Speaker 1: Why am I going to start today's brain science episode
Speaker 1: by telling you about the beater Mainhoff group, which was
Speaker 1: a West German far left terrorist group in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: This political group is fully irrelevant to any modern discussions
Speaker 1: and their political positions are totally irrelevant to neuroscience. So
Speaker 1: what do these domestic terrorists have to do with attention
Speaker 1: and salience and the front of your brain and synchronicity?
Speaker 1: And why might you soon hear about the better Minehoff group?
Speaker 1: Again not for political reasons, but for reasons to do
Speaker 1: with your own brain. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me
Speaker 1: David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford and
Speaker 1: in these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound
Speaker 1: universe to understand the intersection between how the brain works
Speaker 1: and how we experience life. So let's start in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy when a far left wing militant group called beater
Speaker 1: Mainhoff also known as the Red Army Faction, they took
Speaker 1: to the streets in Germany. Now they define themselves as
Speaker 1: communist and anti imperialist, and they launched a string of
Speaker 1: robberies and then bombings, and eventually assassinations, and this all
Speaker 1: brought a lot of bloodshed and pain to Germany throughout
Speaker 1: the decade. Okay, now, who cares about the beater Minhoff Gang. Well,
Speaker 1: unless this touched your life in the nineteen seventies, probably nobody.
Speaker 1: So why am I telling you about this gang? Are
Speaker 1: they coming back? No, happily they are long defunct. But
Speaker 1: the joy of today's podcast is that I get to
Speaker 1: make a prediction that you will hear about Bader Mainehoff
Speaker 1: again and it probably won't be too long. And then
Speaker 1: you'll think, Wow, I just heard about that on Eagelman's podcast,
Speaker 1: and now I'm hearing about it again. Now, how can
Speaker 1: I make a prediction like that? Well, the important part
Speaker 1: of our story began two decades after the beater Minehoff Kang.
Speaker 1: It began with a man named Terry Mullen in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety four. Now, Terry, like probably most people, had never
Speaker 1: heard of the batter Minehoff Gang, and then he heard
Speaker 1: about them. He heard their name, and then he was
Speaker 1: surprised to hear the name a second time within twenty
Speaker 1: four hours, and he thought that was just sort of
Speaker 1: weird and amazing that he had just learned that name
Speaker 1: and then he heard it a second time, so he
Speaker 1: informally posted about that on the Saint Paul Pioneer Press
Speaker 1: online discussion board, and others immediately chimed in that they
Speaker 1: had noticed this general pattern before. There had been times
Speaker 1: when they had learned a new concept or name, and
Speaker 1: then they began to see it everywhere, and this phenomenon
Speaker 1: of learning something new and then seeing it again shortly after,
Speaker 1: or seeing it all over the place. Everyone started chiming
Speaker 1: in on the discussion board that they had noticed this
Speaker 1: kind of thing before. So the original poster named this
Speaker 1: the Beaiter Meinhoff phenomenon, and it quickly blossomed into a meme,
Speaker 1: first on the discussion board, then nationally, then internationally. Now
Speaker 1: you've probably noticed this in your own life. You see
Speaker 1: some item or some new term, and then you see
Speaker 1: it again and again. It's not necessarily something really popular
Speaker 1: that everyone's talking about, but seemingly something more obscure. Once
Speaker 1: you've heard of something, you start noticing it everywhere, like
Speaker 1: you've just learned a new word when you're totally sure
Speaker 1: you've never heard before, and then seemingly out of nowhere,
Speaker 1: you hear it several times in a week where maybe
Speaker 1: you learn about some obscure piece of technology and suddenly
Speaker 1: it appears elsewhere on your news feed, or your friend
Speaker 1: mentions it out of the blue. If you chew on
Speaker 1: this for a second, you'll definitely be able to come
Speaker 1: up with examples where you learned some new piece of trivia,
Speaker 1: or you became interested in some new type of shoe
Speaker 1: and then suddenly it seems like you encounter that particular
Speaker 1: fact again, or you see that shoe everywhere you go.
Speaker 1: That is the beatter Minehoff phenomenon. A friend recently reported
Speaker 1: this to me. When his wife got pregnant, he started
Speaker 1: noticing pregnant women everywhere. Suddenly the world was filled with
Speaker 1: women about to give birth. Where were they all before?
