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Circularity
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16 Sep 2015, 6:24 pm

I had a very stressful time, I got schizophrenic and paranoid.
After this time it's like a switch was turned. I see patterns everywhere and experience déjà vu's daily.
If I learn a new word, a day after this word appears to be everywhere, flyers, television, ads - I never recognized this word before but it's like it bombs me from now after it jumped into my world for ~ 1 week.

I'm learning a lot about the brain at the moment. I can dive deeper and deeper into how thinking works, I reverse my thoughts and visualize their structures. The more I do this the more it seems like I understand everything but the more I dissapear from my reality.

Anyone can confirm this? It's so weird and exciting at once



arielhawksquill
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16 Sep 2015, 6:32 pm

That happens to everybody. It's a cognitive bias called the "frequency illusion". From Wikipedia:
"The illusion in which a word, a name or other thing that has recently come to one's attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards (not to be confused with the recency illusion or selection bias).Colloquially, this illusion is known as the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon."

Cognitive science is really interesting, and investigating your own consciousness is, too. Why do you call it schizophrenic and paranoid?



takudzwaaywok198
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18 Sep 2015, 11:42 am

Goddamn, that's funny, because I do the exact same stuff and have the same thing.
Tough, I don't have the problems with deja vu or words. But, I had an experience a bit similar to yours. I did some occult stuff that I found online that caused me a great deal of anxiety for a long time, and to have visual and auditory hallucinations and sleep paralysis. Then, I ended up derealized and personnalized, and then, I believe, another coping mechanism my brain ended up using was that, it temporarily made my non-dominant brain hemisphere dominant.
So yeah, another symptom of that thing I did was that, when I would see a number, I would remember that i've seen the exact same number earlier this day...
I have taken the habit of, while thinking, always looking inside of me at the same time.
I believe it's a possibility that, you recognize that this word is everywhere precisely because you brought your awareness upon it. After I could get rid of that occult thing, the number problem was gone. Probably did it also cause my brain to "save" more information from the environment or so.



GodzillaWoman
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18 Sep 2015, 10:32 pm

I notice visual patterns a lot, but I've never found it particularly distressing or tending to make me depersonalized/zone out. They do get fascinating, though, and sometimes are a bit distracting if I'm trying to get some work done. I might find my gaze attracted by the patterns on people's clothes, or look out the window and notice how leaves or snow swirls in eddies, or how pretty the tracks are that a truck leaves in the snow. The pattern thing actually can be helpful in work at times--I quickly spot errors in code or document layouts because the errors are "out of pattern" to my eyes, almost as though there is a tension around them, like a hole in a sweater. To me, they stand out like a red bird on a snow bank. My mom tells me that when I was a toddler, when I walked into a room, I would go straight to whatever was new or different in the room.

Aural patterns are a different story. I simply cannot concentrate if a sound is repeating, no matter how soft it is. Ticking clocks, construction noises, an office mate tapping his foot, drive me crazy. I get very tense and angry and want to pound the person or thing into silence. I usually have to wear headphones at work. There's been construction with lots of pounding and beeping machinery going on outside our lab for weeks and it's just been awful.


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seaweed
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19 Sep 2015, 1:55 am

GodzillaWoman wrote:
I notice visual patterns a lot..."out of pattern" to my eyes, almost as though there is a tension around them, like a hole in a sweater. To me, they stand out like a red bird on a snow bank.


this is why I suck at the way they teach us to do math because it's not visual at all, and without the visual cue I'm pretty much clueless, but then when math is taught to me visually (best tutor ever) I suddenly understand the concept that seemed so elusive before.