Episode: 3763
Title: HPR3763: The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3763/hpr3763.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 05:07:13

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3763 for Wednesday, 4 January 2023.
Today's show is entitled, The Botter Mindhoff Phenomenon.
It is hosted by Mike Ray and is about 13 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, A Looking to This Psychological Phenomenon.
Hello and welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
HPR is a crowdsourced podcast in which people like you and me and everybody else who can,
and that's everybody, provides or sends in podcasts, little recordings, long recordings about
any second of interest to the Hacker community.
My name is Mike Ray and it's a very long time since I did an HPR podcast.
And most of my podcasts in the past have been about technical subjects.
This is about the psychological Phenomenon.
Now I should point out that it has gone with its well-past 10 o'clock on Christmas Eve.
And I'm several bottles of Hogsback Traditional English Ale.
And about a third of a bottle of 20-year-old port to the better.
So I might be slightly incoherent anyway.
The Barter Mindhoff Phenomenon.
Now this is something which I can guarantee that if you are of any age,
you will hear my description of it and you will go, oh yeah, that's happened to me.
And I should explain the name, the Barter Mindhoff Phenomenon.
Now the name Barter Mindhoff, two older listeners like me,
will be reminiscent of the late 60s, early 70s, or the whole of the 70s, really.
And the early 80s.
They were a group who liked to call themselves the Red Army faction.
And they were labeled the Barter Mindhoff gang, or the Barter Mindhoff group, by journalists.
They were responsible in the 60s and 70s and into the 80s for a number of what might be described as terrorist atrocities,
assassinations, attempted bombings, successful bombings of places in and around Western and Eastern Germany, particularly East Germany.
But of course one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
And we're not going to get involved in that discussion here.
Now this phenomenon is known as the Barter Mindhoff Phenomenon,
because it was in 1994 a man wrote to a newspaper and mentioned that he had heard
mention of the Barter Mindhoff group, or seen mention of it, whichever.
And thereafter, seemed to be hearing about it multiple times.
And hence it was given the label the Barter Mindhoff Phenomenon.
And later than that in 2005, it was christened the frequency illusion.
So to describe what the Barter Mindhoff illusion or phenomenon is in simple terms.
About 18 months ago, I was talking to a friend of mine called Emma.
And we were discussing, talking about some of what I consider to be my legacy skills.
And one legacy skill in particular, which is cobalt, I was originally trained in 1991 for about 12 months at college.
At the Royal National College for the Blind and Visually Impaired, as a cobalt programmer.
And I mentioned cobalt to Emma. And she'd never heard of it.
The next time I spoke to her about a month after that, she said that we spoke about cobalt.
I heard it several times after that.
I was standing on a railway station in particular, so she told me.
And there were a couple of guys behind me on the platform.
And I heard them talking about cobalt.
And then on the radio, a couple of weeks later, I heard it mentioned again.
And Emma is, I think in her late 30s or early 40s, possibly.
And until I mentioned cobalt to her, she had never heard of it.
And then seemed to be hearing it all over the place.
So that is the phenomenon.
And that is why it's called the Frequency Illusion.
It's something which you hear or see, usually or now.
It might be the name of a city, the name of a river, a country, a rock group, a song, programming language, as in my case.
Or something else.
And then you take note of it, having never heard of it before.
And then after that, you seem to be hearing about it all the time, or coming across it quite frequently.
A very strange phenomenon.
Now I have experienced it several times in my life.
The only one I can think of at the moment is the word interlocutor.
Now interlocutor means, if you're having a conversation with somebody, the person you're having a conversation with is your interlocutor.
I first came across the word when I read some HG Wells at the age of about 25, possibly.
So over 25, well over 25 years ago.
But thereafter I seem to be hearing the word interlocutor a lot.
I think it's mentioned in the Sherlock Holmes canon.
But I must have heard or seen the word interlocutor before that.
I just didn't make note of it.
But because when I was reading the HG Wells and saw the word, I didn't know what it meant.
So I made a note of it and went to look for it for the definition.
And they seem to be coming across it thereafter quite frequently.
So I've explained the phenomenon.
Now let's talk about what psychologists think of this and why it occurs.
Psychologists will say that the responsibility of it falls with two cognitive biases.
The first of these two cognitive biases is selective attention bias.
And that is the effect of noticing things which are important to us.
So anything that you've heard before and are familiar with, you will hear again.
And the most noticeable, of course, of these selective attention bias is the thing that we all know and we all experience.
And that is hearing our name spoken from the other side of a crowded room where there is a lot of chatter.
You will hear your name over and above the chatter which you are disregarding which has background noise.
So that's selective attention bias, paying attention to things which are important to us.
The second of these cognitive biases is confirmation bias, not bias, bias, confirmation bias.
And that is paying attention to things which reinforce our predisposition, our current belief and disregarding anything that contradicts it.
So that's the second of the cognitive biases which give rise to the bottom line of phenomenon.
It's thought to be almost entirely harmless although it does impact people with the worst kind of...
What can't think of what it's called at a moment.
Schizophrenia, people with the worst kind of schizophrenia can suffer from poor effects created or brought on by the bottom line of phenomenon.
So there you go, a phenomenon which I am absolutely confident that if you are of any age, unless you are very young, a child or a young adult, you will have experienced this phenomenon and you will have made a mental note of it.
Probably very casually, but you will probably like me in the early days.
Not really understood why something you had not heard before or never heard of before is suddenly heard all the time.
Now this is a function of how your brain actually works. A lot of people regard human brain as being a lot like a disk drive which absolutely is not.
It's almost like velcro, it consists of hooks and loops and things become connected, synapses.
Little chunks of memory are connected by association patterns where absolutely as humans designed to recognize patterns and these associations build up in the brain.
So Emma, my friend again on the telephone conversation with me, would have heard me talking about cobalt.
So when she then heard it on a railway station was subjected to that synaptic connection in her brain between me, a close friend and cobalt, being fired.
And she immediately paid attention to the fact that there were two guys standing on the railway platform, somewhere close to where she was standing talking about cobalt.
Whereas in her 30 odd years, 40 odd years, she must have heard the name cobalt before but had no synaptic or no brain patterns in her brain,
which caused that connection to, you know, that connection to be fired. So that's the way the brain works.
So there we go.
Butter minehoth phenomenon, a very interesting psychological effect or phenomenon, which I am again absolutely confident that you are familiar with.
Anyway, this has been Mike Ray on Hacker Public Radio talking about the butter minehoth phenomenon.
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