Secrets of psychology. 20 facts you need to know
20 Psychological Facts You Didn't Know About Yourself
Although researchers have learned many interesting facts about the psychological characteristics of a person, and even can predict our behavior based on certain rules, much remains unknown.
Did you know how wrong your memories are, how long your habits take to form, or how many friends you can make?
Here are these and other psychological facts that will help you get to know yourself better.
Psychological processes of a person
1. You suffer from "inattentional blindness"If you haven't heard anything about the "invisible gorilla" experiment, watch the following video. You need to count the number of passes made by people in white shirts (watch the video before reading the text further).
This is an example of what is called "inattentional blindness". The idea is that we are often blind to what is 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 walks away. Participants who are busy counting passes often simply do not notice the gorilla. Moreover, those who are aware of the appearance of the gorilla become even more inattentive and miss other changes (such as changing the color of the curtains, the departure of one girl).
2. 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, unless we repeat it again and 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 in our minds.
Recent studies show that we are able to store even less: about 3-4 blocks of information at a time. And although we try to group the data we receive, our short-term memory is still quite limited.
For example, a phone number is divided into several sets of numbers so that we can remember it more easily.
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 hard on our eyes when they are next to each other.
This is due to an effect called chromostereopsis, which causes some colors to stand out while others are removed. This causes irritation and eye fatigue.
This effect is most pronounced when combining red and blue, as well as red and green colors.
4. You see things differently than you perceive them.
Wisdom of the wisest. Embrace the infinite
According to a study by the University of Cambridge, the letters in each subdiacra are not jagged in the left. Smaoe vaonzhe, this is what it was to be early and suffered bkuva blyi on their own metsah.Even if the rest of the letters are mixed up, you can still read the sentence. This is because the human brain does not read each letter, but the word as a whole. It is constantly processing information it receives from the senses, and how you perceive information (words) is usually different from what you see (messed up letters).
5. You are able to maintain 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 attention you can maintain is 7-10 minutes. After that, your attention will begin to weaken and you need to take a break in order to continue to maintain your interest.
Psychological characteristics of a person
6. The ability to delay gratification begins in childhood.Your ability to delay the immediate gratification of your desires begins in early childhood. People who were able to delay gratification at an early age did better in school and coped better with stress and frustration.
7. We dream 30 percent of the time.
Do you like to be in the clouds? According to psychologists, we all love to dream at least 30 percent of the time. Some of us even more, but that's not always a bad thing. Researchers say that people who like to daydream tend to be more resourceful and better problem solvers.
8. It takes 66 days to form a habit.
Scientists studying how long certain actions turn into a habit found that on average it takes us about 66 days.
The more complex the behavior we want to acquire, the longer the time we need. Thus, those who wanted to develop the habit of exercising 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.
9. You overestimate your reaction to future events.
Secrets of psychology. 20 facts you need to know
We are not very good at predicting the future. To be more precise, we overestimate our reaction to future events, whether pleasant or negative. Studies have shown that people believe that positive events, such as marriage or a big win, will make them much happier than they actually were. Likewise, we believe that negative events, such as losing a job or an accident, will cause us to feel much more depressed than we actually do.
10. You blame the other person, not the situation (and the situation, not yourself)
Secrets of psychology. 20 facts you need to know
Think back to when you were waiting for another person who was late for a meeting. Most likely, you attributed his delay to irresponsibility and lack of concentration. In the same situation, you attributed your delay to external circumstances (traffic jams).
In psychology, this is called the "fundamental attribution error" - that is, the tendency to blame other people's behavior on internal personality traits, and one's behavior on 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.
11. The number of friends you can have is limited.
Secrets of psychology. 20 facts you need to know
Even though you may boast of having a few thousand social media friends, you actually have far 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 ignore food, sex, and danger.
Secrets of psychology. 20 facts you need to know
Have you noticed that people always stop to look at accident scenes. In fact, we cannot ignore the danger situation. Every person has an ancient brain structure that is responsible for survival and asks: "Can I eat this? Can I have sex with this? Can this 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.
13. You know how to do things you've never done before.
Secrets of psychology. 20 facts you need to know
Imagine that you have never seen an iPad, but they gave you one and offered to read books on it. Even before you turn on the iPad and start using it, you will already have a model in your head of how to read books with it. You will have suggestions about what the book will look like on the screen, what features you will be able to use, and how you will do it.
In other words, you have a "mental model" of reading a book on a tablet, even if you've never done so. Your mental model will be different from someone who has read e-books before and who doesn't even know what an iPad is.
Our mental models are based on incomplete facts, past experience, and even intuition.
14. You want more choices than you can handle.
Secrets of psychology. 20 facts you need to know
If you go to any supermarket, you will see a huge range of products, and all because people need a lot of choice.
In one supermarket study, researchers presented participants with 6 types of jam and then 24 types of jam. And while people were more likely to stop at a 24-jam stand, they were 6 times more likely to buy jam at a 6-jam stand.
The reason for this is simple: despite the fact that we feel like we want more, our brains can only handle a limited number of items at once.
15. You are happier when you are doing something.
Secrets of psychology. 20 facts you need to know
Imagine that you are at the airport and you need to pick up your luggage. However, you need about 12 minutes to reach the baggage claim area. When you approach the baggage claim, you immediately pick up your suitcase. How impatient do you feel?
Now try to imagine a similar situation, but only you get to the pickup area in 2 minutes and wait for your luggage for 10 minutes. Although in both situations it took you 12 minutes to get your luggage, in the second case you were probably more impatient and unhappy.
If a person has no reason to be active, he decides not to do anything. While it helps us conserve energy, idleness makes us feel impatient and miserable.
Brain and psyche
16. You make most decisions subconsciously.
Secrets of psychology. 20 facts you need to know
While we like to think that all of our decisions are carefully controlled and thought out, research suggests that everyday decisions are actually subconscious, and for good reason.
Every second, our brains are attacked by more than 11 million individual items of data, and since we cannot carefully check all this, our subconscious mind helps us make a decision.
17. You remake your memories
Secrets of psychology. 20 facts you need to know
We think of our memories as little "movies" that we play in our head and think they are stored just like a video in our computer. However, it is not.
Every time you mentally return to an event, you change it, because the neural pathways are activated differently each time. This can be influenced by later events, and the desire to fill in the 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 can't do more than one thing at a time
If you think that you can do several things well at once, you are mistaken. 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 only focuses on one priority function at any given time. This suggests that we cannot think about two different things at the same time.
19. Your most vivid memories are wrong.
Memories of exciting and dramatic events are called "flash memories" in psychology, and they, as it turned out, are full of errors.
Well-known examples of this phenomenon are the events associated with 9/11. The 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 attack and 3 years later. It turned out that 90 percent of the later descriptions differed from the original ones. Many people can describe in detail where and what they were doing at the moment they heard the news. The only problem is that these details are wrong, because the strong emotions associated with memory distort memories.
20. Your brain is as active in sleep as it is when you are awake.
Secrets of psychology. 20 facts you need to know
When you sleep and dream, your brain processes and combines the experience of the whole day, creates associations from the information received, decides what to remember and what to forget. Surely you have often heard the advice to "get a good night's sleep" before an exam or an important event. If you want to remember what you have learned, it is best to go to bed after you have learned the material and before you need to remember it.
Comments
Post a Comment