Everyone around is just busy throwing dust in our eyes and manipulating our poor consciousness. The struggle for the main powder of the brain was played out between marketers, politicians, magicians, advertisers.
We have learned to take it for granted, and remove the next pasta from our ears just to admire its exquisite shape. However, there is someone who can control your mind, distract it and maliciously deceive. Someone you trust one hundred percent and don't expect a setup. Someone acting from within.
This is your own brain. Most likely, he will try to kill you while reading to keep his secrets secret, so try to distract him with something.
Here's the first of his tricks:
1. Blindness to change
You will never notice a very obvious change in the object that you were looking at a minute ago. What does it mean?
For example, you admire a photograph of Justin Bieber. Okay, don't admire. You look contemptuously. Then something distracted you for a few seconds. Then your gaze returned to the photograph.
Promotional video:
If, in those few seconds, Justin gets a green jacket and sunglasses, you won't notice the change. This is how our brain works.
If you, not believing our slander, again turn away for a while and. returning to Justin, you triumphantly poke into the same green jacket - your brain is counting 2-0. After all, now Justin is against the backdrop of ponies and rainbows.
Research into this phenomenon began back in the seventies by psychologist George McConkey. If you are still worried about your defeat, you can take comfort in the fact that McConkey posted his examples-illustrations right on the same page. And people reading his writings still could not immediately notice the difference between picture A and picture B.
Why is he doing this to us ?
The phenomenon of change blindness is often associated with another brain-frame: inattention blindness. If your brain processes absolutely all the details of the picture entering it, you will simply fall into madness. It's like on the eve of the session, only constantly and a million times worse. Therefore, the brain wisely selects only information that is supposedly valuable and focuses on it. Ponies and rainbows are swept aside for impracticality. The brain will gladly lie to you that they were there from the very beginning, so long as you do not dwell on it.
Sometimes it's too much
You can't even imagine how often your brain turns off your attention to detail. Scientists (undoubtedly in secret collaboration with brains) had fun under the guise of a scientific experiment as follows: at the counter in the office, they put a person who interacted with the test subjects - students who came to get a job. The man explained how to fill out the form, where to put it, what to do next.
At a certain moment, another person, all this time hiding under the counter, replaced the first. He asked several questions, and the student, as if nothing had happened, answered them without noticing any change. And this despite the fact that the second person looked different, had a different hairstyle and was wearing different clothes!
2. Masking intermittent eye movement
The essence of this trick is that for about forty minutes a day, each person is completely blind, although he does not notice it at all.
You can do an almost scientific experiment to prove it. Quickly, look towards the kitchen! In this split second, when your gaze darted from the computer to the kitchen and back, you were completely blind. And, of course, they did not notice it.
Why is he doing this to us ?
Do you get seasick even while watching Pirates of the Caribbean? When the picture on the screen shakes and rotates, does it start to stir up? This is because your brain does not like fast image changes, and generally against sudden movements. But the movements of your eyes are even faster than changing the picture on the screen. Look at the kitchen again. Didn't you feel dizzy? And all from the fact that the brain simply blocks the blurred image that we, theoretically, should see in the process of eye movement.
One more look towards the kitchen. In fact, not alone, and do not argue. At least three or four additional eye movements - this is the order of our brain. And yes, he simply excludes all these blurry "frames" from perception. So that the world does not seem to us shown on Skype with a slow Internet.
Sometimes it's too much
By the most conservative estimates, all of the above means nothing more than forty minutes of complete blindness a day. Moreover, the brain masterly masks it, convincingly insisting that there was no blackness at the moment when you looked from the monitor to the landscape outside the window.
3. Proprioperception
Imagine that your brain has a google map of your body, complete, colorful, three-tee, and in real time. But at the same time he has sudden attacks of cartographic cretinism.
In other words, proprioperception is the ability of the brain to always know exactly where your limbs are at a given moment relative to another body, provided that they are still growing out of this body. In general, nothing strange and ominous: this wonderful ability helps us not to pass a sausage sandwich past our mouths while our eyes are busy reading the news on Facebook.
Why is he with us so ?
This time he was not at all on purpose. Only if he himself suddenly gets confused, for example, under the influence of alcohol. How proprioperception doesn't work is known to anyone who has taken a sobriety test and misses his nose with his index finger.
Sometimes it's too much
Another group of scientists, for scientific purposes, of course, made people believe that their nose had grown by half a meter. They baffled subjects' proprioperception with electrical stimulation of the biceps and triceps by ordering them to bring their finger to the tip of the nose beforehand. And, lo and behold the wonders of science, the test subjects experienced the complete illusion that the nose was rapidly growing in length!
4. Cryptomnesia
Sometimes this trick is called "unconscious plagiarism": your brain steals other people's ideas, slipping them to you under the guise of your own.
Your brain is not that good at everything, no matter what it takes. Among his weak points is remembering exactly where this or that idea came from. The main thing is the idea, and its source is the tenth thing. This is how our brain sees the situation, which is convinced that copyright is a tertiary survival thing.
There are not so many high-profile examples, but it is known that George Harrison paid $ 600,000 for a song that he sincerely considered his own. Surely there are people who are convinced that they have come up with the plot of a wonderful fairy tale about a boy invited to a school of wizards and confronting evil for seven volumes. And someone dreams of making a film about a little man with hairy legs who will save everyone by throwing a magic ring into the mouth of a volcano.
And someone confuses dreams with reality, this is also cryptomnesia.
Why is he doing this to us ?
As already mentioned, the origin of an idea or plot is not important for survival, and when we insistently try to remember where we got from in our head the wonderful lines about a lonely whitening sail, the irritated brain defines itself as the authors. That is, its owner.
Sometimes it's too much
Research has shown that cryptomnesia works most often when the real author and the hapless unconscious plagiarist are of the same sex. And in general, the more they look alike. The more chances of such an unconscious borrowing. So if someone suddenly shows up claiming to have invented a wonderful story about Frankenstein, more than likely it will be a woman.
5. Subconscious behavior
The mystics call this foresight. In fact, this is just another trick of our shameless brain.
But still, this can be called a prediction, given that in most cases Vanga from our brain is useless, and he makes mistakes quite often. Nevertheless, the brain often thinks that such and such can happen, and that this and that should be done. And he starts to act without even consulting you, as he sees fit. That is, we do many things even before we realize that they need to be done.
Why is he with us so?
If not for this trick, we would be the most awkward creatures on this planet.
Our brain is an interesting thing, capable of many things; we have intelligence and imagination, but most of our simple human abilities are pretty useless in case of unexpected danger. Therefore, the brain, in addition to the ability to think, control our body and fool our heads, very carefully stores important life experience, based on which it makes certain predictions at critical moments.
The experience itself can be forgotten for a long time, you burned yourself on milk in childhood and have been blowing on water all your conscious life. Even cold. Is the brain reinsured? He's just fooling you again.
Sometimes it's too much
Scientists (where without them) have recently figured out a curious thing: if you connect your brain to a special scanner and ask you a question that requires a decision, then the light bulb associated with the part of the brain responsible for making a decision will light up a few seconds earlier than you consciously - decide something. In other words, if you decide not to go to work in the morning, be sure that your brain gave you the idea of being sick before you woke up.
If there was a scanner that reads specific information from your brain, its owner would be able to predict with a head start in a few seconds what decision you will make and how you will answer this or that question.
And this fact makes us seriously think about the existence of free will.