Human psyche
The human psyche remains one of the world's greatest mysteries. Did you know how wrong your memories are, how long it takes to form your habits, or the number of friends you can make?
Human psychological processes
Your brain is as active during sleep as it is when you are awake.
When you sleep and dream, your brain processes and integrates the experience of the whole day, creates associations from the information received, decides what to remember and what to forget. You've probably heard the advice “get a good night's sleep” before an exam or an important event. If you want to remember what you've learned, it's best to go to bed after you've learned the material and before you need to remember it.
You can only memorize 3-4 items at a time
There is a rule of "magic number 7 plus minus 2", according to which a person cannot store more than 5-9 blocks of information at the same time. Most of the information in short-term memory is stored for 20-30 seconds, after which we quickly forget it, only if we do not repeat it over and over again. While most people can remember about 7 numbers for a short period, almost all of us find it difficult to keep 10 numbers in our mind. Recent studies show that we are able to store even less: about 3-4 blocks of information at a time. Although we try to group the data we receive, our short-term memory is still quite limited. So, for example, a phone number is split into several sets of numbers so that we can remember it more easily.
We do not perceive the combination of red and blue well
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Although these colors are used in many national flags, red and blue are difficult for our eyes to perceive when they are next to each other. This is due to an effect called chromostereopsis, which causes some colors to "stick out" while others are removed. This causes eye irritation and fatigue. This effect is most pronounced with a combination of red and blue, as well as red and green.
You see things differently than you perceive them
According to a study by the University of Cambridge, “there have been many more salty bills in the background. Smaoe vaonzhe, this is chotby pervya and carried the bkuva blei on svioh metsah. Even if the rest of the letters are mixed, you can read the sentence. This is because the human brain does not read every letter, but the whole word. It constantly processes the information it receives from the senses and the way you perceive information (words) is usually different from what you see (confused letters).
You are able to hold close attention for about 10 minutes
Even if you are in a meeting, you are interested in the topic, and the person expounds the subject in an interesting way, the maximum attention that you are able to maintain is 7-10 minutes. After that, your attention will begin to weaken and you need to take a break to further maintain your interest.
Psychological characteristics of a person
The ability to delay pleasure comes from childhood
Your ability to postpone the immediate gratification of your desires arises in early childhood. People who were able to postpone pleasure early in life did better in school and deal better with stress and frustration.
We dream 30 percent of the time
Do you like to be in the clouds? According to psychologists, we all love to daydream at least 30 percent of the time. Some of us are even bigger, but that's not always a bad thing. The researchers argue that people who like to daydream tend to be more resourceful and better at solving various problems.
The habit is formed within 66 days
Scientists studying how long certain actions take to become a habit have found that we average about 66 days to do this. The more complex the behavior we want to acquire, the longer it takes. For example, those who wanted to get into the habit of doing exercise most often took 1.5 times longer for it to become automatic than those who developed the habit of eating fruit for lunch. Even if you skip a day or two, it won't affect the timing of the habit, but skipping too many days in a row can slow down the process.
You overestimate your reaction to future events
We are not very good at predicting the future. More precisely, we overestimate our reaction to future events, be they pleasant or negative. Research has shown that people believe that positive experiences, such as getting married or winning big, will make them much happier than they actually did. Likewise, we believe that negative events, such as losing a job or an accident, will make us much more depressed than in reality.
You blame the other person, not the situation (and the situation, not yourself)
Think back to when you were waiting for another person who was late for an appointment. Most likely, you explained his delay by irresponsibility and lack of focus. In the same situation, you attributed your lateness to external circumstances (traffic jams). In psychology, this is called the "fundamental attribution error" - that is, the tendency to blame the behavior of other people by internal personality traits, and their behavior - by external factors ("I had no choice", "I was not lucky"). Unfortunately, even though we are aware of our tendency to make unfair judgments, we still continue to make this fundamental mistake.
The number of friends you can have is limited
Even if you can brag about a few thousand friends on social media, you actually have a lot less of them. Psychologists and anthropologists have identified the "Dunbar number" - that is, the maximum number of close relationships that a person can have, and it ranges from 50 to 150.
You can't help but pay attention to food, sex, and danger
Have you noticed that people always stop to look at the accident scenes? In fact, we cannot ignore the danger situation. Each person has an ancient brain structure that is responsible for survival and asks: “Can I eat this? Can you have this sex? Could it kill me? Food, sex, and danger are all he cares about. After all, without food a person will die, without sex the race will not continue, and if a person dies, the first two points will not make sense.
You know how to do things that you've never done before
Imagine that you've never seen an iPad, but you were given one and offered to read books on it. Even before you turn on the iPad and start using it, you already have a model in your head of how to read books with it. You will have an idea of how the book will look on the screen, what functions you can use, and how you will do it. In other words, you have a "mental model" of reading a book from a tablet, even if you have never done so. Your mental model will be different from the model of someone who has read e-books before and someone who does not even know what an iPad is. Our mental models are based on incomplete facts, past experience, and even intuition.
You want more choice than you can handle
If you go to any supermarket, you will see a huge range of products, and this is because people need a lot of choice. In one supermarket study, researchers presented participants with 6 types of jam, followed by 24 types of jams. And although people were more likely to stop at the counter with 24 types of jam, they were 6 times more likely to buy jam at the counter with 6 types of jam. This can be explained simply: despite the fact that it seems to us that we want more, our brain can only cope with a limited number of elements at a time.
You are happier when you are busy with something
Imagine that you are at the airport and you need to collect your luggage. However, you need about 12 minutes to get to the baggage claim area. When you get to the baggage claim belt, you immediately pick up your suitcase. How impatient do you feel? Now try to imagine a similar situation, but only you get to the delivery line in 2 minutes and wait for your luggage for 10 minutes. Although it took you 12 minutes to get your baggage in both situations, in the second case you were probably more impatient and unhappy. If a person has no reason to be active, he decides to do nothing. And while it helps us conserve energy, idleness makes us feel impatient and unhappy.
Brain and psyche
You make most decisions subconsciously
While we like to think that all of our decisions are carefully monitored and thought out, research suggests that everyday decisions are actually subconscious, and for a reason. Every second our brain attacks more than 11 million individual pieces of data, and since we cannot thoroughly check all this, our subconscious mind helps us make a decision.
You redo your memories
We perceive our memories as small “movies” that we play in our head and believe that they are stored just like videos on our computer. However, it is not. Every time you mentally return to an event, you change it, as the neural pathways are activated differently each time. This can be influenced by later events and the desire to fill gaps in memory. So you, for example, do not remember who else was at the meeting of relatives, but since your aunt was usually present, you can eventually include her in your memory.
You cannot do several things at once
If you think you can do several things well at once, you are wrong. Scientists have proven that we cannot do 2-3 things at once. Of course, we can walk and talk to our friend at the same time, but our brain focuses on only one priority function at a time. This suggests that we cannot think of two different things at the same time.
Your brightest memories are wrong
Memories of exciting and dramatic events are called "flashbacks" in psychology, and they turned out to be full of errors. Famous examples of this phenomenon are the 9/11 events. Psychologists asked the participants to describe in detail what they were doing, where they were and other details related to this event, immediately after the terrorist attack and 3 years later. It turned out that 90 percent of later descriptions differed from the original. Many people can describe in detail where and what they were doing when they heard the news. The only problem is that these details are incorrect, as strong emotions associated with memory distort memories.