11 Tricks Your Mind Is Playing On You
Guess you never realized that. Your mind is trying to trick you all this while.
It so happens that things we are so used to believing might turn out to be untrue after all. Seriously, our brain is the biggest prankster, making us dream up things that might be a little crazy.
1. Remembering things that didn’t actually happen
“False memories” can be easily planted in our brains by using suggestive material, as tested by psychologists in a simple lab test. On the other hand, sleep-words study authors see false memories as part of what makes humans intelligent.
2. Looking for patterns that doesn’t exist
A science magazine published a study in 2008, where participants were able to see images in TV static when they felt a lack of control and helpless with the world around them.
3. Words start to lose their meaning when said over and over again
“Semantic satiation” is a term that refers to a mental phenomenon where words repeated too many times will start to sound like nonsense. The phenomenon was being studied since the early 1900s.
4. Working against you to spot your own typos
When you read, your brain does not need to focus on every letter but instead, takes in whole words. It makes reading much quicker, but the more familiar you are with something, like your own work, the more your brain skips and the harder it is to spot your own mistakes.
5. Ignoring information that your brain finds not important
By looking at the green dot long enough, the yellow dots will disappear from view. This is called “motion induced blindness” which might be due to a clash between the brain’s two halves.
6. Thinking others’ ideas are your own
Cryptomnesia refers to memory hidden in your mind, and when they resurface, it might cause you to plagiarize someone else’s idea because you mistakenly think you came up with the idea yourself.
7. The color of food affects how it tastes
Your mind communicates with your taste buds even before your eat the food, by the way your food looks.
8. Feeling someone’s pain when other people get hurt
In 2009, a study in the Journal Pain a significant minority of people actually felt pain while watching someone else get hurt.
9. Having a song stuck in your head
While this could be caused by many things, the most obvious being the repeated exposure to a song. Some people try to get rid of it by listening to the full song or listening a different song.
10. Seeing, hearing, smelling or tasting things that aren’t there
Unlike the telepathy skill as seen on movies, the more common one that people experience are called hallucinations. You may hallucinate with any of your senses, not just vision, and are more common in people with sleep disorders and mental illnesses.
11. Believing horoscopes are specifically about you
Known as the “Forer effect”, which is named after the psychologist who discovered it. Bertram Forer uncovered how horoscopes manage to sound scarily accurate for many people with blanket and vague statements.
At least now we know that we are not the only crazy one. Does your mind have an extra trick or two which is not mentioned here? Share with us in the comments below.
