thanks for the info…a guy at my work thought that he discovered this phenomenon

Later that night I watched a tv-show where choirs are singing songs – one of them sang Thriller.

The day after that I looked up another video, which I had never noticed – the intro of the video was a parody of the Thriller video.

For over a month the whole Thriller-thing stalked me! It was on t-shirts, tv-shows, jokes on the radio – EVERYWHERE!
When I talked to my mom about it, I realized that Thriller was a pretty big cultural thing (since I am very young) but it still bothered me a lot…
and many many many more things like this has happened to me.. now I’ve got a name for it!

This is really damn interesting! One particular case i found very interesting in showing the phenomenon is this:

[quote]mennehaha said: “I’ve never heard about this play before, and I have suddenly received two references to it in the same day. What’s really crazy is that about a week later, I’m watching Miss Congeniality and the scene where she is getting all made up for the first time, Sandra Bullock tells the aggressive hairstylist “Take it easy, Sweeny Todd! “Crazy…”[/quote]
Well, as far as i understood it, you have probably heard about Sweeney Todd a dozen times before in your life (it’s a really famous story), but hadn’t noticed it! As ShellyMilwaukee said, we tend to forget things unfamiliar to us. Never before had you heard it twice the same day, that resulting in you forgetting about it until the next time you would hear the word, so by the day you heard it twice, you thought that was the first two times you had heard the word! Damn interesting. I experience this kind of thing all the time: when i hear a new word i’ve never heard before (on the internet or tv, for instance), i begin to hear it again and again, but that’s just me noticing it more.. i know i have probably heard the word countless times in my life before! (Wikipedia’s article on BM explains this).

For further reading on related phenomena, look up on Wikipedia for:
- Forer Effect (or Barnum Effect, the thing that makes us think random information is meaningful to us, like horoscope);
- Cold Reading (the technique used to intentionally fool people in this way);
- Confirmation Bias (the tendency of always giving a lot more credit to evidences that confirm one’s beliefs and prejudices, and at the same time ignoring evidences of the contrary;
- Self Propaganda; Apophenia; Subjective Validation; and others…

- And the Number 23 Enigma of course. If you haven’t seen the film based on this phenomenon, i recommend it =). On the DVD Making Of, Jim Carrey talks about how he himself had a thing with the number 23 and how he was just talking about it when the director called about hiring him for this new film – the “meaningful coincidence” just there!

- And lastly, the novel Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson (creator of cyberpunk genre and the ideas behind the Matrix movies).. it talks about all these things i guess. From Wikipedia: “The novel’s central theme involves the examination of the human desire to detect patterns or meaning and the risks of finding patterns in meaningless data. Other themes include methods of interpretation of history, cultural familiarity with brand names, and tensions between art and commercialization. The September 11, 2001 attacks are used as a motif representing the transition to the new century.”

It’s amazing how we can fool ourselves into thinking that ordinary things have a deep significance to them.
We got to be careful.

[quote]Dr.Grimgravy said: “I have the situation of looking at the clock exactly at 9:11 pm/am. It is weird, but it seems I look at the clock at exactly 9:11 all the time.”[/quote]
And for those of you talking about the clock at 9:11 (some 9 people as far as i counted).. i think that really has to do with the infamous date of the WTC incident. In fact, the people that say that the whole thing was a hoax, an inside job by the government, would even say the date 9-11 was deliberately chosen as a way of burning the “Emergency Number” into the minds of people, in order to justify subsequent wars that had in fact other purposes. I won’t talk about that, but the effetc the number had on people’s minds and lifes is really ramarkable.

[quote]trillian said: “I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if after the first few coincidental glimpses of 9:11 on the clock, my mind learned to look for it, or to look at the clock at the right time (in order to reward that pattern-finding center). We humans have pretty decent internal clocks, so maybe my unconscious just wants to weird me out.”[/quote]
I definitely go with this too! It only helps us think it’s not just coincidence. And not just internal clocks, i’d say PERIPHERAL VISION too! Things we see with the corner of the eye, just subconsciously, like the 9:11 on the clock, and THAT makes us really look at the clock and consciously see the numbers… i think that by that time we have ALREADY seen the numbers unconsciously.

Wanna know something odd? When I read this post, I instinctively looked up at the clock over my desk, (I read DI during my breaks at work a lot of thetime), and although it wasn’t 9:11, it was 10:45, which meant that the large and small hands were resting on the 9 and 11 numerals respectively…

“Nobody notices when there’s a full moon and nothing happens — you only notice when something does happen. In other words, heads I win, tails don’t count.”

Here’s the link to the full article:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/552/do-things-get-crazy-when-the-moon-is-full

A good and somewhat germane story happened to me during middle school when the song How You Remind Me by Nickelback became popular, seriously, for a week i woke up every day to that song on my clock radio. I don’t know why a station would play a song at the same time every day but it did, then i tended to hear that song nearly every other time i turned on my radio. After the first two weeks i decided to tally up my results over the next week. That goddamn song was the first song i heard every time i turned on the radio about 50% of the time during that third week. I continued to hear that song at about twice a day even after i stopped listening to my own radio. I suppose if that was the most popular song of all time it would make some sense but seriously 50% of the time is unprecedented.

We were having a great time, loving the song, and then talked about “Ruby”…said we should name our first girl Ruby.

Then a few days later this new tv show came out called…you guessed it…”Ruby”.

Then I’m playing guitar hero on Xbox, and there’s the song, you can play it at home…”Ruby”.

Then guess what happens? She gets pregnant!!! We look at each other and pretty much say “Ruby”.

In Victoria Secrets the other night, picking out bigger bra’s (lol)…I tell the saleswoman about the baby and if it’s a girl…you know…well, she says “That was supposed to be MY NAME!”…

I hear a story on the radio the other day about these famous lesbians getting together in the UK..one of them is named “Ruby Rose”…how about that!?!?!

It’s constant and has been going on for over a month straight~!

Ruby! Ruby! Ruby!