Everything shifts to new things simultaneously...

[StephenT]

I had the topic name in my head, but couldn't express it well with words, so the topic title isn't very good... Anyways, here's the whole thing: Nearly every day I will learn something new that I think about a lot for a certain ammount of time. I could have never heard anything about this before ever and it could be the most random thing in the world. Suddenly, within usually the day that I learn of it I will hear it many times, see it, discuss it with random people, etc. I might learn about some random wierd way of playing guitar from looking at a song's wikipedia page, then I'll turn on TV to VH1 and they'll be talking about somebody playing like that, then I'll go to school and 2 people in the day will randomly come up to me and tell me about it when I never said a word. I'll stumble upon something about it in computer science. There will be a question on Jeapordy about it , etc. Everything happens in clusters for me. One thing starts it then BOOM, it's everywhere. One example of this was when I first started looking at LDing a couple months ago, I randomly found it and read some stuff on it, then my friend brought over the movie Waking Life a couple days later, then the next day, without telling anybody about it a friend came up to me and told me he was getting some Mugwort and told me that it induces lucid dreams. Does this huge burst of new things happen to you guys also? Is it all in my head? Was it there before and I just didn't notice it because I didn't know about it? The last one seems most logical, but there's lots of things where it's just so random that I know that I've never heard of it before the initial exposure.

[Chris182t]

Like you said, i think the most logical explanation for this would be that those things would have happened anyway by coincidence, and that you just wouldn't have recognized this as anything special seeing as you didn't know about them in the first place. Logical explanations aren't always enough though, they only suffice as there is nothing "better" to satisfy the question with. Sometimes i think that just too many things seem to happen to just be a coincidence, and that maybe things do have some sort of a "set path" or something. I don't know. Interesting topic though.

[StephenT]

Like you said, i think the most logical explanation for this would be that those things would have happened anyway by coincidence, and that you just wouldn't have recognized this as anything special seeing as you didn't know about them in the first place. Logical explanations aren't always enough though, they only suffice as there is nothing "better" to satisfy the question with. Sometimes i think that just too many things seem to happen to just be a coincidence, and that maybe things do have some sort of a "set path" or something. I don't know. Interesting topic though. That's my exact thinking! I love it when people get what I say! It could be coincidence, but there's just so much of it happening and it will happen at least once a week average to me. And usually there will be around 5 things within the day or day after. It just all happens so near each other then it all vanishes suddenly that it seems very illogical. The lucid dreaming though, I knew what it was from a LD I had a couple years ago, but hadn't thought twice about it till a couple months ago when I read a TON about it, then all of that happened.

[Chris182t]

It could be coincidence, but there's just so much of it happening and it will happen at least once a week average to me. And usually there will be around 5 things within the day or day after. They're some really impressive figures, especially (as i presume from what you have said) as these are not just everyday subjects that you would usually hear about a lot. I don't recall this ever happening to me, although maybe it has and i just wasn't aware of it. I've had similar sorts of "coincidental" things happen, for example when i've just been thinking of something completely random, and someone else just happens to say that same thing. I've put this down to something happening subliminally within the room however which has triggered the same thoughts in us both, although it is a little harder to explain how VH1 have had that same thought process as you

[The Cusp]

I have that happen to me as well, and I don't really believe in coincidence. That's what they call synchronicity.

[StephenT]

They're some really impressive figures, especially (as i presume from what you have said) as these are not just everyday subjects that you would usually hear about a lot. I don't recall this ever happening to me, although maybe it has and i just wasn't aware of it. I've had similar sorts of "coincidental" things happen, for example when i've just been thinking of something completely random, and someone else just happens to say that same thing. I've put this down to something happening subliminally within the room however which has triggered the same thoughts in us both, although it is a little harder to explain how VH1 have had that same thought process as you Oh yeah, I've been the sayer a couple times. My friend was over last week and we were sitting on the couch and I just randomly said, I want yogurt. He freaked out saying that it was the exact thought he was thinking when I said it. I really just blurted it out without even thinking about it. It was like I was the ventriloquist dummy and he was the master haha. Ahh, The Cusp! That's the word I was looking for in the title. Great word for it!

[StephenT]

A new one just happened. Just a coincidence I guess haha. I stumbled upon a random page with an image of an iron clover on a wooden thing and I looked over and my mom had just searched under yahoo images for caves and mountains or soemthing like that for my brother's project, and the picture was at the bottom of the page. When I get an actual one (shouldn't be too long), I'll post it here.

[Xaqaria]

This has been coined the 'Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon' and is most likely due to the recency effect, which is the tendency of our brains to apply disproportionate signifigance to information that is part of a recent series of other recent information. The human brain has developed into a pattern recognition machine and searches for patterns in everything that it perceives, whether these patterns are actually signifigant or not. Carl Jung, however, would call this synchronicity and that perspective is also worth an investigation.

[Xei]

Yes, I used to get this quite a bit actually. I didn't realise it was a recognised phenomenon... cool, I'll read about that. I can only remember one of them which was the word 'vague', but I do remember it happening often enough for me to wonder about it some time in the past... it hasn't happened lately, though.