dedicated to vida. hahaha!
"have you ever had the experience where you hear a strange word for the first time, and then soon afterward you hear the same word again?
"that happens all the time," i said. "it's freaky. it's as if hearing a word for the fist time makes it appear everywhere. like fescue. i never heard of that word until i saw it on a package of grass seed in the store last week. that night i was at a party and some guy used the word. i'm fairly sure i've never heard that word before in my entire life, then i hear it twice in a matter of hours. what are the odds of that?
"and last night i was at my neighbor's house down the street, shooting some pool on his new table. i asked him if he ever played a game called foosball. it's that table game where you use handles connected to little soccer players and try to kick a wooden ball in to the other guy's goal."
his face said that he didn't need to know the details of foosball table design.
"anyway," i continued, "we talked about foosball for twenty minutes, how we both played it in college but hadn't seen a foosball table in years. i can't remember the last time i uttered the word foosball. fifteen minutes later, i'm walking home and something catches my eye in an upstairs window of a neighbor's house. i'll be darned if it wasn't a bunch of kids playing foosball. i've gone past that house a thousand times and never seen that foosball table in the window before."
"your brain can only process a tiny portion of your environment," he said. "it risks being overwhelmed by the volume of information that bombards you every waking moment. your brain compensates by filtering out the 99.9 percent of your environment that doesn't matter to you. when you took notice of the word fescue for the first time and rolled it around in your head, your mind tuned itself to the word. that's why you heard it again so soon."
"it's still a coincidence. i don't think people are saying fescue around me every day."
"yes, probability is still involved. but fescue and foosball were only a few of the unusual words and ideas that you tuned your brain to this week. the others didn't cross your path again so you took no notice of their absence. when you consider all of the coincidences that are possible, it is not surprising that you experience a few every day..."
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"it's one of those days. you know?" (gruet, 2005)