Is there a word for this?

[kenobi65]

I got turned down by someone I thought was particularly cool, and for a week solid, Jane Child's "I don't wanna fall in love" was in heavy rotation. One time, my roomie and I got in my car to go to dinner, I turned on the ignition, and it was just coming on...so I flipped to my second favorite station, and it was in the middle of the song...so I flipped once more, just in time to hear the outro. He laughed.

Shortly after I first started playing D&D (this would have been the summer of '82), I suffered through a very frustrating game session, in which I spent most of the session unable to do anything, since my PC had been petrified by a basilisk in the day's first encounter. (Yes, they eventually dragged my stone butt back to town, and got a Stone to Flesh cast on me.)

We finished up for the night, I went out to my car, started it up, and the song on the radio was "Turn To Stone", by ELO.

 

[moritheil]

I'm not a psychologist (but I am a linguistic and information scientist), and I reckon this is what's happening:

You're receiving rarely used words all the time. Your brain is looking for patterns. When you perceive the same rare word more than once, your brain goes "that's unusual", and suddenly you become conscious of both previous instances of that word. Now you've become more aware of the word, you're going to notice it more in print, in overheard conversations, in song lyrics that before you'd have just overlooked as background noise. Your perception has changed, not the frequency of word use.

Except in the case of songs, often there is some major marketing effort underway that causes them to be played with alarming frequency on the radio.

Synchronicity, perhaps?

Johnathan

I thought synchronicity was more akin to "being where you need to be to witness what you need to witness, despite being utterly unaware of that fact."

 

[trancejeremy]

I hate it when this kind of thing happens with songs...

I swear, back when I was in college, I grew absolutely convinced that after I took a test, what song played on the radio as I got in my car afterward to go home indicated how I did.

Best example, one particularly test I did spectacularly bad on, the song played was "Flirting With Disaster" by Molly Hatchet.

Of course, later, my senior year, I also grew convinced I was Jim Morrison (or reincarnation of).

(I was on anti-depressants which really really had strange side effects)


Really though, I think it's just you simply notice it more when you first learn about something. Or are looking for it. You also tend to remember the "hits" when you have a theory or observation about something, and forget or not notice the "misses". (An example of this is refereeing in sports - fans always remember the mistakes that cost the team, but tend to forget the ones that helped them.)

 

[megamania]

Moxie has been poping up a lot here also.


Last week my son had his Blue and Gold dinner and the theme was 70's. Included a slang test. Lord- I'm glad I was a product of the 80's.....