Why am I going to start today's brain science episode by telling you about the beater Mainhoff group, which was a West German far left terrorist group in the nineteen seventies. This political group is fully irrelevant to any modern discussions and their political positions are totally irrelevant to neuroscience. So what do these domestic terrorists have to do with attention and salience and the front of your brain and synchronicity? And why might you soon hear about the better Minehoff group? Again not for political reasons, but for reasons to do with your own brain. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford and in these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand the intersection between how the brain works and how we experience life. So let's start in nineteen seventy when a far left wing militant group called beater Mainhoff also known as the Red Army Faction, they took to the streets in Germany. Now they define themselves as communist and anti imperialist, and they launched a string of robberies and then bombings, and eventually assassinations, and this all brought a lot of bloodshed and pain to Germany throughout the decade. Okay, now, who cares about the beater Minhoff Gang. Well, unless this touched your life in the nineteen seventies, probably nobody. So why am I telling you about this gang? Are they coming back? No, happily they are long defunct. But the joy of today's podcast is that I get to make a prediction that you will hear about Bader Mainehoff again and it probably won't be too long. And then you'll think, Wow, I just heard about that on Eagelman's podcast, and now I'm hearing about it again. Now, how can I make a prediction like that? Well, the important part of our story began two decades after the beater Minehoff Kang. It began with a man named Terry Mullen in nineteen ninety four. Now, Terry, like probably most people, had never heard of the batter Minehoff Gang, and then he heard about them. He heard their name, and then he was surprised to hear the name a second time within twenty four hours, and he thought that was just sort of weird and amazing that he had just learned that name and then he heard it a second time, so he informally posted about that on the Saint Paul Pioneer Press online discussion board, and others immediately chimed in that they had noticed this general pattern before. There had been times when they had learned a new concept or name, and then they began to see it everywhere, and this phenomenon of learning something new and then seeing it again shortly after, or seeing it all over the place. Everyone started chiming in on the discussion board that they had noticed this kind of thing before. So the original poster named this the Beaiter Meinhoff phenomenon, and it quickly blossomed into a meme, first on the discussion board, then nationally, then internationally. Now you've probably noticed this in your own life. You see some item or some new term, and then you see it again and again. It's not necessarily something really popular that everyone's talking about, but seemingly something more obscure. Once you've heard of something, you start noticing it everywhere, like you've just learned a new word when you're totally sure you've never heard before, and then seemingly out of nowhere, you hear it several times in a week where maybe you learn about some obscure piece of technology and suddenly it appears elsewhere on your news feed, or your friend mentions it out of the blue. If you chew on this for a second, you'll definitely be able to come up with examples where you learned some new piece of trivia, or you became interested in some new type of shoe and then suddenly it seems like you encounter that particular fact again, or you see that shoe everywhere you go. That is the beatter Minehoff phenomenon. A friend recently reported this to me. When his wife got pregnant, he started noticing pregnant women everywhere. Suddenly the world was filled with women about to give birth. Where were they all before? And the better Minehoff phenomenon happens to me a lot. It happens that I'm thinking about getting a new vehicle now, so I've been paying more attention to car models on the road around me, and I've spotted a couple of makes and models where I thought, hey, I kind of like that I've never noticed that vehicle before, and now I'm seeing it everywhere. It makes me feel that these models that I had never seen before, that they're proliferating, they're driving past me in the street, they're parked in my neighborhood, they're featured in a movie I'm watching. The impression is that the universe is echoing what I just learned. Now, as you've probably guessed because this is a neuroscience podcast, this phenomenon isn't about the universe making things appear more frequently. Instead, it's a quirk of your psychology. You are having the illusion that the frequency has increased to this end. In two thousand and five, the Stanford linguist ARNOLDSWICKI gave a more official name to the beter Mainhoff phenomenon. He coined this the frequency illusion, and that name captures the idea more precisely. Even though this remains more widely known by its origine meme name. I've also heard this referred to by the way as the red car illusion or the blue car effect, meaning that when you start paying attention to red or blue cars you see them everywhere. But whatever we call it, it's all about the illusion of the frequency of a previously unknown thing increasing, and you can see this in many guyses. For example, I've noticed a fascinating conflation between online ads and the beta Meinhoff effect. It goes like this. A friend is surfing around and spends a moment admiring a new band or a new kitchen item, and then she's surfing around the next day and sees more of these ads for the same thing. So she blames cookies and invasive adwere and yes, of course this is part of why she's seeing that thing more. But this model of big brother can quickly get stretched beyond sensibility when the new item is next noticed on a billboard or overheard in a conversation. People will sometimes make crazy arguments that there's a more devious ad network at play here, But this is simply the Beater Minehoff phenomenon in action. Now, just before we move into understanding why this happens, I'll tell you a quick academic joke. A student says to her friend, have you ever heard of the beatter Minehoff phenomenon? And the other replies, that's so strange. I just read about that yesterday. Okay, So we have a sense of what the phenomenon is, and the question we're going to ask today is why does it occur? Because what we notice and when tells a deeper story about how we engage with the world around us. So with the beta Minehoff phenomenon, we're always tempted to say, no, I'm definitely sure that I've never seen that before. It's not that I'm having some perceptual illusion. It's that I really never heard that term in my life before yesterday, and now I've heard it twice. But that's generally not the case. It's simply that we don't notice those things that are not relevant to us. The beta Mindhoff phenomenon is not some trick of the universe. Instead, it is the love child of two psychological processes running under the hood. The first issue is selective attention. Now, people sometimes think that selective attention just means you're not listening to your spouse or kids, but in fact, selective attention is our brain's way of managing the enormous amount of information that it encounters. Remember that your brain lives in silence and darkness, and it's trying to make a model of the whole world out there. But the whole world is way too complex and it's overflowing with detail, almost all of which is meaningless to you. So your brain is selective about what it looks for and what it takes in. So think about the last time you walked through a crowded marketplace. The sites, the sounds, the smell. It's more details than you could ever encode or whatever want to encode. So your attention acts like a filter. Now, let's get straight what we mean by a filter. Sometimes you might think that what this means is that you're taking everything in and then you're throwing out the stuff you don't want. But filtering is generally harsher than that. You don't even take stuff in unless it matches a shape for