Man, I just learned about the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon the other day, and now it seems to be popping up everywhere.

Is this the same effect that when told to count yellow cars whilst driving, you end up noticing far more yellow cars than you thought were on road.

Or how you notice how much more frequent your model of car is on the roads?

Also when you learn a new word in a different language, it seems like suddenly everyone is using that word all the time.

Are there any explanations for this phenomenon. I keep experiencing it all the time :)

Me too, but I had always figured it as survivorship bias. That is, there are many such things that I newly hear of, but most of them don't get repeated mentions right way. The few of them that do catch my attention, and it seems like it happens a lot. But it actually happens only for a few of the many, many new things I hear about all the time. Similar to my friend who thought that every time he looked at a dead street lamp, it would turn on. :)

Another possible factor is that I find I pay more attention to things I've recently learned about more closely when I come across them, but ignore them when I either know them very well or don't know them at all. I don't know if this is true for anyone else.

It's, of course the second explanation.

The first would include the Kardasians for example. But just because they get mentioned a lot, you don't feel anything strange about hearing about them a lot.

Whereas the very essense of the phenomenon is that encoutering something multiple times seems strange to you.

Well, after you learned about (or focused on) something, you have an increased awareness of it mentioned, whereas other times in your life you can encounter it 2-3 times in the same day without paying much attention (just one more unknown word).