Speaker 1: And the better Minehoff phenomenon happens to me a lot.
Speaker 1: It happens that I'm thinking about getting a new vehicle now,
Speaker 1: so I've been paying more attention to car models on
Speaker 1: the road around me, and I've spotted a couple of
Speaker 1: makes and models where I thought, hey, I kind of
Speaker 1: like that I've never noticed that vehicle before, and now
Speaker 1: I'm seeing it everywhere. It makes me feel that these
Speaker 1: models that I had never seen before, that they're proliferating,
Speaker 1: they're driving past me in the street, they're parked in
Speaker 1: my neighborhood, they're featured in a movie I'm watching. The
Speaker 1: impression is that the universe is echoing what I just learned. Now,
Speaker 1: as you've probably guessed because this is a neuroscience podcast,
Speaker 1: this phenomenon isn't about the universe making things appear more frequently. Instead,
Speaker 1: it's a quirk of your psychology. You are having the
Speaker 1: illusion that the frequency has increased to this end. In
Speaker 1: two thousand and five, the Stanford linguist ARNOLDSWICKI gave a
Speaker 1: more official name to the beter Mainhoff phenomenon. He coined
Speaker 1: this the frequency illusion, and that name captures the idea
Speaker 1: more precisely. Even though this remains more widely known by
Speaker 1: its origine meme name. I've also heard this referred to
Speaker 1: by the way as the red car illusion or the
Speaker 1: blue car effect, meaning that when you start paying attention
Speaker 1: to red or blue cars you see them everywhere. But
Speaker 1: whatever we call it, it's all about the illusion of
Speaker 1: the frequency of a previously unknown thing increasing, and you
Speaker 1: can see this in many guyses. For example, I've noticed
Speaker 1: a fascinating conflation between online ads and the beta Meinhoff effect.
Speaker 1: It goes like this. A friend is surfing around and
Speaker 1: spends a moment admiring a new band or a new
Speaker 1: kitchen item, and then she's surfing around the next day
Speaker 1: and sees more of these ads for the same thing.
Speaker 1: So she blames cookies and invasive adwere and yes, of
Speaker 1: course this is part of why she's seeing that thing more.
Speaker 1: But this model of big brother can quickly get stretched
Speaker 1: beyond sensibility when the new item is next noticed on
Speaker 1: a billboard or overheard in a conversation. People will sometimes
Speaker 1: make crazy arguments that there's a more devious ad network
Speaker 1: at play here, But this is simply the Beater Minehoff
Speaker 1: phenomenon in action. Now, just before we move into understanding
Speaker 1: why this happens, I'll tell you a quick academic joke.
Speaker 1: A student says to her friend, have you ever heard
Speaker 1: of the beatter Minehoff phenomenon? And the other replies, that's
Speaker 1: so strange. I just read about that yesterday. Okay, So
Speaker 1: we have a sense of what the phenomenon is, and
Speaker 1: the question we're going to ask today is why does
Speaker 1: it occur? Because what we notice and when tells a
Speaker 1: deeper story about how we engage with the world around us.
Speaker 1: So with the beta Minehoff phenomenon, we're always tempted to say, no,
Speaker 1: I'm definitely sure that I've never seen that before. It's
Speaker 1: not that I'm having some perceptual illusion. It's that I
Speaker 1: really never heard that term in my life before yesterday,
Speaker 1: and now I've heard it twice. But that's generally not
Speaker 1: the case. It's simply that we don't notice those things
Speaker 1: that are not relevant to us. The beta Mindhoff phenomenon
Speaker 1: is not some trick of the universe. Instead, it is
Speaker 1: the love child of two psychological processes running under the hood.
Speaker 1: The first issue is selective attention. Now, people sometimes think
Speaker 1: that selective attention just means you're not listening to your
Speaker 1: spouse or kids, but in fact, selective attention is our
Speaker 1: brain's way of managing the enormous amount of information that
Speaker 1: it encounters. Remember that your brain lives in silence and darkness,
Speaker 1: and it's trying to make a model of the whole
Speaker 1: world out there. But the whole world is way too
Speaker 1: complex and it's overflowing with detail, almost all of which
Speaker 1: is meaningless to you. So your brain is selective about
Speaker 1: what it looks for and what it takes in. So
Speaker 1: think about the last time you walked through a crowded marketplace.
