This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3,763 for Wednesday, the 4th of January 2023.
Today's show is entitled, The Bottle Mind Hall Phenomenon.
It is hosted by Mike Ray and is about 13 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, a looking to this psychological Phenomenon.
Hello and welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
HCR is a crowd-sourced podcast, in which people like you and me and everybody else who can,
and that's everybody, provides or sends in podcasts, little recordings, long recordings,
about any second of interest to the Hacker community.
My name is Mike Ray and it's a very long time since I did an HPR podcast.
Most of my podcasts in the past have been about technical subjects.
This is about the psychological Phenomenon.
Now I should point out that it is gone, which well passed 10 o'clock on Christmas Eve.
I'm several bottles of hoaxback, traditional English ale and about a third of a bowl of 20-year-old
port to the better, so I might be slightly incoherent anyway.
The Bottle Mind Hall Phenomenon.
Now this is something which I can guarantee that if you are of any age, you will hear
my description of it and you will go, oh yeah, that's happened to me.
And I should explain the name, the Bottle Mind Hall Phenomenon.
Now the name Bottle Mind Hall to older listeners like me will be reminiscent of the late 60s,
early 70s or the whole of the 70s, really, and the early 80s.
They were a group who liked to call themselves the Red Army faction.
They were labeled at the Bottle Mind Hall Phenomenon, or the Bottle Mind Hall Group by journalists.
They were responsible in the 60s and 70s and into the 80s for a number of what might
be described as terrorist atrocities, assassinations, attempted bombings, successful bombings
of places in and around Western and Eastern Germany, particularly East Germany, but of course
one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter and we're not going to get involved
in that discussion here.
Now this Phenomenon is known as the Bottle Mind Hall Phenomenon because it was in 1994, a man
wrote to a newspaper and mentioned that he had heard mention of the Bottle Mind Hall
Group or scene mention of it, which ever and thereafter seemed to be hearing about it multiple
times and hence it was given the label the Bottle Mind Hall Phenomenon.
Later that in 2005 it was Chris and the Frequency Illusion.
So to describe what the Bottle Mind Hall's illusion or Phenomenon is in simple terms.
About 18 months ago I was talking to a friend of mine called Emma and we were discussing
talking about some of what I consider to be my legacy skills and one legacy skill in particular
which is Cobalt.
I was originally trained in 1991 for about 12 months at college, at the Royal National College
for the blind and visually impaired as a Cobalt programmer and I mentioned Cobalt to Emma
and she'd never heard of it.
The next time I spoke to her a bit a month after that she said that you know we spoke
about Cobalt she's like I heard it several times after that I was standing on a railway
station in particular so she told me and there were a couple of guys behind me on the platform
and I heard them talking about Cobalt and then on the radio a couple of weeks later I
heard it mentioned again and Emma is I think in her late 30s I was already 40s possibly
and until I mentioned Cobalt to her she had never heard of it and then seemed to be hearing
it all over the place so that is the Phenomenon and that is why it's called the Frequency
Illusion it's something which you hear or see usually on there I might be the name
of a city the name of river a country a rock group a song programming language as in
my course or something else and then you take note of it having never heard of it before
and then after that you seem to be hearing about it all the time or coming across it quite
frequently a very strange phenomenon now I have experienced several times in my life
and the only one I can think of at the moment is the word interlocutor now interlocutor
means if you're having a conversation with somebody the person you're having a conversation
with is your interlocutor I first came across the word when I read some HD wells
at the age of about 25 possibly so over 25 yeah well over 25 years ago but thereafter
I was going to be hearing the word interlocutor a lot and I think it's mentioned in
the Sherlock Holmes canon but yeah I must have heard or seen the word interlocutor before
that I just didn't make note of it but because when I was reading the HD wells and saw
the word I didn't know what it meant so I made a note of it and went and looked for it
for the definition and then seemed to be coming across it thereafter quite frequently
so I've explained the phenomenon now let's talk about what psychologists think of this
and why it occurs so I could just say that the responsibility of it falls with two cognitive
biases the first of these two cognitive biases is selective attention bias and that is the
effective noticing things which are important to us so when you think that you've heard
before and are familiar with you will hear again and the most noticeable of course
of these selective attention bias is the thing that we all know and we all experience
and that is hearing our name spoken from the other side of a crowded room where there is a lot
of chatter you will hear your name over and above the chatter which you are disregarding
which as background noise so that's selective attention bias paying attention to things
which are important to us the second of these cognitive biases is confirmation bias
not by us by us confirmation bias and that is paying attention to things which reinforce
our predisposition our current belief and disregarding anything that contradicts it so that's
the second of the cognitive biases which give rise to the bottom line of phenomenon it's
thought to be almost entirely harmless although it does impact people with the worst kind
of content court it's called at the moment schizophrenia people with the worst kind
of schizophrenia can suffer from poor effects created or brought on by the bottom line
of phenomenon so there you go a phenomenon which I am absolutely confident if you are
of any age unless you are very young a child or young adult you will have experience
just phenomenon and you will have made a mental note of it probably very casually but
you have you have probably like me in the early days not really understood why something
that you had not heard before or never heard of before is suddenly heard all the time
now this is a function of how your brain actually works a lot of people regard human
brain as being like a disc drive which you absolutely is not it's almost like velcro it
consists of hooks and loops and things become connected synapses little chunks of memory
are connected by association patterns where absolutely as humans designed to recognize patterns
and these associations build up in the brain so Emma my friend again on the telephone
conversation with me would have heard me talking about cobalt so when she then heard it
on a railway station was subject to that synaptic connection in her brain between me
a close friend and cobalt being fired and she immediately paid attention to the fact
that they were two guys standing on the railway platform somewhere close to where she was
standing talking about cobalt whereas in her 30 odd years 40 odd years she must have heard
the name cobalt before but I had no synaptic or no brain patterns in her brain which caused
that connection to your that connection to be fired so that's the way the brain works
so there we go bottom line of phenomenon a very interesting psychological effect or phenomenon
which I am again absolutely confidently you are familiar with anyway this has been
like right on my cobalt radio talking about the boulder minehoff phenomenon
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