you. So think about those children's toys where you have a box and you put in a square object into the square hole, or a triangular object into the triangle hole, or a circular object. Those are filters. And if I hand you a hexagon, it doesn't even go in. It's not that the box considers hexagons and then spits it back out, it's that it doesn't even make it into the box. Now, from the brain's point of view, how does it know what things to filter in and out? Well, you pay attention to certain things because you have networks housed primarily in the prefrontal cortex for deciding what information is relevant or salient, and this is constantly updating from your experience. In other words, your brain is always asking, hey, what is the important stuff that I need to pay attention to? What stuff matters here? So when you encounter new information, like hearing that cool new band or seeing the cool new shoes, this network updates and subsequently your brain can take in this information. Now, let's flip this notion of selective attention and look at what can happen if you're simply not paying attention to something. This is called inattentional blindness, and it says though you never even see the thing at all. So I'll give you an example. I did an episode some weeks ago about why magic tricks work, and a lot pivots on exactly this issue of inattentional blindness. Something can happen right in front of you, but if you're not watching for it. In other words, your attention is elsewhere. The photons hit your eyes, but you don't see it. The magician moves his hand in an arc, or pretends he's throwing something in the air, or there's a snap of the fingers right over here, and suddenly the card slip happens. Right there, but it says though it didn't happen, why because your attention has been pulled elsewhere. Now, as an example of this that I'm guessing most people have seen, consider the Invisible Gorilla video. If you haven't seen this, search for it on YouTube. But pause this podcast here because what's coming next is a spoiler. The way this works is you see several people and half are wearing one shirt color and the other half is wearing a different color. And each team passes a basketball, but only two other members of their team, but they're all intermixed, so they're passing and moving between one another, and your job is to count the number of times the ball is passed by one of the teams. So you count, Okay, there's one pass, Then that person throws to another person on their team. Okay, that's two. Then that person throws to another team member. Okay, that's three. Like that, but it's challenging because to keep an accurate account, you have to ignore what the other team is doing. So you get to the end of the video and you say, great, I got it. This team made twelve passes, and you're told the answer, And let's say the answer is twelve you got it right. But then you're asked, but did you notice the gorilla? And then the video is shown again, the exact same video, and now you're not counting passes. You're just looking at the big picture. You're watching the video with a different context. And now you see something that blows your mind, which is that a guy in a gorilla suit walks right into the middle of the basketball players and he turns and faces the camera and thumps his chest, and then he struts out stage left, and all the while the basketball players are just continuing to pass the balls between them. Now, almost everybody doesn't notice the gorilla the first time they watched the video. Why It's because their attention is so focused on counting the passes. So given that our visual attention is limited, we miss the things that were not specifically focused on. And this is why it's known as inattentional blindness. Now, this can all be seen as a downside, but it's actually just what a brain needs to do to navigate its complex environment. It focuses on certain signals while ignoring others. For example, think about when you're at a noisy cafe. You have to selectively focus on your companion's voice and not hear all the irrelevant conversations around you, even though all of this hits your ear drums like.

Why am I going to start today's brain science episode by telling you about the beater Mainhoff group, which was a West German far left terrorist group in the nineteen seventies. This political group is fully irrelevant to any modern discussions and their political positions are totally irrelevant to neuroscience. So what do these domestic terrorists have to do with attention and salience and the front of your brain and synchronicity? And why might you soon hear about the better Minehoff group? Again not for political reasons, but for reasons to do with your own brain. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford and in these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand the intersection between how the brain works and how we experience life. So let's start in nineteen seventy when a far left wing militant group called beater Mainhoff also known as the Red Army Faction, they took to the streets in Germany. Now they define themselves as communist and anti imperialist, and they launched a string of robberies and then bombings, and eventually assassinations, and this all brought a lot of bloodshed and pain to Germany throughout the decade. Okay, now, who cares about the beater Minhoff Gang. Well, unless this touched your life in the nineteen seventies, probably nobody. So why am I telling you about this gang? Are they coming back? No, happily they are long defunct. But the joy of today's podcast is that I get to make a prediction that you will hear about Bader Mainehoff again and it probably won't be too long. And then you'll think, Wow, I just heard about that on Eagelman's podcast, and now I'm hearing about it again. Now, how can I make a prediction like that? Well, the important part of our story began two decades after the beater Minehoff Kang. It began with a man named Terry Mullen in nineteen ninety four. Now, Terry, like probably most people, had never heard of the batter Minehoff Gang, and then he heard about them. He heard their name, and then he was surprised to hear the name a second time within twenty four hours, and he thought that was just sort of weird and amazing that he had just learned that name and then he heard it a second time, so he informally posted about that on the Saint Paul Pioneer Press online discussion board, and others immediately chimed in that they had noticed this general pattern before. There had been times when they had learned a new concept or name, and then they began to see it everywhere, and this phenomenon of learning something new and then seeing it again shortly after, or seeing it all over the place. Everyone started chiming in on the discussion board that they had noticed this kind of thing before. So the original poster named this the Beaiter Meinhoff phenomenon, and it quickly blossomed into a meme, first on the discussion board, then nationally, then internationally. Now you've probably noticed this in your own life. You see some item or some new term, and then you see it again and again. It's not necessarily something really popular that everyone's talking about, but seemingly something more obscure. Once you've heard of something, you start noticing it everywhere, like you've just learned a new word when you're totally sure you've never heard before, and then seemingly out of nowhere, you hear it several times in a week where maybe you learn about some obscure piece of technology and suddenly it appears elsewhere on your news feed, or your friend mentions it out of the blue. If you chew on this for a second, you'll definitely be able to come up with examples where you learned some new piece of trivia, or you became interested in some new type of shoe and then suddenly it seems like you encounter that particular fact again, or you see that shoe everywhere you go. That is the beatter Minehoff phenomenon. A friend recently reported this to me. When his wife got pregnant, he started noticing pregnant women everywhere. Suddenly the world was filled with women about to give birth. Where were they all before? And the better Minehoff phenomenon happens to me a lot. It happens that I'm thinking about getting a new vehicle now, so I've been paying