Uzumaki, The Witness, and the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon

(I was struck by the impulse to write a critical essay about something I thought cool. I didn’t really know where to put it, but here seems as good as any. Enjoy!)

Spoilers for Junji Ito’s “Uzumaki” and “The Witness”

You know that weird feeling, right? The one where you hear about something for the first time, and then suddenly it’s everywhere. It’s weird, where you’ve gone your entire life, decades perhaps, and have not heard about a specific subject; “the Ball Drop”, “The Berlin Airlift”, or “Cyanotype Photography”. And then a friend mentions it offhand, or you stumble across a wikipedia entry linking to it. And overnight, it’s everywhere! In the current news cycle, in a movie, in books… that you’d previously read before? What’s going on here, how have you not noticed it before? Was it always there, or did it spring into existence, precipitated because you now possess the knowledge of its existence, because now you were seeking it?

The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon - the name for this effect - is a psychological artifact of the human brain and its obsession with pattern recognition. Our brains tend to discriminate information based on immediate relevance, and discards the rest. This means that we ignore a vast majority of information in our lives inadvertently. We also tend to weigh that relevance based on irrational things. In this case, we prioritize subjects that we recognize more highly than subjects we don’t. These mechanisms likely benefited us when we would search for berries or prey. It allowed humankind to discover new facets of the world, and then apply that knowledge in the future, but in our modern era where more a hundred-thousand times more raw information is pumped into our brain than it was biologically prepared for, it creates a surreal, uniquely modern human experience. 

Junji Ito is a prolific and foundational writer of horror manga. One of his works addresses this phenomenon directly, his 1998 book “Uzumaki”. In it, the main characters are confronted repeatedly with grotesque and unsettling experiences involving the same shape over and over, a spiral. It is used metaphorically in several different ways within the three volumes Junji wrote; it can flicker between representing madness, dizziness, hypnosis, and labyrinthine loss. To say it is a recurring element is an understatement; the pages are explicitly and violently about the spiral. Panels linger horribly on spiral-themed body horror, eyes coil and writhe, and intestines curl malignantly. 

Most importantly, the true danger of the spiral is passed on by having knowledge of the spiral. Characters that are the most aware of it are the ones twisted by its machinations. Once it begins to appear, the characters are surrounded, uneasy and wary of the impending doom. Junji has forged this obsession with a shape, this call to attention, and handed it to the reader, passing it onto you as a memetic object, cursing you with that knowledge. As you read, you too begin to notice the background art of the panels, each containing sketched spirals in grass and clouds and water. You too can see the rhythm of this world, the foundational pattern that writhes at the center, pulling you horribly inward. And if you tear yourself away, you too pull the knowledge out of the book along with you. In your meatspace lie a nearby coiled extension cord, a twisted string, or a decorative concentric plate. Once everyday objects before you began reading, you see them curve in a different light, cursed as you now are with the knowledge.

Another well known, related psychological phenomena was first brought into mainstream discussion in 1994. Known colloquially as the “Tetris Effect'', it describes the feeling of immersing in an activity - in this case, the video game Tetris - and upon leaving that activity, the human brain repeats the patterns of thoughts that are associated with the activity, turning them over and over, projecting those patterns onto unrelated subjects. Someone playing the game Tetris may experience a latent feeling of wanting to re-organize their refrigerator, seeing the contents as the square tetrominoes. Older sources, not referencing the feeling by the same name, describe the lingering sensation of being on the deck of a ship long after returning to shore. It’s as if the act of marinating our brains in a process leaves it dripping with the very essence of it. It takes a while to drain back out of us. The patterns that wire the neuron connections do so strongly, and switching context takes time.

Some games actively reward this. In the game The Witness, the player is given the task of solving various puzzles on a mysterious island. These puzzles take place on interactive, panel-like screens scattered throughout the island. The core mechanics of the puzzle revolve around drawing a line along a path or the lines of a grid - usually with contextual rules hinted at by the environment - and reaching the end, a dot slightly larger than the rest of the line. You trace this pattern, over and over, with small chimes and animation flourishes that open doors and unlock paths forward, indicating your success. 

The culmination of each set of puzzles is the lighting of a beacon, casting a light across the entire island and shooting a beam at the apex of a mountain. You, the player, travel up the mountain to seek the answers at the top. Halfway up, you turn to look back at the roads and towns and rivers worth of puzzles you’ve solved to get here, and something catches your eye.

A winding river, meandering towards the sunset. It ends in a small round lake. Instinctively, you reach out to trace it. As your pointer comes to the dot of the lake, from the ether, the same chime rings and the outline of the pattern lights, then fades. You have done as the game asked you to, has gifted you; you have carried the knowledge up the mountain with you. The game has shown to you the truth of what was always there, should you only look.

You may have heard of the effect, perhaps somewhere before in your life. This is known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, or the “Frequency Illusion”. It’s the concept that once something has shown up before, we have an instinctual feeling of seeing it again and again. It can be a curse and a gift - the knowledge of playing “The Game”, or an obsession with the decline of spirograph. It makes you question yourself, your certainty about the objective world around you. Was it always there? Or was it only there because you knew how to look?