Browsing Spotify for music to pull me through the slog of a grey February in New York, I came across the work of Labi Siffre, a 1970s artist I had never heard of. I was immediately taken with his delicate voice and simple, intimate musical arrangements.

Shortly after my precious discovery, Labi Siffre turned up in random places. I heard his crooning in coffee shops, a friend put him on at karaoke, and the singer-songwriter Lucy Dacus mentioned him as an artist who epitomised yearning. Labi Siffre was following me. Or at least that’s how I’d think about it if I didn’t know better. Instead, I thought: Baader-Meinhof.

The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, also known as the frequency illusion, is a type of cognitive bias where, once you learn about something – such as a word, person or concept – you start to notice it more frequently. Your best friend clues you in on a slang term, and suddenly you see it endlessly in your feed. Your brother recommends a supplement, and you start repeatedly hearing ads for it. It feels eerie, especially if you don’t have a name for what’s happening.

Terry Mullen recalled feeling similarly when, after learning about a 1970s terrorist group called the Baader-Meinhof Gang, he encountered another mention of them the next day. He wrote to a newspaper about it in 1994. About a decade later, a Stanford professor proposed that a mix of selective attention and confirmation bias explains why something you are newly aware of might seem to happen all the time.

I first learned about this phenomenon in a psychology class at university. Today, when I feel it in action, I mutter ‘Baader-Meinhof’ under my breath. It helps me notice what I’m noticing, and the knowledge that my brain is primed for recognition dispels the feeling that I’m being sent some coded, mystical message – musical or otherwise.

Is there more than one kind of curiosity? I found myself reflecting on this after reading a recent study about different curiosity styles. An analysis of 483,000 Wikipedia users found that people pursue their curiosity in three ways. Some browse articles as ‘hunters’, targeting ‘specific answers in a projectile path’, and their interests are more likely to be in science and technology. Others are nomadic ‘busybodies’, who explore more, building broad, loose networks of knowledge; they gravitate toward arts, culture and the humanities.

A third group are the ‘dancers’ – a little harder to define, they tend to leap ‘in creative breaks with tradition across typically siloed areas of knowledge’, taking an unstructured and inventive approach to information-seeking, across radically different subjects.

This made me wonder what kind of curious I am. When I’m reporting as a science journalist, I tend to adopt the ‘hunter’ style. This helps me meet deadlines, but am I missing out on the serendipity of discovering knowledge like the busybody or the dancer? I’d like to believe I’m curious about the world, but realising that other people’s curiosity might be more nomadic or creative gives me pause.

Another downside to the hunter style is that it’s associated with what’s called ‘deprivation curiosity’. This is the desire to banish the discomforts of uncertainty and lack of knowledge. It can lead people to accept easy answers or false facts. It also correlates with overconfidence in one’s worldview, and lower wellbeing. I hope I’m not motivated by deprivation curiosity when I’m hunting knowledge, but I can’t guarantee that’s always true.

The psychologist William James described curiosity as ‘the impulse towards better cognition’. If I take his words and the Wikipedia study to heart, perhaps I ought to be more curious about my curiosity.

Recently, I got food poisoning on holiday. I guzzled a glass of water from the hotel bathroom tap, after missing a sign saying it wasn’t drinkable. I regretted that decision, but what nagged at me more was something else: my choice of hotel in the first place.

Before a holiday, I often agonise over where to stay, weighing up every hotel I can find, with the goal of finding the very best option. Psychologists would call me a ‘maximiser’. Other people (like my partner, for one) are ‘satisficers’ who evaluate fewer options and choose one that’s ‘good enough’. Since the 2000s, maximisers have become of interest to psychologists because they often report greater regret and dissatisfaction with their choices afterwards. It seems their forensic searching for the ‘best’ reveals more options, but also inflates expectations of perfection and, once they’re locked in, they are painfully aware of all the rejected alternatives. One paper from 2024 suggested such habits can spoil a holiday.

In my nausea, I couldn’t shake the feeling that, in a parallel universe, I was enjoying another hotel sickness-free. So, since then, I’ve tried not to maximise so much, especially for semi-arbitrary choices. I might not find perfection but, according to the research, I’ll feel better about it.

My tactical satisficing has felt even more justified since I learnt recently about the work of the historian Sophia Rosenfeld. In an essay for Psyche’s sister site Aeon, she traces how and why choice became a fundamental right in Western societies – and why that right has created many problems. Choice, she argues, is not the same thing as freedom.

Clearly, it’s a luxury to have choices in life: many people don’t. But what I take from all this is that I could decide to be more mindful about how I choose.

For most of my 20s, I couldn’t brush my teeth, ride public transit, or take a walk without listening to a podcast or audiobook. Silence, I thought, was a waste of time.

But since reading All the Beauty in the World (2023), I’ve been reconsidering my relationship to dull, seemingly empty moments. In the book, Patrick Bringley recounts his decade among the watchful guards of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Standing in the Met’s echoic halls for hours on end, day after predictable day, he found that, over time, his relationship to the work slowly changed. Initial enchantment with the art gave way to boredom – and then, enlightenment. He surrendered to the ‘turtleish movement of a watchman’s time’, stopped thinking about how much of his shift was left, and let the hours drift.

I think about Bringley’s experience when I have to engage in any long, monotonous task. It might be waiting in line or on hold, vacuuming, folding laundry, or chopping vegetables for dinner. I resist the urge to fill the time with music or podcasts and strive instead for what Bringley calls a ‘princely detachment’ from time, finding the luxury and nuance in the moment.

Bringley noticed patterns in the different kinds of Met visitors. Hanging up my laundry, I notice patterns in how different articles of clothing tend to wrinkle in the wash. Bringley developed an appreciation for artworks that he initially ignored. I pay finer attention to the unique composition of facial features on the faces of people I stand in line with. I am learning, I think, to appreciate the little things.

Of course, it requires constant practice to find the peace and richness in these stretches of time. But your reward comes, Bringley says, when an hour no longer feels an hour long, and you ‘hardly remember how to be bored’.