Comments on: The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon

By: Vicora

Vicora — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 20:49:18 +0000

Ohh spooky. Read this article before work this morning, first time I’d heard the term. Appeared as an answer on University Challenge (a panel quiz pitting 4 students of University A against 4 from University B, UK) this evening – I finally got a question right.

By: cog

cog — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 13:05:12 +0000

I share mine with you – I was watching the baader meinhof complex – a film about the terrorist group. I’d never heard of the group before the film.
after it finished i was reading a list of cognitive biases on wikipedia that my friend had sent me . this phenomena was in the list ….. tis what brought me here. no doubt itl come up on radio 4 soon.
I like it . how about it is exciting , means my brain is remembering some knowledge for a change, it will help me remember the name of the group rather than being tongue tied in discussion , you know rather than being scary and meaning something bad may happen. It happens all the time but this been my favorite!.

By: kularic

kularic — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 04:31:22 +0000

[quote]Stephen said: “Whenever I look at the digital clock beside my bed it almost always registers within the last few seconds of that minute. 57-58-59-00. When calculating the possibility of this happening it should happen about only 5 percent of the time. However this is happening about 90 percent of the time. Even when walking into the room from downstairs I seem to be arriving in the room within the last few seconds of the minute, and this is happening time after time. This may happen several times an hour, at which time I become more conscious of it happening. If I think about it to much, it doesn’t seem to work. I have to be completely unaware of the phenomenon for it to happen. I first noticed this phenomenon about fifteen years ago when I bought a digital watch. Whenever I glimpsing down at my watch the minute was within the last few seconds of the hour. I had no idea that this kind of thing happens to other people.

This is not the only strange phenomenon that I am aware of.”[/quote]

After reading your comment, i looked at my watch and it was on 58 seconds! Wow!

By: el378

el378 — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 14:57:00 +0000

Whether someone else asks me the time or I look myself a large majority of the time it’s either 8.08, 3.03, 9.09, 11.11. These types of incidence happen alot in my life and yes I was diagnosed as schizophrenic but surely that means your neural processing is slighty wrong and the connections are then more easily recognised. I certainly do not dwell on finding the meaning of these occurances and just accept that they happen, finding a name for it is the best thing ever, particularly as my friend recommended that I should see this film, hence why I stumbled across this site.
The ‘Beyond Coincidence’ book by Martin Plimmer and Brian King contains some great stories which you could attribute to synchronicity or the Baader-Meinhoff Phenomenon. Happy reading.

By: dance2bridge

dance2bridge — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 20:30:25 +0000

This phenomenon started happening to me a few months ago, very frequently every day, sometimes a few times a day. and its frequency really started to blow me away. There were well over 100. They usually had to do with language – things or names I’d never heard of before or rarely heard of in the past appearing in one context, then appearing from seemingly out of nowhere in a complete different context within a very few hours and then never coming up again since that time. Then it suddenly stopped after two or three months and now after several months it has started again in the past few days. I asked other people if they’d experienced this and only one friend could relate to what I was saying. I named the phenomenon “synchronicity” months ago when this started, not knowing that this concept had already been identified by that name until reading about it now. One recent example was meeting a baby named “Aspen” yesterday–I had never heard anyone with that name before–and then seeing in a documentary about something called “Aspen leaf” within a few hours which I’d also never heard of. I also was working on a description of a workshop on English usage called “Between You and I” only to pass by a library shelf with book sticking out entitled “Between You and I”. In a couple of cases, there have been 3 synchronistic events with the same term.

By: pinkfuzzytoolbelt

pinkfuzzytoolbelt — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 20:24:48 +0000

On a lighter note, my kids (ages 12 and 15) are amazed at how many silver Taurus sedans are on the road – and they never saw even one – until I started driving one.

By: the jar

the jar — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 22:38:29 +0000

[quote]rp2 said: “whoa.. I just knew you were going to put up an article about this.. happens to me about every other day”[/quote]

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

By: dirkstarkiller

dirkstarkiller — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 23:35:37 +0000

this is happening to me all the time! but one particular story has really been bothering me for a long time.
last year, I was looking through my moms old cassettes and put one on – Thriller by Michael Jackson. I did recognize it, but I didn’t knew it was MJ’s song. I decided to go look at the computer and entered a random link – it was the video for Thriller. I remembered that I was watching that video as a kid, and that I was pretty freakin’ scared of it. It really caught my attention.

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!

By: Erickerick

Erickerick — Tue, 19 May 2009 05:03:08 +0000

(Just watch The Number 23 =)

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.

By: Cyber Rodent

Cyber Rodent — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 22:55:08 +0000

[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]

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…