I've been thinking about this phenomenon since I was a young teenager, a couple decades ago... (Not knowing that it had a name, if that name was even coined bac

I've been thinking about this phenomenon since I was a young teenager, a couple decades ago... (Not knowing that it had a name, if that name was even coined back then.) My thoughts on this go two-fold: 1) When we see the same concept multiple times, it often has to do with things being trendy, and media looking to other media for coverage. Other than breaking news, most publications publish iterative rather than totally original content. Even when a thing is not super trending, you can often find that multiple occurrences of the same concept have their root in the same origin. Now that we publish on the web and that most writers aren't greedy with crediting their stories' ancestors with backlinks, you can often tell that this has been the case. 2) Survivor bias. We are exposed to dozens of new concepts every day, many of which will linger on in our minds for a few days or weeks, depending on their salience. When we see a second occurrence, our brain creates a link/links with the previous one, and suddenly the original idea gains in salience in our mind along with the new one. But what about the other 15 unique ideas that I was exposed to yesterday, the day before, and all other days before that? They go on to be forgotten. When one original concept re-appears from a different channel, we're delighted, but really, this is all our brains do for a living, connecting things from disparate origins for what they have in common. Nowadays I'm more upset at not being able to link more information to my existing mental super-structure than I'm excited at connecting things in the schema. :P