more attention to car models on the road around me, and I've spotted a couple of makes and models where I thought, hey, I kind of like that I've never noticed that vehicle before, and now I'm seeing it everywhere. It makes me feel that these models that I had never seen before, that they're proliferating, they're driving past me in the street, they're parked in my neighborhood, they're featured in a movie I'm watching. The impression is that the universe is echoing what I just learned. Now, as you've probably guessed because this is a neuroscience podcast, this phenomenon isn't about the universe making things appear more frequently. Instead, it's a quirk of your psychology. You are having the illusion that the frequency has increased to this end. In two thousand and five, the Stanford linguist ARNOLDSWICKI gave a more official name to the beter Mainhoff phenomenon. He coined this the frequency illusion, and that name captures the idea more precisely. Even though this remains more widely known by its origine meme name. I've also heard this referred to by the way as the red car illusion or the blue car effect, meaning that when you start paying attention to red or blue cars you see them everywhere. But whatever we call it, it's all about the illusion of the frequency of a previously unknown thing increasing, and you can see this in many guyses. For example, I've noticed a fascinating conflation between online ads and the beta Meinhoff effect. It goes like this. A friend is surfing around and spends a moment admiring a new band or a new kitchen item, and then she's surfing around the next day and sees more of these ads for the same thing. So she blames cookies and invasive adwere and yes, of course this is part of why she's seeing that thing more. But this model of big brother can quickly get stretched beyond sensibility when the new item is next noticed on a billboard or overheard in a conversation. People will sometimes make crazy arguments that there's a more devious ad network at play here, But this is simply the Beater Minehoff phenomenon in action. Now, just before we move into understanding why this happens, I'll tell you a quick academic joke. A student says to her friend, have you ever heard of the beatter Minehoff phenomenon? And the other replies, that's so strange. I just read about that yesterday. Okay, So we have a sense of what the phenomenon is, and the question we're going to ask today is why does it occur? Because what we notice and when tells a deeper story about how we engage with the world around us. So with the beta Minehoff phenomenon, we're always tempted to say, no, I'm definitely sure that I've never seen that before. It's not that I'm having some perceptual illusion. It's that I really never heard that term in my life before yesterday, and now I've heard it twice. But that's generally not the case. It's simply that we don't notice those things that are not relevant to us. The beta Mindhoff phenomenon is not some trick of the universe. Instead, it is the love child of two psychological processes running under the hood. The first issue is selective attention. Now, people sometimes think that selective attention just means you're not listening to your spouse or kids, but in fact, selective attention is our brain's way of managing the enormous amount of information that it encounters. Remember that your brain lives in silence and darkness, and it's trying to make a model of the whole world out there. But the whole world is way too complex and it's overflowing with detail, almost all of which is meaningless to you. So your brain is selective about what it looks for and what it takes in. So think about the last time you walked through a crowded marketplace. The sites, the sounds, the smell. It's more details than you could ever encode or whatever want to encode. So your attention acts like a filter. Now, let's get straight what we mean by a filter. Sometimes you might think that what this means is that you're taking everything in and then you're throwing out the stuff you don't want. But filtering is generally harsher than that. You don't even take stuff in unless it matches a shape for you. So think about those children's toys where you have a box and you put in a square object into the square hole, or a triangular object into the triangle hole, or a circular object. Those are filters. And if I hand you a hexagon, it doesn't even go in. It's not that the box considers hexagons and then spits it back out, it's that it doesn't even make it into the box. Now, from the brain's point of view, how does it know what things to filter in and out? Well, you pay attention to certain things because you have networks housed primarily in the prefrontal cortex for deciding what information is relevant or salient, and this is constantly updating from your experience. In other words, your brain is always asking, hey, what is the important stuff that I need to pay attention to? What stuff matters here? So when you encounter new information, like hearing that cool new band or seeing the cool new shoes, this network updates and subsequently your brain can take in this information. Now, let's flip this notion of selective attention and look at what can happen if you're simply not paying attention to something. This is called inattentional blindness, and it says though you never even see the thing at all. So I'll give you an example. I did an episode some weeks ago about why magic tricks work, and a lot pivots on exactly this issue of inattentional blindness. Something can happen right in front of you, but if you're not watching for it. In other words, your attention is elsewhere. The photons hit your eyes, but you don't see it. The magician moves his hand in an arc, or pretends he's throwing something in the air, or there's a snap of the fingers right over here, and suddenly the card slip happens. Right there, but it says though it didn't happen, why because your attention has been pulled elsewhere. Now, as an example of this that I'm guessing most people have seen, consider the Invisible Gorilla video. If you haven't seen this, search for it on YouTube. But pause this podcast here because what's coming next is a spoiler. The way this works is you see several people and half are wearing one shirt color and the other half is wearing a different color. And each team passes a basketball, but only two other members of their team, but they're all intermixed, so they're passing and moving between one another, and your job is to count the number of times the ball is passed by one of the teams. So you count, Okay, there's one pass, Then that person throws to another person on their team. Okay, that's two. Then that person throws to another team member. Okay, that's three. Like that, but it's challenging because to keep an accurate account, you have to ignore what the other team is doing. So you get to the end of the video and you say, great, I got it. This team made twelve passes, and you're told the answer, And let's say the answer is twelve you got it right. But then you're asked, but did you notice the gorilla? And then the video is shown again, the exact same video, and now you're not counting passes. You're just looking at the big picture. You're watching the video with a different context. And now you see something that blows your mind, which is that a guy in a gorilla suit walks right into the middle of the basketball players and he turns and faces the camera and thumps his chest, and then he struts out stage left, and all the while the basketball players are just continuing to pass the balls between them. Now, almost everybody doesn't notice the gorilla the first time they watched the video. Why It's because their attention is so focused on counting the passes. So given that our visual attention is limited, we miss the things that were not specifically focused on. And this is why it's known as inattentional blindness. Now, this can all be seen as a downside, but it's actually just what a brain needs to do to navigate its complex environment. It focuses on certain signals while ignoring others. For example, think about when you're at a noisy cafe. You have to selectively focus on your companion's voice and not hear all the irrelevant conversations around you, even though all of this hits your ear drums like.