Speaker 1: The sites, the sounds, the smell. It's more details than
Speaker 1: you could ever encode or whatever want to encode. So
Speaker 1: your attention acts like a filter. Now, let's get straight
Speaker 1: what we mean by a filter. Sometimes you might think
Speaker 1: that what this means is that you're taking everything in
Speaker 1: and then you're throwing out the stuff you don't want.
Speaker 1: But filtering is generally harsher than that. You don't even
Speaker 1: take stuff in unless it matches a shape for you.
Speaker 1: So think about those children's toys where you have a
Speaker 1: box and you put in a square object into the
Speaker 1: square hole, or a triangular object into the triangle hole,
Speaker 1: or a circular object. Those are filters. And if I
Speaker 1: hand you a hexagon, it doesn't even go in. It's
Speaker 1: not that the box considers hexagons and then spits it
Speaker 1: back out, it's that it doesn't even make it into
Speaker 1: the box. Now, from the brain's point of view, how
Speaker 1: does it know what things to filter in and out? Well,
Speaker 1: you pay attention to certain things because you have networks
Speaker 1: housed primarily in the prefrontal cortex for deciding what information
Speaker 1: is relevant or salient, and this is constantly updating from
Speaker 1: your experience. In other words, your brain is always asking, hey,
Speaker 1: what is the important stuff that I need to pay
Speaker 1: attention to? What stuff matters here? So when you encounter
Speaker 1: new information, like hearing that cool new band or seeing
Speaker 1: the cool new shoes, this network updates and subsequently your
Speaker 1: brain can take in this information. Now, let's flip this
Speaker 1: notion of selective attention and look at what can happen
Speaker 1: if you're simply not paying attention to something. This is
Speaker 1: called inattentional blindness, and it says though you never even
Speaker 1: see the thing at all. So I'll give you an example.
Speaker 1: I did an episode some weeks ago about why magic
Speaker 1: tricks work, and a lot pivots on exactly this issue
Speaker 1: of inattentional blindness. Something can happen right in front of you,
Speaker 1: but if you're not watching for it. In other words,
Speaker 1: your attention is elsewhere. The photons hit your eyes, but
Speaker 1: you don't see it. The magician moves his hand in
Speaker 1: an arc, or pretends he's throwing something in the air,
Speaker 1: or there's a snap of the fingers right over here,
Speaker 1: and suddenly the card slip happens. Right there, but it
Speaker 1: says though it didn't happen, why because your attention has
Speaker 1: been pulled elsewhere. Now, as an example of this that
Speaker 1: I'm guessing most people have seen, consider the Invisible Gorilla video.
Speaker 1: If you haven't seen this, search for it on YouTube.
Speaker 1: But pause this podcast here because what's coming next is
Speaker 1: a spoiler. The way this works is you see several
Speaker 1: people and half are wearing one shirt color and the
Speaker 1: other half is wearing a different color. And each team
Speaker 1: passes a basketball, but only two other members of their team,
Speaker 1: but they're all intermixed, so they're passing and moving between
Speaker 1: one another, and your job is to count the number
Speaker 1: of times the ball is passed by one of the teams.
Speaker 1: So you count, Okay, there's one pass, Then that person
Speaker 1: throws to another person on their team. Okay, that's two.
Speaker 1: Then that person throws to another team member. Okay, that's three.
Speaker 1: Like that, but it's challenging because to keep an accurate account,
Speaker 1: you have to ignore what the other team is doing.
Speaker 1: So you get to the end of the video and
Speaker 1: you say, great, I got it. This team made twelve passes,
Speaker 1: and you're told the answer, And let's say the answer
Speaker 1: is twelve you got it right. But then you're asked,
Speaker 1: but did you notice the gorilla? And then the video
Speaker 1: is shown again, the exact same video, and now you're
Speaker 1: not counting passes. You're just looking at the big picture.
