I found out today that there is a word (or rather words) for something I have often thought (maybe even blogged about).
Have you ever been talking to someone and they say something or explain something that you’ve never known before? For example, maybe someone tells you the story about a British Officer during the Napoleonic wars named William Ingli who cries for his troops to hold their ground and to “die hard”. And thus the phrase was born. Now the phrase has been adapted to basically mean someone who is all out for something.
Now that they’ve told you this thing, you hear someone say the phrase “diehard” 3 more times that very week, but before then, you think maybe you heard it once the entire year. Right after you learned the origin of the word, you feel like you hear it much more than you did before. Exponentially more.
But are you actually hearing the word more, or is it simply because you learned the specifics of the word, so now you start noticing it more. This is what was coined as a “frequency Illusion” or the “Baader–Meinhof phenomenon”.
Have you ever experienced something like this? It always makes me wonder, what are the many hundreds of things I hear each day that are currently going right over my head without me noticing? It’s hard to think of them when you don’t know them. Maybe it’s when someone turners on the light on the other side of the room, if someone told you more about how light worked, you’d think through that light differently?
What things are you missing each day?