IT'S ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

A frequency illusion is a cognitive bias , which takes place in the mind and affects the way we perceive the world around us.

Arnold Zwicky, a linguistics professor at Stanford University in the US, coined the term frequency illusion in 2005.

The idea was that we become more aware of things when we learn about them for the first time and that that can cause us to think that they are happening more often than they are in reality.

For example, if you buy a new red car, you may start seeing red cars more frequently and think that more people are buying red cars, or that red cars are trendy, when in reality it is possible that the number of red cars hasn't changed at all.

If we counted the number of red cars, or checked official statistics for car sales, we may indeed find that there are more red cars on the roads. But we're talking about the perception of facts here, rather than the facts themselves. 

And that's important because such perceptions, or frequency illusions, can affect the way we think and make decisions in our daily lives. We may, for example, overestimate crime rates when crimes are covered more frequently in the media.

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