Interesting Facts About The Human Mind

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Solomon Shereshevsky was a Russian journalist who couldn’t forget. He suffered from synesthesia, a phenomenon in which one sense (for example, vision) stimulates another sense (such as hearing). Solomon’s extreme synesthesia led him to taste, smell, and see vivid images in conjunction with numbers and sounds. Because a single word could trigger a flood of memories and associations, he had a difficult time reading a book or having a simple conversation.i

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The human mind has a difficult time differentiating the innate from the environmental. In other words, if the mind is used to interpreting the world a certain way, it expects that the world is that way naturally and unalterably. For example, for many people, the color pink is naturally feminine and blue is naturally male. However, in the 1920s, parents dressed boys in pink because it was a watered down version of red, which was seen as masculine and fierce. Girls were dressed in pale blue because it was associated with the Virgin Mary.i

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In 1965, a botched circumcision burned away David Reimer’s entire penis. Doctors decided to raise him as a girl, and removed his testicles and fashioned female genitalia. His parents changed his name to Brenda. He finally learned at age 14 that he was a boy, and later committed suicide at age 38. He reported that what they did to his body was not as bad as what they did to his mind.i

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More than 100 studies show that about half of crime is largely under genetic control. Environmental factors such as parenting, poverty, and discrimination account for the other half. In other words, nature and nurture are both important in developing the mind.g

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When the mind recalls a memory, it’s not the original memory. In fact, the act of remembering is an act of creative reimagination. The put-together memory doesn’t just have a few holes; it also has some entirely new bits pasted in.i

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Research has proven how easy it is to create false memories through the force of suggestion. Psychologists found that if they repeated questions (e.g. hugging Bugs Bunny at Disney World—an impossibility) and invited the mind to imagine sensory detail (do you remember stroking Bugs Bunny’s velvety ears), a person would begin to believe it was an actual event.i

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The mind can practice new tasks, such as learning a new piece of music during REM sleep. REM sleep also appears to boost performance with tasks involving procedural memory, or the subconscious “how-to” knowledge that a person uses when walking, riding a bike, or performing most physical tasks.i

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Most people assume that our conscious mind continues until the end of day and then picks up after we wake up. Scientists argue, however, that dreaming is a phenomenon that’s just as visceral and immediate as consciousness is and that since we spend roughly 20 years asleep, dreams should be considered an alternate reality.i

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Advertisers use mind illusions to make their products more appealing. For example, they produce condiment bottles with long necks because the mind is better at judging size than volume. Bottles of maple syrup are narrow at the base but bulge in the middle because that is where a person is most likely to look.i

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The moon appears to be much larger than usual when it’s low in the sky because the mind interprets the size of the moon in relation to distant objects and the horizon. But when the moon is high in the sky, the mind has no such frame of reference, and so the moon appears smaller.i

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Scientists note that the mind is a giant pattern-making machine. It invents shapes and identifiable things to explain odd patterns in arrangements. The mind can also block out things it wants to ignore, such as the tactile sensation of clothes rubbing on a person’s skin or a person’s own body odor.i

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The mind’s power of expectation can blind people to facts and lure them into unwitting conjecture in virtually every way they perceive the world. For example, testers in a study responded differently to an odor that they sniffed out of a test tube depending on whether they were told that it was fancy cheese or human waste.i

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The mind stores memories in different ways, although the boundaries are not always clear cut: short-term memory (working memory), long-term memory (declarative memory), and procedural memory (“how-to” memory associated with physical skills such as shoe tying). Procedural memory is remarkably durable and is even able to survive the ravages of diseases like Alzheimer’s.i

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Scientists are unsure how things are forgotten; in other words, they are unsure what makes a person unable to remember even long-term memories. New research shows that people don’t necessarily forget, they simply lose the ability to retrieve older, rarely visited memories.i

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Short-term memory is linked to current electrical activity taking place in a person’s neurons, or the pattern of signal transmission that goes through the brain. Long-term memory, however, depends on permanent physical changes in the brain.i