This, But what you attend to is this, Hi, can I get you something?

This, But what you attend to is this, Hi, can I get you something?

So it's obviously very useful to be able to selectively attend because the world is a cacophonous flood, and selective attention allows us to zoom in on the signals of interest. I'm just gonna take a one second tangent to give you a sense of something here. Some of you know that I spun a company out of my lab called Neo Sensory, And in this company, we make a wristband for people who are deaf, and the wristband has a microphone that picks up on the sounds around you, and then it turns those sounds into patterns vibration on the skin. So it's doing what your inner ear, your cochlea is doing. We're just transferring that job to the skin. Now, here's what I wanted to touch on. Typically, when someone puts this on for the first time, they say, WHOA, I'm feeling so much buzzing going on around here, and it takes them a little while to understand that all this buzzing is part of this soundscape around them. In other words, the next time you're at the cafe, pay attention not just to your companion's conversation, but really listen to all the sounds that are hitting your ears. The overhead music and the barista and the coffee machines, and the doors opening and closing, and the squeaking and every single one of the conversations going on around you. All of that is hitting your ear drums. We're so good at ignoring all of that that we only take in what is salient to us. And it's only when you push that information in through a new channel, like through your wrist, that you realize how much noise is actually out there. Your brain has to learn how to pay selective attention to the vibrations on your wrist. Okay, so that's selective attention. How does this kind of thing get studied in the neuroscience laboratory. Well, think of something like a card game like the one called Set or something called the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task. And in games like this, each card has some number of shapes of a certain color. So this card might have three blue diamonds and this one has four red squares, and that one has two green circles. And let's say you're trying to match a certain property between cards, like the blue color and the shapes and the number of shapes. That doesn't matter. So because you're holding this rule in mind match the color, the neural networks in your visual cortex are mostly responding just to the color you stare at the cards, but really it's only your neurons involved in color that are shouting off. Now the rule changes and you have to pay attention to the number of objects. So you match a card with three shapes over here to a card with three shapes over there. Now, what hits your eyes is exactly the same, but the cells in your brain that are responding are those involved in numeracy and same when you're concentrating on matching shapes, like you want to match squares here with squares there. Your brain now plays a very different game. Everything hits the eyes, but your brain only really runs the algorithms involved in shape. So we can see selective attention directly in the brain. So back to the beta Miinhoff effect. Our brains encode almost nothing around us unless it somehow becomes relevant to us. Once something has been flagged as important or interesting to your brain, you will notice it more, creating the illusion that it is suddenly everywhere, And that leads us to the second parent of the better Minhoft love child, which is another psychological process running under the hood. The first was selective attention. The second is called confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is our tendency to notice everything that confirms what we already believe. We notice that we focus on it, we give greater credence to it. So generally we talk about confirmation bias as favoring information that confirms our pre existing beliefs and disregarding evidence that contradicts our beliefs. Or we seek out information that supports our existing views, or we interpret ambiguous evidence in a way that supports our existing opinions. But in this case of the beta Minhoff phenomenon, there's a simpler aspect of this going on. We are simply more likely to take the second appearance of the new word or car or shoe as something meaningful. Our brains are now on the lookout for it, and every time we see it or hear that word or song or fact again, that strengthens our belief our conviction that the event is happening with increased frequency, and lots of research shows that we remember information that supports our beliefs more readily than information that contradicts them. So once a new piece of information is introduced to our minds, like the name of a band or a new gadget, confirmation bias makes us believe that the thing is now suddenly ubiquitous. Every time we see it, we further sum meant this belief into place. So researchers typically talk about the beta Minhoff phenomenon in terms of selective attention and confirmation bias. But because I talk about internal models all the time, I want to cast what we're talking about today in terms of that. So as a reminder, your brain works to make a model of what is going on in the world out there. That's the internal model. Now, the part I want to emphasize is just how that actually limits your perception of the world. So let me give you an example. Imagine that you're on a hike with friends, and as you're tramping up the trails, one of your friends is a mycologist who studies mushrooms, and he notices the colors and unusually broad variety of the mushrooms around you. Now these fung guy at the base of trees, these have been hitting everyone's retinas, but this detail was invisible to the rest of you. Let's say one of your other friends as a pediatrist, and she notices something about the subtle turn of your feet as you hike, but no one else saw that. And your other friend is a climate scientist, and he notices the erosion around the tree line, and that's invisible to all the rest of you, even though all your eyes are pointing in that direction. The point is the same, data is laid out before all of you, but each of you knows how to look differently. Your internal model is built from the raw materials of your experience with the world, and each of us vacuums up the data from our peculiar thin trajectory in the world, which builds up our models and therefore our interpretations and our biases based on our experiences. And that's why when you're hiking, everyone is seeing a different world. So that's why we notice things more once they have some relevance to us, because the borders of your internal model have stretched, so now your brain catches words or cars or shoes that were previously just noise. These items had no filter shaped like them, and therefore they're mentioned was as good as invisible. Now that the model is stretched, you catch that new thing all over the place. So let's summarize where we are so far. Although we might swear that we've never heard a term mentioned before, the shoddiness of human memories suggests that's generally not true. Instead, what the beter Minhof phenomenon illustrates is how deeply we filter the world. We don't notice those things that we have no interpretation for. So think of walking in a foreign country and hearing people's speech simply as background noise, something you can't interpret. If you then learn like the word for good or for sorry or for thanks, then that constantly jumps out of the conversation to your ears. Why because you can now interpret it. It's not that people are saying it more often, It's that you finally figured