Speaker 1: You're watching the video with a different context. And now
Speaker 1: you see something that blows your mind, which is that
Speaker 1: a guy in a gorilla suit walks right into the
Speaker 1: middle of the basketball players and he turns and faces
Speaker 1: the camera and thumps his chest, and then he struts
Speaker 1: out stage left, and all the while the basketball players
Speaker 1: are just continuing to pass the balls between them. Now,
Speaker 1: almost everybody doesn't notice the gorilla the first time they
Speaker 1: watched the video. Why It's because their attention is so
Speaker 1: focused on counting the passes. So given that our visual
Speaker 1: attention is limited, we miss the things that were not
Speaker 1: specifically focused on. And this is why it's known as
Speaker 1: inattentional blindness. Now, this can all be seen as a downside,
Speaker 1: but it's actually just what a brain needs to do
Speaker 1: to navigate its complex environment. It focuses on certain signals
Speaker 1: while ignoring others. For example, think about when you're at
Speaker 1: a noisy cafe. You have to selectively focus on your
Speaker 1: companion's voice and not hear all the irrelevant conversations around you,
Speaker 1: even though all of this hits your ear drums like.
Speaker 2: This, But what you attend to is this, Hi, can
Speaker 2: I get you something?
Speaker 1: So it's obviously very useful to be able to selectively
Speaker 1: attend because the world is a cacophonous flood, and selective
Speaker 1: attention allows us to zoom in on the signals of interest.
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna take a one second tangent to give
Speaker 1: you a sense of something here. Some of you know
Speaker 1: that I spun a company out of my lab called
Speaker 1: Neo Sensory, And in this company, we make a wristband
Speaker 1: for people who are deaf, and the wristband has a
Speaker 1: microphone that picks up on the sounds around you, and
Speaker 1: then it turns those sounds into patterns vibration on the skin.
Speaker 1: So it's doing what your inner ear, your cochlea is doing.
Speaker 1: We're just transferring that job to the skin. Now, here's
Speaker 1: what I wanted to touch on. Typically, when someone puts
Speaker 1: this on for the first time, they say, WHOA, I'm
Speaker 1: feeling so much buzzing going on around here, and it
Speaker 1: takes them a little while to understand that all this
Speaker 1: buzzing is part of this soundscape around them. In other words,
Speaker 1: the next time you're at the cafe, pay attention not
Speaker 1: just to your companion's conversation, but really listen to all
Speaker 1: the sounds that are hitting your ears. The overhead music
Speaker 1: and the barista and the coffee machines, and the doors
Speaker 1: opening and closing, and the squeaking and every single one
Speaker 1: of the conversations going on around you. All of that
Speaker 1: is hitting your ear drums. We're so good at ignoring
Speaker 1: all of that that we only take in what is
Speaker 1: salient to us. And it's only when you push that
Speaker 1: information in through a new channel, like through your wrist,
Speaker 1: that you realize how much noise is actually out there.
Speaker 1: Your brain has to learn how to pay selective attention
Speaker 1: to the vibrations on your wrist. Okay, so that's selective attention.
Speaker 1: How does this kind of thing get studied in the
Speaker 1: neuroscience laboratory. Well, think of something like a card game
Speaker 1: like the one called Set or something called the Wisconsin
Speaker 1: Card Sorting Task. And in games like this, each card
Speaker 1: has some number of shapes of a certain color. So
Speaker 1: this card might have three blue diamonds and this one
Speaker 1: has four red squares, and that one has two green circles.
Speaker 1: And let's say you're trying to match a certain property
Speaker 1: between cards, like the blue color and the shapes and
Speaker 1: the number of shapes. That doesn't matter. So because you're
Speaker 1: holding this rule in mind match the color, the neural
Speaker 1: networks in your visual cortex are mostly responding just to
Speaker 1: the color you stare at the cards, but really it's
Speaker 1: only your neurons involved in color that are shouting off.
Speaker 1: Now the rule changes and you have to pay attention
Speaker 1: to the number of objects. So you match a card
Speaker 1: with three shapes over here to a card with three
Speaker 1: shapes over there. Now, what hits your eyes is exactly
Speaker 1: the same, but the cells in your brain that are
Speaker 1: responding are those involved in numeracy and same when you're
Speaker 1: concentrating on matching shapes, like you want to match squares
Speaker 1: here with squares there. Your brain now plays a very
Speaker 1: different game. Everything hits the eyes, but your brain only
Speaker 1: really runs the algorithms involved in shape. So we can
Speaker 1: see selective attention directly in the brain. So back to
Speaker 1: the beta Miinhoff effect. Our brains encode almost nothing around
Speaker 1: us unless it somehow becomes relevant to us. Once something
Speaker 1: has been flagged as important or interesting to your brain,
Speaker 1: you will notice it more, creating the illusion that it
Speaker 1: is suddenly everywhere, And that leads us to the second
Speaker 1: parent of the better Minhoft love child, which is another
Speaker 1: psychological process running under the hood. The first was selective attention.
