Has it ever happened to you that you learn for the first time about a book, and after a while this name begins to lead you, say, so? More precisely, it comes across your eyes in the form of various information or the plot of this work, or about the biography of its author, even though you did not want to know it at all? Practical psychology calls such a phenomenon, occurring in the life of everyone, as a phenomenon of Baader-Meinhof. It is worth noting that the person, after whom such a syndrome was named, has not the slightest relation to psychological science. Let us consider in more detail this Meinhof phenomenon.
The Baader-Meinhof effect: the origin
Many psychological sources describe this phenomenon as a feeling that arises when an individual begins to pay attention to something that was previously unknown to him. He is faced with new information under various conditions, which, often, do not have a relationship.
It is interesting to know that the name of this effect is mostly colloquial. Its origin was born in 1986, when in the American state of Minnesota, a local newspaper published an article by one of its readers. It said that he somehow came across information about the activities of the German terrorist group "Faction of the Red Army", which existed in the FRG in the 1970s (the film "The Baader-Meinhof Complex" tells about their activities). Soon, it was said in the article, the reader began to see everywhere about something about this association. After a while, a lot of letters were sent to the editorial office of the newspaper, in which people shared their thoughts on this subject, putting forward various theories. As a result of their popularity, the partisans Baader and Meinhof, became, some kind of, the authors of this phenomenon.
It will not be superfluous to note that to this day in the newspaper "St. Paul Pioneer Press "there is a column in which similar, unusual stories are published.
Explanation of the Baader-Meinhof syndrome
One theory says that human memory is by its nature fairly selective, and therefore it permanently remembers the recently clarified and noteworthy facts of a different nature for it. So, sometimes for people just received information becomes more important than what was stored for years. In the end, when something in your environment has something in common with the newly acquired knowledge, you begin to regard this phenomenon as something supernatural. If we consider this position from the point of view of modern conditions of information load on a person, then the frequent occurrence of the Baader-Meinhof syndrome becomes understandable.
Man, sometimes without noticing it, fixes in his memory everything that relates to the newly acquired knowledge. In other words, our consciousness is engaged in the search for everything that is associated with new names, concepts, etc. The result of such searches: completely coincidental coincidences acquire a certain mystical meaning for the individual.
A different theory is based in its arguments on the teachings of the famous psychologist Jung.
There is also a refuting party to this theory. Sociologist Thousande is one of its representatives. Jung's explanations of the phenomenon he calls only "mystical fog".