Learn a new word or decide on a specific car, and suddenly it appears everywhere. This episode explains the frequency illusion, also called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, a name that began with a 1994 letter to the St. Paul Pioneer Press by reader Terry Mullen and was formalized in 2005 by Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky. The hosts break down the two-step engine behind it, selective attention followed by confirmation bias, using the image of a nightclub bouncer told to look only for red hats.

The discussion widens to related traps like the recency illusion and the split category effect, the evolutionary case that this tally-keeping brain was a survival advantage, and the real-world consequences: linguists fooled about the quotative all, a Swedish study where grocery shoppers overestimated national inflation, marketers who seed ads to prime  ...