5 Brain Facts That Explain Your Weird Behavior

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-13 00:26

Our brain is imperfect. We forget the names of people, we cannot sleep at night, we do not notice the obvious things … The neuroscientist Dean Burnett, in his fascinating book "Idiotic Priceless Brain", explains why we have such chaos in our heads.

1. Why do we see something creepy

Probably everyone will be able to remember the case when one night it seemed to him that a thief had entered the room, but in fact it turned out to be an old dressing gown on the door handle. Or the shadows on the walls looked like terrible monsters. Well, millions of years of evolution have prepared us for this.

There are many dangers around us, and our brains react immediately to any potential threat. Of course, it seems to you that it is silly to jump at the sight of a robe - what kind of danger is that? But only the most careful of our ancestors, who reacted even to non-existent threats, were able to survive.

Our brains are characterized by the "God save" approach, so we often experience fear in situations where there is no reason for this. Dean Burnett

Fear has helped humanity develop an amazing fight-or-flight defense. At such moments, the sympathetic nervous system mobilizes the forces of the body. You start breathing more often so that there is more oxygen in your blood, you feel tension in your muscles, you get an adrenaline rush and become more alert than usual.

The problem is that the fight-or-flight response is activated before it is clear if it is needed. And there is logic in this: it is better to prepare for a non-existent danger than to miss a real one.

2. Why can't we remember why we went to the next room

It’s a familiar situation: you rush to the kitchen in full determination, cross the threshold and … forget that, in fact, you needed here.

It's all about the peculiarities of the work of short-term memory. This kind of memory is constantly in action. We think about something every second, information enters the brain at a tremendous speed and disappears almost immediately. All new data is stored as patterns of neural activity, and this is a very complex process.

It's like making a grocery list on the froth of your cappuccino. This is technically possible, because the foam can hold the outline of the words for a few moments, but in practice it makes no sense.

This unreliable system sometimes crashes. Information can simply get lost, so you forget why you went. This often happens because you think too much about something else. The volume of short-term memory is only four units, which are stored for no more than a minute. Therefore, it is not surprising that new information replaces old information.

3. Why we react sharply to criticism

Imagine that you changed your haircut, and when you came to work, ten colleagues complimented you, but one looked disapprovingly. Who will you remember more? There is no need to guess, because criticism is much more important for our brain than praise. This happens for several reasons.

When you hear a remark or see a negative reaction, you experience stress, albeit a little. In response to this event, the hormone cortisol begins to be produced. Cortisol is not only involved in stressful situations, but also provokes a fight-or-flight response, and this is a serious burden for the body.

But the point is not only in physiology, but also in psychology. We are used to praise and politeness. And criticism is an atypical situation, which is why it attracts our attention. In addition, our visual system unknowingly looks for threats in the environment. And we are more likely to feel it from the side of a negative person than from smiling colleagues.

4. Why we doubt our ability

Smart people often lose arguments to fools, because the latter are much more confident in themselves. In science, this phenomenon is called the "Dunning - Kruger effect".

Psychologists Dunning and Kruger conducted an experiment. They handed out tasks to the subjects, and then asked how they, in their opinion, coped with them. An unusual pattern has emerged. Those who performed poorly on the assignments were confident that they had coped with them perfectly. And those who completed the tasks well, doubted themselves.

Dunning and Kruger hypothesized that stupid people not only lack intelligence. They also lack the ability to recognize that they are not coping well.

A smart person constantly learns something new, so he does not undertake to assert his innocence with one hundred percent certainty. He understands that in any issue there is still a lot of unexplored. Remember the saying of Socrates: "I know that I know nothing."

A stupid person does not suffer from such doubts, therefore he often wins arguments. He is not shy about throwing false statements and presenting his personal opinion as truth.

5. Why can't we hide from others what we really think

Our brains are amazingly good at guessing facial expressions and recognizing emotions. To do this, he needs the very minimum of information. A typical example is emoticons. In symbols:),:(,: Oh, you can immediately recognize joy, sadness and surprise, although these are just dots and dashes.

Some people are good at hiding their emotions, such as poker players. But even they cannot do anything about involuntary expressions. They are governed by an ancient structure in our brain - the limbic system. Therefore, when we try to hide our true emotions out of politeness, others will still notice when your smile is sincere and when it is not.