Ever had déjà vu, that unsettling feeling you've experienced something before?

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Have you listened to a new song and swore it sounded familiar? Watched a newly released movie but instinctively knew what came next? Strolled through a shopping centre in another country that looked exactly like one back home?

Been there. Done that. For the past few years I've dismissed this creeping suspicion that everything is beginning to feel the same as another unfortunate symptom of growing old.

My adult kids agree. They've been urging me to leave my musical comfort zone of the '70s and '80s and listen to something new. So I have. And yet so much of it - the riffs, hooks, melodies and rhythm - sounds awfully familiar.

Turns out I'm not imagining things. In an era promising infinite choice and abundance, everything everywhere is becoming more alike.

In a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, researchers at James Cook University in Singapore have dubbed this weird paradox "hyperselection".

Put simply, we've become incredibly proficient at discovering what tickles our fancy. Once we know something works it is copied, refined, enhanced, optimised and copied again. Failures are discarded. Winners multiply.

The result is what you are now experiencing - a world overflowing with choice but without the equivalent variety.

Groundhog Day is everywhere; supermarkets boast aisles of breakfast cereal but most are based on the same formula; shopping centres on opposite sides of the globe offer the same international brands and generic muzak; cafes in different cities employ identically tattooed baristas and wobbly tables.

The paper's authors argue it is difficult to envisage Queen's legendary song Bohemian Rhapsody, with its six-minute length, unconventional structure and no traditional chorus, making a dent on today's charts. Even the band members and record label executives argued heatedly during its recording in 1975 over whether the track was too confusing for a mass audience.

Today's music streaming platforms, the researchers say, may offer millions of songs but "this creates intense pressure to stick to formulas that are known to work, rather than risking experimenting with something different."

"As a result," says one........

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