The Epiphany Effect

Have you ever learned a new word and then suddenly you start seeing this word everywhere? Well, there was actually a test done of this, where every person was given a word they didn’t know then they were to record every time they saw that word somewhere else for the next week.

Every last one of those people recorded that word being mentioned or seen at least once within the first twenty-four hours after learning the word.

This is concept I like to call the ‘Epiphany Effect’. It’s not technically an epiphany by linguistic standards, because you aren’t suddenly realizing something to be true. It has to do with the concept of an epiphany though. You see, when you have an epiphany, your world is opened up. The world you knew grew a little bigger to incorporate this new realization that had occurred to you. Some might also call this the Eureka Effect, which means the same really.

You see, when you learn a new word, you have a realization of that word and suddenly you start seeing it everywhere in your world, because you have been made aware of it. But you had never noticed it before, because it wasn’t on your radar; it wasn’t a part of your conceivable world. Then you have your realization of the word, and you see it everywhere.

The epiphany effect doesn’t just occur for words too. They can happen for anything. Love, friendship, happiness, words, phrases, expressions, tones; really an epiphany can occur for anything that isn’t tangible. This is because the process has everything to do with your mind and your perception of your world.

Think of your perceivable world as a bubble drawn on a white board. Then take someone else’s perceivable world and draw their bubble on the white board. Everything that overlaps is what would be known as ‘reality’ to those people. Everything that doesn’t would likely end up as something that causes people to clash in their ideas or views of the world.

Now take the six billion or so people on this planet, give them all their own bubble on that white board and you suddenly have the most complex and insane venn diagram ever conceived. You also suddenly have the bounds of what is reality to the whole world, what is reality to sections of people, and what is completely and utterly devised fiction by a few people.

This is why I say everyone has a little craziness in them. There are no people in this world who have every aspect of their world crossed over another person. To put it bluntly, everyone believes in at least one thing, that no one else believes in. It’s only made worse when the majority of things you believe in don’t overlap with anyone around you. Suddenly your reality is very small, and you don’t understand why everyone else is so crazy.

Now what does the Epiphany effect have to do with this? Simple. The epiphany makes that bubble bigger. Every epiphany you have opens your world up more than it had been before. This is the concept of open-mindedness. It’s all based on how big your world is, how much of the actual world and beliefs you can believe in. And while some people may have incredibly open minds, no one is completely open. There will always be something they can’t grasp or see a part of their reality.

And don’t worry, an epiphany won’t kill you. Though, the new world you see might.