out how to listen for it. As you better model the world, the more you catch. So even though you may think you never heard of this nineteen seventies German domestic terrorist group before, you presumably have, but you were busy with the other things of salience in your life, and it just didn't register. You were counting basketball passes and missed this gorilla. If you don't have a model for things, you just don't catch them. Now, the fascinating thing about the beter Miinhoff phenomenon is that it shows up in lots of ways. Once your attention is drawn to something, some words, some car, or some shoes, it seems to you to be everywhere. And the linguist that I mentioned before, Arnold's Wicki points out that there are several special cases of this. For example, one is called the outgroup illusion, and this is where there's some characteristic of a group who you don't like, and you start seeing that characteristic more often. So, for example, imagine that there are two groups who live on opposite sides of the track, the Augustinians and the Justinians. So let's say you're an Augustinian and you think the Justinians are very selfish. So then anytime some Justinian happens to act selfishly, you're noticing that, just like you would notice the new word or the shoe chooser the car. Your confirmation bias says, yes, I knew that was true about those guys, but presumably you don't notice as diligently the equivalent behaviors in your own group. And on the other side of the tracks, the Justinians look at the Augustinians and think they are very immoral. So whenever an Augustinian behaves poorly, a version of the better Meinhoff phenomenon takes place here, and it seems like this is a characteristic that is seen a whole lot in those Augustinians. And of course the Justinians will tend to notice less when immoral behavior happens in their own group, because their internal models suggest, like everybody's internal models, that their in group generally behaves well, behaves within certain moral boundaries, but that outgroup they are capable of anything. Now, relatedly, there was a paper a couple of years ago out of Duke Universe where they showed that if there's some group that you feel is threatening to you, they seem more populous, as in, there seem to be more of them, presumably because your internal model is noticing them more. Look, there's one on the sidewalk, there's one in the clothing store, there's one in that restaurant. So just like the beta Minhof phenomenon. Your estimates are off based on the details of your internal model. Why does this happen Because you're not noticing the groups that you are not threatened by. You're noticing those individuals who belong to the group that you attend to. Now, by the way, this doesn't always need to be groups that you're threatened by or you dislike. This can generally happen with anything you notice about groups that are not your own. As one example is which He also points out that some people who speak English in one country notice things about English speakers in another country. One example is the double use of the word is. For example, someone says the thing is is that blah blah blah. So speakers of different English dialects like Australian or Irish or British or American will say that they notice that other speakers use the double is, but that their own country does not do this. But it turns out that's generally not true. It's simply that you can notice things more easily that you take to be features of this other group that you think are unusual or exotic features, and you notice them all the time, while in fact it is just as common in your own group and all this is consistent with the fact that we as humans are pattern imposers. We try to capture the world, not by writing down every megabyte of data like a computer would, but instead by summarizing situations into patterns that we can recognize. And one of the ways we can see this is in how brains will impose patterns onto random noise. I talked about this in previous episodes, for example, about faces. It's so trivially easy for us to see faces all around us because faces carry enormous social information and we are highly pre programmed to spot faces. And that's why you see a face in the electrical outlet in your wall, or in the burn marks of a piece of toast, or on the face of the moon. Anything that even vaguely resembles two eyes and the line down and a line across will generally trigger your attention, because your brain thinks there is a face out there, and for reasons of threat or opportunity, it really cares about that. Now, in the visual domain, we call this paradolia, but this is a subset of a more general phenomenon called apophenia, which just refers to imposing patterns on noisy data. For example, participant in the lab will impose voices onto random noise, and in other studies, investors tend to see trends and patterns in stock prices that are essentially random, and that leads to over confidence in predicting future stock movements. And this is exactly what happens to us all the time we erroneously detect patterns. One particularly egregious example of this is when people claim that they have good or bad red light karma or parking karma. Now, I don't need to tell you that there is no such thing. The electronics underlying the city traffic department does not keep a light green or red for you, nor, as far as we can tell, are those electronics influenced by any sort of deity to help you at the expense of others to make a green light. No matter how much your deity likes you, he presumably doesn't manipulate the electronics lying your local city traffic department, and certainly none of the engineers who work there have ever noticed an anomaly. And it's the same with your parking. Your deity, although a fan of yours does not force a close parker to leave them all because he sees that you're coming. Nonetheless, we impose patterns, and if you have three lucky lights in a row or three lucky parking spots, then you start to feel like there's something larger than you happening here. Okay, so we've been talking about the beta Mainhoff phenomenon and the details of our psychology, like selective attention or confirmation bias. So now let's zoom out to the big picture of how the quirks of our psychology craft, in part, how we navigate our lives. And we can get into this by asking how does a simple psychological phenomenon touch on profound philosophical ideas an artistic expression? And this matters because the beta Meinhoff phenomenon isn't just about noticing something frequently after first encountering it. It's about how those repeated encounters feel surprising, almost like they are signaling something significant. So some decades ago, the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung proposed this concept of synchronicity. When events seem meaningfully related, like you are thinking about an old friend that you haven't spoken to in a long time, and just as you're reminiscing about him. Your phone rings and it's that friend calling you out of the blue. This unexpected coincidence where the inner thought and external event line up in a meaningful way. This is what young meant by synchronicity. And lots of people see these coinciding events or random encounters and they say, look, there must be a deeper cosmic pattern here. There's something I'm meant to notice now. This is a poetic thought, and the notions of serendipity and coincidence often show up in books and poetry. For example, in Ruki Morocomi's novels, the characters often experience strange synchronicities that guide their actions. These patterns are essential threads and the tapestry of life