Speaker 1: The second is called confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is our
Speaker 1: tendency to notice everything that confirms what we already believe.
Speaker 1: We notice that we focus on it, we give greater
Speaker 1: credence to it. So generally we talk about confirmation bias
Speaker 1: as favoring information that confirms our pre existing beliefs and
Speaker 1: disregarding evidence that contradicts our beliefs. Or we seek out
Speaker 1: information that supports our existing views, or we interpret ambiguous
Speaker 1: evidence in a way that supports our existing opinions. But
Speaker 1: in this case of the beta Minhoff phenomenon, there's a
Speaker 1: simpler aspect of this going on. We are simply more
Speaker 1: likely to take the second appearance of the new word
Speaker 1: or car or shoe as something meaningful. Our brains are
Speaker 1: now on the lookout for it, and every time we
Speaker 1: see it or hear that word or song or fact again,
Speaker 1: that strengthens our belief our conviction that the event is
Speaker 1: happening with increased frequency, and lots of research shows that
Speaker 1: we remember information that supports our beliefs more readily than
Speaker 1: information that contradicts them. So once a new piece of
Speaker 1: information is introduced to our minds, like the name of
Speaker 1: a band or a new gadget, confirmation bias makes us
Speaker 1: believe that the thing is now suddenly ubiquitous. Every time
Speaker 1: we see it, we further sum meant this belief into place.
Speaker 1: So researchers typically talk about the beta Minhoff phenomenon in
Speaker 1: terms of selective attention and confirmation bias. But because I
Speaker 1: talk about internal models all the time, I want to
Speaker 1: cast what we're talking about today in terms of that.
Speaker 1: So as a reminder, your brain works to make a
Speaker 1: model of what is going on in the world out there.
Speaker 1: That's the internal model. Now, the part I want to
Speaker 1: emphasize is just how that actually limits your perception of
Speaker 1: the world. So let me give you an example. Imagine
Speaker 1: that you're on a hike with friends, and as you're
Speaker 1: tramping up the trails, one of your friends is a
Speaker 1: mycologist who studies mushrooms, and he notices the colors and
Speaker 1: unusually broad variety of the mushrooms around you. Now these
Speaker 1: fung guy at the base of trees, these have been
Speaker 1: hitting everyone's retinas, but this detail was invisible to the
Speaker 1: rest of you. Let's say one of your other friends
Speaker 1: as a pediatrist, and she notices something about the subtle
Speaker 1: turn of your feet as you hike, but no one
Speaker 1: else saw that. And your other friend is a climate scientist,
Speaker 1: and he notices the erosion around the tree line, and
Speaker 1: that's invisible to all the rest of you, even though
Speaker 1: all your eyes are pointing in that direction. The point
Speaker 1: is the same, data is laid out before all of you,
Speaker 1: but each of you knows how to look differently. Your
Speaker 1: internal model is built from the raw materials of your
Speaker 1: experience with the world, and each of us vacuums up
Speaker 1: the data from our peculiar thin trajectory in the world,
Speaker 1: which builds up our models and therefore our interpretations and
Speaker 1: our biases based on our experiences. And that's why when
Speaker 1: you're hiking, everyone is seeing a different world. So that's
Speaker 1: why we notice things more once they have some relevance
Speaker 1: to us, because the borders of your internal model have stretched,
Speaker 1: so now your brain catches words or cars or shoes
Speaker 1: that were previously just noise. These items had no filter
Speaker 1: shaped like them, and therefore they're mentioned was as good
Speaker 1: as invisible. Now that the model is stretched, you catch
Speaker 1: that new thing all over the place. So let's summarize
Speaker 1: where we are so far. Although we might swear that
Speaker 1: we've never heard a term mentioned before, the shoddiness of
Speaker 1: human memories suggests that's generally not true. Instead, what the
Speaker 1: beter Minhof phenomenon illustrates is how deeply we filter the world.
Speaker 1: We don't notice those things that we have no interpretation for.
