A funny thing happened...

"Aha - confirmation bias", I thought. But that's not quite the right term. That means searching for and - funnily enough - finding, evidence that confirms a prejudice that you started out with. The siloed nature of the internet and news media makes this so much easier these days, and I find it very reassuring. All the sources I respect agree with me and I don't understand how everyone else can cleave to such crazy ideas

But what about the phenomenon where, for example, you learn a new word - or song, or concept - and suddenly it's turning up everywhere, so frequently that you can't understand how it never passed your way before. I'm not sure there is in fact a universally agreed term, but I found someone who calls it "the frequency illusion": when you notice something new, something that was there all the time but you never paid it attention, your brain is primed to notice it the next time you encounter it, and the time after that

When this has happened two or three times, it strikes you as too extraordinary to be a co-incidence and you start to rationalise: it can't be blind chance, it must be the government, the liberals, the aliens, the ley lines, God. There is a whole little corner of psychology concerned with our perception of co-incidences - often a consequence of us being very bad at assessing probability. It's amazing how often two children in a class have the same birthday - or it is until you do the maths and find that the number of people you need in a room for there to be a 50/50 chance of two of them having the same birthday is... 23

One little detail I like is that people are much more impressed by coincidences that happen to them than those that happen to other people. Like dreams, mine are fascinating, yours are humdrum. There are personality types to whom co-incidences happen more often, and of course those to whom they don't. The field of study edges into related ideas like synchronicity, extra-sensory perception, telepathy, the paranormal and occult

So today we went nowhere near a city but took a river walk along the beautiful north Oxfordshire Glyme - anticipating that tomorrow we will be house-bound as 2025 comes in like a lion. And no-one need be surprised that, having mused about Thomasson art in Oxford yesterday, today we fell upon this. How very odd it should hapoen to me, it must be the time of year. Happy New One