that pull us towards our destinies, and poets like Charles Bodelaire or ts Eliot they explore these themes of fate and coincidence and the search for signs and the chaos of urban life. But while this universe we live in is certainly much bigger than us and still full of mysteries, this is a good example of the way that our own psychological peculiarities might lead us to bark up the wrong trees. What simple psychological phenomenon like the better Meinhoff effect expose for us is the way that idiosyncrasies of our minds determine the way we interpret the world, both on a daily basis and in our life literature. What we see in the beta Minhoft phenomenon, which is a result of selective attention and confirmation bias, often convinces us of synchronicity in the universe when we're just seeing the exhaust of our own engines. So our literature gets shaped by the details of our psychology. If you can imagine an alien civilization that maybe has their own quirks, but doesn't have inattentional blindness and cognitive biases like our own, they might have a very different literature. If we're a commune, Baudelaire and Elliott got on a spaceship and went on a book toward to this other planet, they might find that their works aren't so popular because without the particular attentional quirks that we have, the aliens would not find stories about synchronicities so compelling. Like many things in science, understanding the details of our minds gives us a way to pull the camera back just slightly wider than our parochial view of the world, so that we can see the ways that we so often seek and impose meaning even when there is none. For the record, I'm not saying life is not full of meaning it is. I'm only pointing to those places where we can reliably demonstrate that patterns are being erroneously imposed. So what we talked about today was this weird feeling of learning something new and then suddenly noticing it everywhere. In the case of the beta Minhoff phenomenon, it is a bias where our attention and then our subsequent recognition are heightened, which leads us to believe that these newly discovered items are occurring more frequently. So does the beta Minehoff effect reveal a deeper spiritual reality in which everything in the universe is connected? Or is it merely our minds seeking patterns in the randomness of existence, asking these questions and chasing down the answers. This improves our understanding of reality and our place within it, because we see that it is less about the objects or the information themselves and more about the intricate dance of attention and memory. It's a reminder that your perception of frequency is not a perfect mirror of reality, but is shaped by the interplay of new information and existing knowledge. The cognitive mechanisms that we come to the table with color our experience, sometimes with misleading hues. We don't see the world exactly as it is out there, but is filtered through the lens of what we have experienced. As the writer on ais ninput it, we see things not as they are, We see them as we are. I hope today's exploration will make you more aware of your of the world. Try to notice instances of the better Minehoff phenomenon in your life. Ask why certain information suddenly stands out to you. You won't always be able to answer this, but sometimes something interesting will surface, turning a bit of your unconscious experience more conscious. Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and find further reading. Send me an email at podcasts at eagleman dot com with any questions or discussions, and if this is your first time hearing about the better Minehoff effect, I'm quite sure you'll hear about it again soon. Pop me a note when you do, and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments until next time. I'm David Eagleman, and thank you for joining me here in the inner Cosmos. I hope you to part

So it's obviously very useful to be able to selectively attend because the world is a cacophonous flood, and selective attention allows us to zoom in on the signals of interest. I'm just gonna take a one second tangent to give you a sense of something here. Some of you know that I spun a company out of my lab called Neo Sensory, And in this company, we make a wristband for people who are deaf, and the wristband has a microphone that picks up on the sounds around you, and then it turns those sounds into patterns vibration on the skin. So it's doing what your inner ear, your cochlea is doing. We're just transferring that job to the skin. Now, here's what I wanted to touch on. Typically, when someone puts this on for the first time, they say, WHOA, I'm feeling so much buzzing going on around here, and it takes them a little while to understand that all this buzzing is part of this soundscape around them. In other words, the next time you're at the cafe, pay attention not just to your companion's conversation, but really listen to all the sounds that are hitting your ears. The overhead music and the barista and the coffee machines, and the doors opening and closing, and the squeaking and every single one of the conversations going on around you. All of that is hitting your ear drums. We're so good at ignoring all of that that we only take in what is salient to us. And it's only when you push that information in through a new channel, like through your wrist, that you realize how much noise is actually out there. Your brain has to learn how to pay selective attention to the vibrations on your wrist. Okay, so that's selective attention. How does this kind of thing get studied in the neuroscience laboratory. Well, think of something like a card game like the one called Set or something called the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task. And in games like this, each card has some number of shapes of a certain color. So this card might have three blue diamonds and this one has four red squares, and that one has two green circles. And let's say you're trying to match a certain property between cards, like the blue color and the shapes and the number of shapes. That doesn't matter. So because you're holding this rule in mind match the color, the neural networks in your visual cortex are mostly responding just to the color you stare at the cards, but really it's only your neurons involved in color that are shouting off. Now the rule changes and you have to pay attention to the number of objects. So you match a card with three shapes over here to a card with three shapes over there. Now, what hits your eyes is exactly the same, but the cells in your brain that are responding are those involved in numeracy and same when you're concentrating on matching shapes, like you want to match squares here with squares there. Your brain now plays a very different game. Everything hits the eyes, but your brain only really runs the algorithms involved in shape. So we can see selective attention directly in the brain. So back to the beta Miinhoff effect. Our brains encode almost nothing around us unless it somehow becomes relevant to us. Once something has been flagged as important or interesting to your brain, you will notice it more, creating the illusion that it is suddenly everywhere, And that leads us to the second parent of the better Minhoft love child, which is another psychological process running under the hood. The first was selective attention. The second is called confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is our tendency to notice everything that confirms what we already believe. We notice that we focus on it, we give greater credence to it. So generally we talk about confirmation bias as favoring