Speaker 1: So think of walking in a foreign country and hearing
Speaker 1: people's speech simply as background noise, something you can't interpret.
Speaker 1: If you then learn like the word for good or
Speaker 1: for sorry or for thanks, then that constantly jumps out
Speaker 1: of the conversation to your ears. Why because you can
Speaker 1: now interpret it. It's not that people are saying it
Speaker 1: more often, It's that you finally figured out how to
Speaker 1: listen for it. As you better model the world, the
Speaker 1: more you catch. So even though you may think you
Speaker 1: never heard of this nineteen seventies German domestic terrorist group before,
Speaker 1: you presumably have, but you were busy with the other
Speaker 1: things of salience in your life, and it just didn't register.
Speaker 1: You were counting basketball passes and missed this gorilla. If
Speaker 1: you don't have a model for things, you just don't
Speaker 1: catch them. Now, the fascinating thing about the beter Miinhoff
Speaker 1: phenomenon is that it shows up in lots of ways.
Speaker 1: Once your attention is drawn to something, some words, some car,
Speaker 1: or some shoes, it seems to you to be everywhere.
Speaker 1: And the linguist that I mentioned before, Arnold's Wicki points
Speaker 1: out that there are several special cases of this. For example,
Speaker 1: one is called the outgroup illusion, and this is where
Speaker 1: there's some characteristic of a group who you don't like,
Speaker 1: and you start seeing that characteristic more often. So, for example,
Speaker 1: imagine that there are two groups who live on opposite
Speaker 1: sides of the track, the Augustinians and the Justinians. So
Speaker 1: let's say you're an Augustinian and you think the Justinians
Speaker 1: are very selfish. So then anytime some Justinian happens to
Speaker 1: act selfishly, you're noticing that, just like you would notice
Speaker 1: the new word or the shoe chooser the car. Your
Speaker 1: confirmation bias says, yes, I knew that was true about
Speaker 1: those guys, but presumably you don't notice as diligently the
Speaker 1: equivalent behaviors in your own group. And on the other
Speaker 1: side of the tracks, the Justinians look at the Augustinians
Speaker 1: and think they are very immoral. So whenever an Augustinian
Speaker 1: behaves poorly, a version of the better Meinhoff phenomenon takes
Speaker 1: place here, and it seems like this is a characteristic
Speaker 1: that is seen a whole lot in those Augustinians. And
Speaker 1: of course the Justinians will tend to notice less when
Speaker 1: immoral behavior happens in their own group, because their internal
Speaker 1: models suggest, like everybody's internal models, that their in group
Speaker 1: generally behaves well, behaves within certain moral boundaries, but that
Speaker 1: outgroup they are capable of anything. Now, relatedly, there was
Speaker 1: a paper a couple of years ago out of Duke
Speaker 1: Universe where they showed that if there's some group that
Speaker 1: you feel is threatening to you, they seem more populous,
Speaker 1: as in, there seem to be more of them, presumably
Speaker 1: because your internal model is noticing them more. Look, there's
Speaker 1: one on the sidewalk, there's one in the clothing store,
Speaker 1: there's one in that restaurant. So just like the beta
Speaker 1: Minhof phenomenon. Your estimates are off based on the details
Speaker 1: of your internal model. Why does this happen Because you're
Speaker 1: not noticing the groups that you are not threatened by.
Speaker 1: You're noticing those individuals who belong to the group that
Speaker 1: you attend to. Now, by the way, this doesn't always
Speaker 1: need to be groups that you're threatened by or you dislike.
Speaker 1: This can generally happen with anything you notice about groups
Speaker 1: that are not your own. As one example is which
Speaker 1: He also points out that some people who speak English
Speaker 1: in one country notice things about English speakers in another country.
Speaker 1: One example is the double use of the word is.
