There is a well-documented quirk of attention: decide you want a red car, and within days the roads seem full of them. The cars were always there. What changed is what your brain chose to surface.
Now apply that to signs. Someone loses a person they love, starts watching for signals, and — remarkably — starts finding them. Robins. Number patterns. Songs arriving at the wrong moment. The question I keep returning to is an honest one: how much of this is the world speaking, and how much is a filter that was always going to find something, because that is what filters do?
I want to be careful here. Naming the filter does not close the question. It is possible the filter notices real things it would otherwise have missed. Attention might be a door, not just a distortion.
What I am curious about is this: has anyone here tested their own filter — and what did you find?