Banjoes & Mushrooms…

SJ: “I can’t believe how many banjoes there were!”

Me: “Banjoes?”

SJ: “Yeah, they were EVERYWHERE. I’ve never seen so many banjoes in one place in my WHOLE LIFE.”

Me: “Huh, I didn’t see ANY. I did see a lot of mushrooms though.”

SJ: “Mushrooms…?”

The big antiques faire here in Alameda reopened this month and I took my 16-year-old daughter for the very first time. We were there about three hours and managed to snag a few cool things before the big rush. As we were driving away, I asked her what she thought about it. That’s when she told me about seeing all those banjoes. I laughed and told her that, back in the day, I used to see a lot of “Lincolns” at the flea market. It was a game my then-boyfriend and I played: Count how many things we saw in Abraham Lincoln’s likeness. There are so many Lincoln things out there! Sometimes we switched to owls. Turns out you can tune into most anything and start seeing lots of them.

For the first time ever, I looked up what it’s all about, this pattern detection “thing,” I found out it has a name. In fact, it has two.

Here’s what I learned:

“The name ‘Baader–Meinhof phenomenon” was… noticed by a man named Terry Mullen, who in 1994 wrote a letter to a newspaper column in which he mentioned that he had first heard of the Baader–Meinhof Group, and shortly thereafter coincidentally came across the term from another source. After the story was published, various readers submitted letters detailing their own experiences of similar events, and the name ‘Baader–Meinhof phenomenon’ was coined as a result.

The term ‘frequency illusion‘ was coined in 2005 by Arnold Zwicky, a professor of linguistics at Stanford University and The Ohio State University. Zwicky considered this illusion a process involving two cognitive biases: selective attention bias (noticing things that are salient to us and disregarding the rest) followed by confirmation bias (looking for things that support our hypotheses while disregarding potential counter-evidence).”

So, there ya go. Don’t know why SJ’s brain was locked into banjoes but I know mine is laser-focused on mushrooms because I need to get off my butt and start making art for the upcoming Game of Shrooms (see the Featured Events section for more info)!

Listen, I don’t want you to think of mushrooms, mushroom art, mushroom anything, ok? And certainly don’t send me photos of all the mushrooms you aren’t seeing. Let’s nip these mushroom sightings in the bud, shall we?

— Rusty Blazenhoff

P.S. SJ and I hiked to Little Yosemite in Sunol, CA this past weekend. What a neat nature find! If you go, go early, bring water, and wear a hat and sunscreen. It gets hot.

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Publisher and Editor-in-Chief: Rusty Blazenhoff