information that confirms our pre existing beliefs and disregarding evidence that contradicts our beliefs. Or we seek out information that supports our existing views, or we interpret ambiguous evidence in a way that supports our existing opinions. But in this case of the beta Minhoff phenomenon, there's a simpler aspect of this going on. We are simply more likely to take the second appearance of the new word or car or shoe as something meaningful. Our brains are now on the lookout for it, and every time we see it or hear that word or song or fact again, that strengthens our belief our conviction that the event is happening with increased frequency, and lots of research shows that we remember information that supports our beliefs more readily than information that contradicts them. So once a new piece of information is introduced to our minds, like the name of a band or a new gadget, confirmation bias makes us believe that the thing is now suddenly ubiquitous. Every time we see it, we further sum meant this belief into place. So researchers typically talk about the beta Minhoff phenomenon in terms of selective attention and confirmation bias. But because I talk about internal models all the time, I want to cast what we're talking about today in terms of that. So as a reminder, your brain works to make a model of what is going on in the world out there. That's the internal model. Now, the part I want to emphasize is just how that actually limits your perception of the world. So let me give you an example. Imagine that you're on a hike with friends, and as you're tramping up the trails, one of your friends is a mycologist who studies mushrooms, and he notices the colors and unusually broad variety of the mushrooms around you. Now these fung guy at the base of trees, these have been hitting everyone's retinas, but this detail was invisible to the rest of you. Let's say one of your other friends as a pediatrist, and she notices something about the subtle turn of your feet as you hike, but no one else saw that. And your other friend is a climate scientist, and he notices the erosion around the tree line, and that's invisible to all the rest of you, even though all your eyes are pointing in that direction. The point is the same, data is laid out before all of you, but each of you knows how to look differently. Your internal model is built from the raw materials of your experience with the world, and each of us vacuums up the data from our peculiar thin trajectory in the world, which builds up our models and therefore our interpretations and our biases based on our experiences. And that's why when you're hiking, everyone is seeing a different world. So that's why we notice things more once they have some relevance to us, because the borders of your internal model have stretched, so now your brain catches words or cars or shoes that were previously just noise. These items had no filter shaped like them, and therefore they're mentioned was as good as invisible. Now that the model is stretched, you catch that new thing all over the place. So let's summarize where we are so far. Although we might swear that we've never heard a term mentioned before, the shoddiness of human memories suggests that's generally not true. Instead, what the beter Minhof phenomenon illustrates is how deeply we filter the world. We don't notice those things that we have no interpretation for. So think of walking in a foreign country and hearing people's speech simply as background noise, something you can't interpret. If you then learn like the word for good or for sorry or for thanks, then that constantly jumps out of the conversation to your ears. Why because you can now interpret it. It's not that people are saying it more often, It's that you finally figured out how to listen for it. As you better model the world, the more you catch. So even though you may think you never heard of this nineteen seventies German domestic terrorist group before, you presumably have, but you were busy with the other things of salience in your life, and it just didn't register. You were counting basketball passes and missed this gorilla. If you don't have a model for things, you just don't catch them. Now, the fascinating thing about the beter Miinhoff phenomenon is that it shows up in lots of ways. Once your attention is drawn to something, some words, some car, or some shoes, it seems to you to be everywhere. And the linguist that I mentioned before, Arnold's Wicki points out that there are several special cases of this. For example, one is called the outgroup illusion, and this is where there's some characteristic of a group who you don't like, and you start seeing that characteristic more often. So, for example, imagine that there are two groups who live on opposite sides of the track, the Augustinians and the Justinians. So let's say you're an Augustinian and you think the Justinians are very selfish. So then anytime some Justinian happens to act selfishly, you're noticing that, just like you would notice the new word or the shoe chooser the car. Your confirmation bias says, yes, I knew that was true about those guys, but presumably you don't notice as diligently the equivalent behaviors in your own group. And on the other side of the tracks, the Justinians look at the Augustinians and think they are very immoral. So whenever an Augustinian behaves poorly, a version of the better Meinhoff phenomenon takes place here, and it seems like this is a characteristic that is seen a whole lot in those Augustinians. And of course the Justinians will tend to notice less when immoral behavior happens in their own group, because their internal models suggest, like everybody's internal models, that their in group generally behaves well, behaves within certain moral boundaries, but that outgroup they are capable of anything. Now, relatedly, there was a paper a couple of years ago out of Duke Universe where they showed that if there's some group that you feel is threatening to you, they seem more populous, as in, there seem to be more of them, presumably because your internal model is noticing them more. Look, there's one on the sidewalk, there's one in the clothing store, there's one in that restaurant. So just like the beta Minhof phenomenon. Your estimates are off based on the details of your internal model. Why does this happen Because you're not noticing the groups that you are not threatened by. You're noticing those individuals who belong to the group that you attend to. Now, by the way, this doesn't always need to be groups that you're threatened by or you dislike. This can generally happen with anything you notice about groups that are not your own. As one example is which He also points out that some people who speak English in one country notice things about English speakers in another country. One example is the double use of the word is. For example, someone says the thing is is that blah blah blah. So speakers of different English dialects like Australian or Irish or British or American will say that they notice that other speakers use the double is, but that their own country does not do this. But it turns out that's generally not true. It's simply that you can notice things more easily that you take to be features of this other group that you think are unusual or exotic features, and you notice them all the time, while in fact it is just as common in your own group and all this is consistent with the fact that we as humans are pattern imposers. We try to capture the world, not by writing down every megabyte of data like a computer would, but instead by summarizing situations into patterns that we can recognize. And one