Occasionally I hear a song on the radio that I don’t remember hearing in a while but that I had been thinking about only a day or two before. This surprised me, so I started thinking of possible explanations. My first thought was that I think about a lot of things and I hear a lot of songs on the radio so maybe there was bound to be a connection somewhere via the birthday paradox and that this was just more salient than the many times I had heard an unrelated song. I started making a mental note every time it happened, and even after considering the above, it still felt like it was happening too often to be pure coincidence. I currently think this happens because...
The station doesn’t draw songs from the entire library of songs they play but rather selects from a smaller subset that gets updated every week or month. This song was recently added to the rotation and I already heard it once recently without remembering which prompted me to think about it.
Occasionally I hear a song on the radio that I don’t remember hearing in a while but that I had been thinking about only a day or two before. This surprised me, so I started thinking of possible explanations. My first thought was that I think about a lot of things and I hear a lot of songs on the radio so maybe there was bound to be a connection somewhere via the birthday paradox and that this was just more salient than the many times I had heard an unrelated song. I started making a mental note every time it happened, and even after considering the above, it still felt like it was happening too often to be pure coincidence. I currently think this happens because...
The station doesn’t draw songs from the entire library of songs they play but rather selects from a smaller subset that gets updated every week or month. This song was recently added to the rotation and I already heard it once recently without remembering which prompted me to think about it.