Subliminal influence?

Here's another experimental sketch I worked on this week. I had a bunch of interesting green elements leftover from a number of previous projects. I thought I would just try something a little different, for me -- more abstract than surreal or narrative. I really like the different greens together. And I always like a slash of contrast (the red, in this case). Interestingly, when I got into my office the following day, I was struck by the similarity between my sketch and the cover of the textbook I use for my statistics class (I will provide the name of the cover art artist as a edit to this post). I had no intention of trying to emulate the cover of my stats book with the sketch. And I am not even convince that it influenced me explicitly. But maybe deep-down in my subconscious, the image influenced my sketch. Or perhaps, it was a "great minds think alike" kind of a thing (although I would consider it more of a "artists think alike" phenomenon). It does raise an interesting issue regarding the influence of a lifetime of exposure to visual stimuli. Do all of these experiences get "stored" somewhere in memory? Do all of these experiences have the potential to influence artistic exploration and production? I think that perhaps more likely, is that the total accumulation of life sensorial experiences help shape our potential to create new, integrative, synthetic compositions/images. This "coincidence" I found particularly noteworthy.