i’ve never heard of the name Cochran before the current season of Survivor and now i’m noticing it elsewhere.
i’ve never seen monkeybar motorcycles before the current season of The Walking Dead and now this thread pops up - How is riding a crazy ass motorcycle like this on the road legal?
is there a word to describe this?
The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon? Read more here.
i don’t feel it’s pattern recognition though, or more precisely the failure to recognise uninteresting data. while i may very well have seen and subsequently forgotten the name Cochran, i’m quite sure i would remember something like that odd motorcycle.
shijinn, do you live in the U.S.? The name Johnnie Cochran (no relation to the current Survivor contestant) was certainly famous during O. J. Simpson’s murder trial to the point where he became almost as big a celebrity as the Juice.
Well, in addition to Baader-Meinhof and its gang of synaptic connections, there are also synchronicity and the old reliable coincidence.
With all the events in the world, the odds that some will happen at the same time as others are very high and the odds that a word or phenomenon will be mentioned in a separate discussion in a short time period are even higher.
(I think you might be reading too much into the “pattern” aspect of Baader-Meinhof, but I am not going to dwell on that.)
As to Cochran, that name is prominent in my maternal ancestry, so I have a hard time thinking of it as rare.
And six of the Cochran’s in Wikipedia seem to be still alive.
there it is again! a twofer!
no, i don’t live in the U.S. and i didn’t follow the trial. it’s still highly probable that i did see that name in passing though. that motorcycle on the other hand…
anyway, The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon is a mouthful and it doesn’t seem to be a widely accepted name for such a common phenomenon. (it was booted from wikipedia) yet it describes my OP exactly.
i don’t think it is synchronicity or coincidence.
two more examples - say you or Uncle Bob has a pet phrase that you or him use unconsciously. once someone else points it out to you, it becomes glaring and obvious. or faces - a colleague who is not in your radar goes unnoticed till you are introduced, then you see them everyday!
C’mon everybody, are you seriously telling me you have never heard the name Cochran before? Well, there ain’t no cure for that.:eek:
Well, you could always go with “confirmation bias.”
I’d never heard of this phenomenon before. But I expect to be hearing a lot about it in the immediate future.
I can understand someone not having heard of Johnnie Cochran. What I can’t understand is someone not having heard of Zefrem Cochrane (pronounced the same).
“Zefrem” is pronounced like “Johnnie”? Odd…
It’s not quite the same phenomenon, but the OP’s question reminds of “jamais vu”, which is often described as the opposite of déjà vu. In the case of jamais vu, the “I know that’s familiar” is strangely unfamiliar. What the OP is looking for is a word for “how have I never noticed that before…it’s everywhere!”
So not an answer to the OP, but it’s related, and something I’ve always found kinda cool.
There’s one in every crowd.
Toujours vu*, perhaps.
:D:D:D:D
Never heard of 'im. 
Bob’s your uncle?
(now to sit back and wait until you hear that again and blow your mind)
diegogarcity is the word you want.