Speaker 1: For example, someone says the thing is is that blah
Speaker 1: blah blah. So speakers of different English dialects like Australian
Speaker 1: or Irish or British or American will say that they
Speaker 1: notice that other speakers use the double is, but that
Speaker 1: their own country does not do this. But it turns
Speaker 1: out that's generally not true. It's simply that you can
Speaker 1: notice things more easily that you take to be features
Speaker 1: of this other group that you think are unusual or
Speaker 1: exotic features, and you notice them all the time, while
Speaker 1: in fact it is just as common in your own
Speaker 1: group and all this is consistent with the fact that
Speaker 1: we as humans are pattern imposers. We try to capture
Speaker 1: the world, not by writing down every megabyte of data
Speaker 1: like a computer would, but instead by summarizing situations into
Speaker 1: patterns that we can recognize. And one of the ways
Speaker 1: we can see this is in how brains will impose
Speaker 1: patterns onto random noise. I talked about this in previous episodes,
Speaker 1: for example, about faces. It's so trivially easy for us
Speaker 1: to see faces all around us because faces carry enormous
Speaker 1: social information and we are highly pre programmed to spot faces.
Speaker 1: And that's why you see a face in the electrical
Speaker 1: outlet in your wall, or in the burn marks of
Speaker 1: a piece of toast, or on the face of the moon.
Speaker 1: Anything that even vaguely resembles two eyes and the line
Speaker 1: down and a line across will generally trigger your attention,
Speaker 1: because your brain thinks there is a face out there,
Speaker 1: and for reasons of threat or opportunity, it really cares
Speaker 1: about that. Now, in the visual domain, we call this paradolia,
Speaker 1: but this is a subset of a more general phenomenon
Speaker 1: called apophenia, which just refers to imposing patterns on noisy data.
Speaker 1: For example, participant in the lab will impose voices onto
Speaker 1: random noise, and in other studies, investors tend to see
Speaker 1: trends and patterns in stock prices that are essentially random,
Speaker 1: and that leads to over confidence in predicting future stock movements.
Speaker 1: And this is exactly what happens to us all the
Speaker 1: time we erroneously detect patterns. One particularly egregious example of
Speaker 1: this is when people claim that they have good or
Speaker 1: bad red light karma or parking karma. Now, I don't
Speaker 1: need to tell you that there is no such thing.
Speaker 1: The electronics underlying the city traffic department does not keep
Speaker 1: a light green or red for you, nor, as far
Speaker 1: as we can tell, are those electronics influenced by any
Speaker 1: sort of deity to help you at the expense of
Speaker 1: others to make a green light. No matter how much
Speaker 1: your deity likes you, he presumably doesn't manipulate the electronics
Speaker 1: lying your local city traffic department, and certainly none of
Speaker 1: the engineers who work there have ever noticed an anomaly.
Speaker 1: And it's the same with your parking. Your deity, although
Speaker 1: a fan of yours does not force a close parker
Speaker 1: to leave them all because he sees that you're coming. Nonetheless,
Speaker 1: we impose patterns, and if you have three lucky lights
Speaker 1: in a row or three lucky parking spots, then you
Speaker 1: start to feel like there's something larger than you happening here. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we've been talking about the beta Mainhoff phenomenon and
Speaker 1: the details of our psychology, like selective attention or confirmation bias.
Speaker 1: So now let's zoom out to the big picture of
Speaker 1: how the quirks of our psychology craft, in part, how
Speaker 1: we navigate our lives. And we can get into this
Speaker 1: by asking how does a simple psychological phenomenon touch on
Speaker 1: profound philosophical ideas an artistic expression? And this matters because
Speaker 1: the beta Meinhoff phenomenon isn't just about noticing something frequently
Speaker 1: after first encountering it. It's about how those repeated encounters
Speaker 1: feel surprising, almost like they are signaling something significant. So
Speaker 1: some decades ago, the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung proposed this
Speaker 1: concept of synchronicity. When events seem meaningfully related, like you
Speaker 1: are thinking about an old friend that you haven't spoken
Speaker 1: to in a long time, and just as you're reminiscing
Speaker 1: about him. Your phone rings and it's that friend calling
Speaker 1: you out of the blue. This unexpected coincidence where the
Speaker 1: inner thought and external event line up in a meaningful way.
Speaker 1: This is what young meant by synchronicity. And lots of
Speaker 1: people see these coinciding events or random encounters and they say, look,
Speaker 1: there must be a deeper cosmic pattern here. There's something
Speaker 1: I'm meant to notice now. This is a poetic thought,
Speaker 1: and the notions of serendipity and coincidence often show up
Speaker 1: in books and poetry. For example, in Ruki Morocomi's novels,
Speaker 1: the characters often experience strange synchronicities that guide their actions.
