A closer look
Frequency illusion, commonly known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, is a cognitive bias where, after noticing something for the first time, there is a tendency to notice it more often, leading someone to believe that it has an unusually high frequency of occurrence. This happens because your brain employs selective attention to highlight the new information, followed by confirmation bias that convinces you the universe is deliberately surrounding you with it. You buy a highly specific, supposedly unique mustard-colored sedan, and suddenly every third car on the highway is a mustard-colored sedan. You did not glitch the matrix, nor is a secret society stalking you with obscure vintage cars; your brain just finally decided to stop filtering out that specific piece of mundane data. Our minds process billions of sensory inputs daily by aggressively ignoring almost all of them, which means your perception of reality is mostly just a curated playlist of coincidences
