I've noticed a similar phenomenon in certain business situations: Ever worked at a tradeshow booth or done product demos? One thing you'll surely notice is th

I've noticed a similar phenomenon in certain business situations: Ever worked at a tradeshow booth or done product demos? One thing you'll surely notice is that over the course of interacting with hundreds (or thousands) of people, strong patterns will emerge. Different people will say the _exact_ same thing in certain situations, and they'll all think they're being super funny or super original and clearly the first person to think of that. We may have "free will" in the conscious sense, but our brains are still, for the most part, wired the same way, and what we think is an original or free-response is likely part of a very common, very non-original pattern.