form of selection bias).

Perhaps it’s a feeling that everything happens for a reason and the coincidence we feel is just too astronomically unlikely, but of course, the truth is that most bordering on all things don’t happen for a reason, despite our intuition that they do. And yet, it’s just that intuition activated in the Baader Meinhof phenomenon, that gives us an interesting look into the machinery of the mind, our brains are essentially pattern recognizing superheroes, able to find meaning in countless pieces of data.

The Baader Meinhof illusion proves that we only see the things that we’re looking out for this can be bad in the case of confirmation bias, but it also goes to show how ignorance can be maintained through a lack of active learning, the more you prime your mind by reading and writing to see new patterns, the more reality will unfold before you as an extraordinary mechanism of natural laws.

Next time you notice words, objects or people of interest more quickly in the newspaper, on bulletin-boards, over text text messages or even in your surroundings, remind yourself of the Baader Meinhof phenomenon!

Anujeet’s book journey

Currently I’m reading

The 5am Club – Robin Sharma

Can’t Hurt Me – David Goggins

Aggregate, the weekly quote

“Grow through what you go through.”

- Sumer Sethi

Harmony, the weekly song

Whatever It Takes – Imagine Dragons

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