Our thinking is full of absolutely incredible mistakes and errors. After reading this collection, you will probably be surprised how people are generally able to act meaningfully, if even our own brains sometimes interfere with this.
1. You suffer from "inattention blindness"
Watch the following video. You need to count the number of passes the people in the white shirts made. Watch the video BEFORE continuing reading.
This is an example of what is called "inattention blindness." The idea is that we are often blind to what is happening literally "under our noses" if we are focused on some other task.
In this case, a man in a gorilla suit walks through a group of players, stops, and leaves. Participants who are busy counting passes often simply do not notice the gorilla. Moreover, those who know about the appearance of the gorilla become even more inattentive and miss other changes, such as changing the color of the curtains and the departure of one of the girls.
2. You can memorize only 3-4 items at a time
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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, if we do not repeat it over and over again.
Although most people can keep about 7 digits in memory for a short period, almost all of us find it difficult to keep 10 digits.
Recent studies show that we are able to store even less: about 3-4 blocks of information at the same time. An example is a telephone number: it is split into several digital blocks to make it easier to remember.
3. We do not perceive the combination of red and blue color well
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.
4. 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 is chotby pervya and carried bkuva bla 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 information from the senses, and the way you perceive information (words) is usually different from what you see (confused letters).
5. 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 presents the subject in an interesting way, the maximum time for your close attention is 7-10 minutes. After that, attention will begin to weaken and you will need to take a break to further maintain interest in the topic.
6. The ability to postpone pleasure comes from childhood
Your ability to postpone the immediate gratification of your desires arises in early childhood. People who can postpone pleasure early in life do better in school and deal better with stress and frustration.
7. We daydream 30% of the time
Do you like to be in the clouds? According to psychologists, we all love to daydream at least 30% of the time. Some of us are even bigger, but that's not always a bad thing. Researchers argue that people who like to daydream tend to be more resourceful and better at solving various problems.
8. The habit is formed, on average, in 66 days
The more complex the behavior we want to reinforce, the longer it will take. For example, those who wanted to get into the habit of regularly playing sports often needed 1.5 times longer than those who developed the habit of eating fruit for lunch. Even if you skip 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.
9. You overestimate your reaction to future events
We are not very good at predicting the future. More specifically, 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 do. Likewise, we believe that negative events, such as losing a job or an accident, will make us much more depressed than in reality.
10. You blame the other person, not the situation (and the situation, not yourself)
Think of a time when you were waiting for another person who was late for a meeting. Most likely, you explained his delay by irresponsibility and lack of focus. In a similar situation, you would blame your own lateness on external circumstances (traffic jams).
In psychology, this is called the "fundamental attribution error" - the tendency to explain the behavior of others by internal personality traits, and one's own - by external factors ("I had no choice," "I was not lucky").
Unfortunately, even realizing our tendency to make unfair judgments, we still continue to make this mistake - this tendency is inherent in all people from birth.
11. 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 fewer 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.
12. 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? But we cannot ignore the danger situation. Every human has an ancient brain region responsible for survival that asks, “Can I eat this? Can you have this sex? Could it kill me?"
Food, sex and danger are the most important things. 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.
13. You know how to do things 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, your head will already have assumptions about 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. It will be different from the model that a person who has read e-books before and someone who does not even know what an iPad is at all.
These models are based on incomplete facts, past experience, and intuition.
14. You want more choices than you can handle
If you go to any supermarket, you will see a huge range of products because people "need a lot of choice."
In one supermarket study, researchers presented participants with 6 types of jams, 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 we think we want more, our brain can only cope with a limited number of elements at a time.
15. You are happier when you are busy with something
Imagine you are at the airport and you need to collect your luggage. However, it will take you about 12 minutes to reach the baggage claim area. When you get to the baggage claim belt, you immediately pick up your suitcase.
Now try to imagine a similar situation, but only you get to the delivery line in 2 minutes and wait for a suitcase 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. While it helps us conserve energy, doing nothing makes us feel impatient and unhappy.
16. Most decisions you make are subconscious
While we like to think that our decisions are carefully monitored and thought through, 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, the subconscious mind helps us make a decision.
17. You change your memories
We perceive our memories as small “movies” that we play in our head and think that they are stored just like video on a computer. However, it is not.
Each time you mentally return to an event, you change it, since the neural pathways are activated differently each time. This may be influenced by later events. and a desire to fill gaps in memory.
So, for example, you don't remember who else was at the family meeting, but since your aunt was usually present, you can eventually include her in your memory.
18. You cannot do several things at the same time
If you think you're great at doing multiple things at once, you're wrong. Scientists have proved 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 only focuses on one priority function at a time.
The point is that we cannot think of two different things at the same time.
19. 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 events of 9/11. The psychologists asked the participants to describe in detail what they were doing, where there were other details immediately after the terrorist attack and after 3 years.
It turned out that 90% of later descriptions differed from the original ones. 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.
20. Your brain is as active during sleep as it is when you are awake
When you sleep and dream, your brain processes and accumulates the experience of the whole day, creates associations from the information received, decides what to remember and what to forget.