Interesting Facts About The Human Mind

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A group of scientists from Cal Tech and UCLA have developed a way for epilepsy patients who have had electrodes implanted inside their brains to control a computer mouse with their minds.l

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The Stanford Prison Experiment is an infamous experiment that took average people and randomly assigned them to be either guards or prisoners. After a few days, the prisoners and guards became grossly absorbed in their roles. The experiment revealed how readily the human mind accepts authority and institutional ideologies.b

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A single descriptive word can manipulate how the mind remembers an event. For example, in a 1974 experiment, 45 people watched the film of a car accident. Different groups of people were asked how fast the cars were going using different trigger words, such as “hit,” “smashed,” “collided,” bumped,” and “contacted.” The group whose question included the word “smashed” estimated the cars were going 10 mph faster than the group whose word was “contacted.” A week later, when participants were asked about broken glass, those who were asked more forceful trigger words reported that there was broken glass even though there was none.i

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Studies show that people are able to group items in short-term memory into roughly seven units that allow them to hold more individual items. Interestingly, many human belief systems have considered the number 7 to be a sacred number.i

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In 1938, Orson Wells broadcasted an adaption of H.G. Wells’ War of the World on the radio. The broadcast caused mass panic in nearly 3 million of the 6 million listeners. Psychologists note that even highly educated people believed it because it was on the radio and thus “authoritative.” They also note that media manipulation of our minds is a regular art form.i

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Psychologists have noted that in the mind of suicidal people, time seemed to move significantly slower. The suicidal mind also had a more difficult time thinking about the future. Researchers suggest this helped the person withdraw from thinking about past failures and what was perceived as a hopeless future.a

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The mind of a suicidal person tends to focus increasingly on concrete thought, which is often conveyed in suicide notes. For example, suicide notes tend to be more banal and specific, such as “Don’t forget to feed the cat.” Fake suicide notes, however, tend to include more contemplative language, such as “Always be happy.” Psychologists note the suicidal mind is trying to slip into idle mental labor to avoid unpleasant emotions.a

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Some scientists believe that there may be universal features of the human mind that make it easier for people to believe in a higher power. In fact, brain scans of Franciscan nuns, Tibetan Buddhists, and Pentecostal Christians showed similar activity in their brains during prayer and meditation. Interestingly, both believers and atheists point to brain scans as proof of their positions.h

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The conscious mind includes sensations, perceptions, memories, feelings, and fantasies inside of our current awareness. The preconscious mind includes those thoughts that we are thinking at the moment but can easily draw into our conscious mind. The subconscious mind is the psychic activity that operates below the level of awareness.h

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Studies show that people clean up more if there is a faint smell of cleaning liquid in the air, they become more competitive if they see a briefcase, and they become more cooperative if they glimpse words like “dependable”—all without being aware of the change or what triggered it. Scientists note that this shows how everyday sights, smells, and sounds, can activate the subconscious mind.d

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Mind control is the unethical use of manipulative techniques to persuade others to conform to the wishes of the manipulator. It was first recorded during the Korean War.i

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During the famous Milgram Experiment (1961), 65% of volunteers gave what they thought was a fatal dose of electric shock to someone when told to do so, even though less than 1% said they would in a pre-experiment survey. The study showed that the human mind does not necessarily operate based on personality but rather on the roles we are asked to play to make society move smoothly.b

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The CIA reportedly created a project called Project MK-ULTRA to experiment with mind control using LSD. They even tried to use the drug as a way to completely wipe the memories of retiring CIA agents.i

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One of the crueler mind experiments was conducted by psychologist Harry Harlow who studied severe maternal deprivation. He separated a baby monkey from its mother and raised it in a cage with two substitute mothers. One mother was made from wire and had a bottle. The other mother was made from cloth, but didn’t have a bottle. As soon the infant finished nursing, it would cling to the cloth monkey. When the experimenters introduced frightening stimulus into the cage, the monkeys ran to the cloth monkey for protection. The monkeys grew up with severe emotional and behavioral problems.b

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Scientists believe that the mind forgets in order to avoid information overload, to think more quickly, assimilate new information easier, and to avoid emotional hangovers.i