of the ways we can see this is in how brains will impose patterns onto random noise. I talked about this in previous episodes, for example, about faces. It's so trivially easy for us to see faces all around us because faces carry enormous social information and we are highly pre programmed to spot faces. And that's why you see a face in the electrical outlet in your wall, or in the burn marks of a piece of toast, or on the face of the moon. Anything that even vaguely resembles two eyes and the line down and a line across will generally trigger your attention, because your brain thinks there is a face out there, and for reasons of threat or opportunity, it really cares about that. Now, in the visual domain, we call this paradolia, but this is a subset of a more general phenomenon called apophenia, which just refers to imposing patterns on noisy data. For example, participant in the lab will impose voices onto random noise, and in other studies, investors tend to see trends and patterns in stock prices that are essentially random, and that leads to over confidence in predicting future stock movements. And this is exactly what happens to us all the time we erroneously detect patterns. One particularly egregious example of this is when people claim that they have good or bad red light karma or parking karma. Now, I don't need to tell you that there is no such thing. The electronics underlying the city traffic department does not keep a light green or red for you, nor, as far as we can tell, are those electronics influenced by any sort of deity to help you at the expense of others to make a green light. No matter how much your deity likes you, he presumably doesn't manipulate the electronics lying your local city traffic department, and certainly none of the engineers who work there have ever noticed an anomaly. And it's the same with your parking. Your deity, although a fan of yours does not force a close parker to leave them all because he sees that you're coming. Nonetheless, we impose patterns, and if you have three lucky lights in a row or three lucky parking spots, then you start to feel like there's something larger than you happening here. Okay, so we've been talking about the beta Mainhoff phenomenon and the details of our psychology, like selective attention or confirmation bias. So now let's zoom out to the big picture of how the quirks of our psychology craft, in part, how we navigate our lives. And we can get into this by asking how does a simple psychological phenomenon touch on profound philosophical ideas an artistic expression? And this matters because the beta Meinhoff phenomenon isn't just about noticing something frequently after first encountering it. It's about how those repeated encounters feel surprising, almost like they are signaling something significant. So some decades ago, the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung proposed this concept of synchronicity. When events seem meaningfully related, like you are thinking about an old friend that you haven't spoken to in a long time, and just as you're reminiscing about him. Your phone rings and it's that friend calling you out of the blue. This unexpected coincidence where the inner thought and external event line up in a meaningful way. This is what young meant by synchronicity. And lots of people see these coinciding events or random encounters and they say, look, there must be a deeper cosmic pattern here. There's something I'm meant to notice now. This is a poetic thought, and the notions of serendipity and coincidence often show up in books and poetry. For example, in Ruki Morocomi's novels, the characters often experience strange synchronicities that guide their actions. These patterns are essential threads and the tapestry of life that pull us towards our destinies, and poets like Charles Bodelaire or ts Eliot they explore these themes of fate and coincidence and the search for signs and the chaos of urban life. But while this universe we live in is certainly much bigger than us and still full of mysteries, this is a good example of the way that our own psychological peculiarities might lead us to bark up the wrong trees. What simple psychological phenomenon like the better Meinhoff effect expose for us is the way that idiosyncrasies of our minds determine the way we interpret the world, both on a daily basis and in our life literature. What we see in the beta Minhoft phenomenon, which is a result of selective attention and confirmation bias, often convinces us of synchronicity in the universe when we're just seeing the exhaust of our own engines. So our literature gets shaped by the details of our psychology. If you can imagine an alien civilization that maybe has their own quirks, but doesn't have inattentional blindness and cognitive biases like our own, they might have a very different literature. If we're a commune, Baudelaire and Elliott got on a spaceship and went on a book toward to this other planet, they might find that their works aren't so popular because without the particular attentional quirks that we have, the aliens would not find stories about synchronicities so compelling. Like many things in science, understanding the details of our minds gives us a way to pull the camera back just slightly wider than our parochial view of the world, so that we can see the ways that we so often seek and impose meaning even when there is none. For the record, I'm not saying life is not full of meaning it is. I'm only pointing to those places where we can reliably demonstrate that patterns are being erroneously imposed. So what we talked about today was this weird feeling of learning something new and then suddenly noticing it everywhere. In the case of the beta Minhoff phenomenon, it is a bias where our attention and then our subsequent recognition are heightened, which leads us to believe that these newly discovered items are occurring more frequently. So does the beta Minehoff effect reveal a deeper spiritual reality in which everything in the universe is connected? Or is it merely our minds seeking patterns in the randomness of existence, asking these questions and chasing down the answers. This improves our understanding of reality and our place within it, because we see that it is less about the objects or the information themselves and more about the intricate dance of attention and memory. It's a reminder that your perception of frequency is not a perfect mirror of reality, but is shaped by the interplay of new information and existing knowledge. The cognitive mechanisms that we come to the table with color our experience, sometimes with misleading hues. We don't see the world exactly as it is out there, but is filtered through the lens of what we have experienced. As the writer on ais ninput it, we see things not as they are, We see them as we are. I hope today's exploration will make you more aware of your of the world. Try to notice instances of the better Minehoff phenomenon in your life. Ask why certain information suddenly stands out to you. You won't always be able to answer this, but sometimes something interesting will surface, turning a bit of your unconscious experience more conscious. Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and find further reading. Send me an email at podcasts at eagleman dot com with any questions or discussions, and if this is your first time hearing about the better Minehoff effect, I'm quite sure you'll hear about it again soon. Pop me a note when you do, and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments until next time. I'm David Eagleman, and thank you for joining me here in the inner Cosmos. I hope you to part