Speaker 1: These patterns are essential threads and the tapestry of life
Speaker 1: that pull us towards our destinies, and poets like Charles
Speaker 1: Bodelaire or ts Eliot they explore these themes of fate
Speaker 1: and coincidence and the search for signs and the chaos
Speaker 1: of urban life. But while this universe we live in
Speaker 1: is certainly much bigger than us and still full of mysteries,
Speaker 1: this is a good example of the way that our
Speaker 1: own psychological peculiarities might lead us to bark up the
Speaker 1: wrong trees. What simple psychological phenomenon like the better Meinhoff
Speaker 1: effect expose for us is the way that idiosyncrasies of
Speaker 1: our minds determine the way we interpret the world, both
Speaker 1: on a daily basis and in our life literature. What
Speaker 1: we see in the beta Minhoft phenomenon, which is a
Speaker 1: result of selective attention and confirmation bias, often convinces us
Speaker 1: of synchronicity in the universe when we're just seeing the
Speaker 1: exhaust of our own engines. So our literature gets shaped
Speaker 1: by the details of our psychology. If you can imagine
Speaker 1: an alien civilization that maybe has their own quirks, but
Speaker 1: doesn't have inattentional blindness and cognitive biases like our own,
Speaker 1: they might have a very different literature. If we're a commune,
Speaker 1: Baudelaire and Elliott got on a spaceship and went on
Speaker 1: a book toward to this other planet, they might find
Speaker 1: that their works aren't so popular because without the particular
Speaker 1: attentional quirks that we have, the aliens would not find
Speaker 1: stories about synchronicities so compelling. Like many things in science,
Speaker 1: understanding the details of our minds gives us a way
Speaker 1: to pull the camera back just slightly wider than our
Speaker 1: parochial view of the world, so that we can see
Speaker 1: the ways that we so often seek and impose meaning
Speaker 1: even when there is none. For the record, I'm not
Speaker 1: saying life is not full of meaning it is. I'm
Speaker 1: only pointing to those places where we can reliably demonstrate
Speaker 1: that patterns are being erroneously imposed. So what we talked
Speaker 1: about today was this weird feeling of learning something new
Speaker 1: and then suddenly noticing it everywhere. In the case of
Speaker 1: the beta Minhoff phenomenon, it is a bias where our
Speaker 1: attention and then our subsequent recognition are heightened, which leads
Speaker 1: us to believe that these newly discovered items are occurring
Speaker 1: more frequently. So does the beta Minehoff effect reveal a
Speaker 1: deeper spiritual reality in which everything in the universe is connected?
Speaker 1: Or is it merely our minds seeking patterns in the
Speaker 1: randomness of existence, asking these questions and chasing down the answers.
Speaker 1: This improves our understanding of reality and our place within it,
Speaker 1: because we see that it is less about the objects
Speaker 1: or the information themselves and more about the intricate dance
Speaker 1: of attention and memory. It's a reminder that your perception
Speaker 1: of frequency is not a perfect mirror of reality, but
Speaker 1: is shaped by the interplay of new information and existing knowledge.
Speaker 1: The cognitive mechanisms that we come to the table with
Speaker 1: color our experience, sometimes with misleading hues. We don't see
Speaker 1: the world exactly as it is out there, but is
Speaker 1: filtered through the lens of what we have experienced. As
Speaker 1: the writer on ais ninput it, we see things not
Speaker 1: as they are, We see them as we are. I
Speaker 1: hope today's exploration will make you more aware of your
Speaker 1: of the world. Try to notice instances of the better
Speaker 1: Minehoff phenomenon in your life. Ask why certain information suddenly
Speaker 1: stands out to you. You won't always be able to
Speaker 1: answer this, but sometimes something interesting will surface, turning a
Speaker 1: bit of your unconscious experience more conscious. Go to Eagleman
Speaker 1: dot com slash podcast for more information and find further reading.
Speaker 1: Send me an email at podcasts at eagleman dot com
Speaker 1: with any questions or discussions, and if this is your
Speaker 1: first time hearing about the better Minehoff effect, I'm quite
Speaker 1: sure you'll hear about it again soon. Pop me a
Speaker 1: note when you do, and check out and subscribe to
Speaker 1: Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and
Speaker 1: to leave comments until next time. I'm David Eagleman, and
Speaker 1: thank you for joining me here in the inner Cosmos.
Speaker 1: I hope you to part