We continue getting to know ourselves and our brains with this new set of revealing psychological facts. Other articles in this series:
- 3 ways your mind betrays you and keeps you from moving forward in life
- How your mind betrays you (Part 2)
- How learned helplessness affects our lives and success
1. Your brain is as busy when you sleep as when you’re awake.
We know today that when we sleep, the body goes into a process of regeneration, a kind of “tune-up” to repair damage. But the big question was what exactly our brain does while we sleep.
Matthew Wilson carried out research with laboratory rats, measuring their brain activity as they ran through mazes looking for the way out. To his surprise, he discovered that while the rats were asleep, their brain activity was practically the same as when they were running through the maze.
From his experiments, Wilson developed a theory not only for rats but for people too: when you sleep and dream, you are consolidating the day’s experiences and adding new memories, making new associations from the information processed during the day. The brain decides what it will remember and what it will let go.
That is why the old advice to get a good night’s sleep before a big event or an important exam turns out to be sound. If you want what you have learned to stick, the best thing you can do is go to sleep.
2. People who trust others are happier.
If you want to know whether someone is really happy, try measuring how much they trust other people. According to researcher Eric Weiner, it is a measure that never fails. Weiner travelled the world looking for answers about happiness and found Iceland at the top and Saudi Arabia at the bottom.
If people trust their family and friends, the justice system and their government, happiness is all but guaranteed. That is why, according to psychology, extroverts are happier than introverts, optimists are happier than pessimists, and married people are happier than single people, even if it may seem otherwise.
3. People are happier when they are busy and facing challenges.
Although most people might think they want calm rather than challenges, the truth is that a lack of challenges in life causes enormous unhappiness. If you have no challenges, you have no goals to fight for.
Being busy, moreover, keeps unhappiness at bay. Here is an example:
Imagine you have just landed at the airport and have to walk 12 minutes to collect your luggage. When you get there, your luggage is waiting for you.
Now consider this scenario. You land and have to walk 2 minutes to collect your luggage. You get there and it takes 10 minutes for your bags to come out.
Even though in both cases it takes you 12 minutes to get your luggage, in the second case you will feel impatient, as if they were wasting your time. It is the difference between waiting and being busy getting there.
So doing something is much better than doing nothing. That is why you should always keep moving; otherwise, you will grow lazier and lazier. And lazy people are unhappier than those who keep moving.
(See: 10 psychological traits in people you can use to your advantage)
4. The average time it takes to form a habit is 66 days.
We can take on new habits and drop old ones. Suppose you want to build the habit of reading every day, exercising, getting up earlier, or wasting less time on Facebook.
Put another way, acquiring a habit means you want to become more disciplined, and discipline generally comes from behaving as if you were already disciplined until, one day, the habit becomes part of you.
According to researcher Phillippa Lally, people who want to change their eating habits (go on a diet), quit smoking or stop drinking need 12 weeks on average, although it is worth saying that it is easier to take on a new habit than to drop an old one.
In fact, when it comes to giving up an old habit, most people fail because they don’t realise that, as a rule, when you drop an old habit you need to bring in a new one to replace it.
For example, if you want to stop getting up so late, you will need to adopt the habit of going to bed earlier. If you want to give up smoking, you will probably need to turn to exercise to relieve stress. (See: 6 reasons you may fail when trying to change bad habits)
When it comes to taking on a new habit, especially if it involves a new skill, we can actually do it much faster. However, while you are building a habit, you have to be very careful about skipping days until it is fully established.
(See: 4 tips to speed up mastering a new skill)
5. We are victims of selective blindness.
Psychologist Richard Wiseman coined this term, “selective blindness” or “inattentional blindness”. The idea is that our brain misses big changes in its surroundings because it is busy watching a small one.
Take a look at this short video and you’ll see more clearly what we mean:
Watch: short video on YouTube
How many times have you focused so hard on the bad things in life that you missed all the good things around you? What if you focused on the solution rather than on the problems?
As you can see, all those clichéd pieces of advice start to make sense once you picture how powerful, and at the same time how foolish, our brain can be.
6. Our memories can be altered by events that happen after them.
Our memories are not fixed. At least not in the way they are perceived. When we remember an event or an occasion, our brain plays it back as if it were a film, but that film can change over time. It’s not that we are altering the past. It is much simpler than that.
For example, if you go to a wedding, years later you may remember who was there, how the guests were dressed, who you talked to and who spent the most time by your side, even who you liked and who you didn’t. Are those memories fixed? You can bet they’re not.
Those details shift as time goes by and each time we recall the event. Memory can be altered by things that happen after the event. For example, a cousin or a close friend may have been there, someone you remembered as making you laugh during the wedding.
But over the years, that cousin or close friend let you down and turned out to be a jerk. Now, when you think back to the wedding, your view of your cousin has changed, and the good times you had with him at the ceremony are, after all those years and later events, remembered as your “clown” of a cousin telling bad jokes and drunk to boot.
So your mental film contains two different events: in the original, your cousin gave you a good time, while in the later edit, your cousin was a jerk.
The brain also tends to mix up and/or fill in some of the gaps in your memories. Researcher Elizabeth Loftus reached this conclusion through several studies of eyewitness testimony about an accident. The witnesses’ version of events (their memories) changed as time passed and as they interacted with the people involved.
(See: How to condition a child for success or for failure: an experiment)
7. Multitasking doesn’t exist.
There’s that old joke that men can’t do two things at once, but the truth is that women can’t either. In fact, nobody can. We are talking about mental multitasking, of course.
You can make an omelette and listen to music, but you can’t make an omelette while studying. Either the omelette goes wrong or nothing you study will sink in.
Research shows that we can only do one cognitive task at a time. We can only carry out one mental activity at once. You can’t talk about cars while reading about boats. You can’t listen to someone while you read.
The only exception to this rule is combining a physical task we have done very often (one that has become automatic) with a mental activity. For example, we learn to walk as small children, and that is what lets us walk and talk at the same time.
But research also suggests that this may not really be an exception, since it has been shown that if you walk while talking on your mobile phone, you are more likely to be unaware of your surroundings and to bump into someone or something.
That is why, when companies today ask their employees to multitask, what they actually end up with are employees who do neither task well. A big mistake.
8. People say they want more choice, but they don’t really want more choice.
If we ask someone whether they would rather choose between 3 different product models or 30, most will say they want to choose from 30. But the truth is that the more options there are, the less likely people are to buy, because the choice overloads the brain and makes decisions harder.
Neuroscience applied to sales (neuroselling) advises salespeople not to give customers so many options, even if they ask for them, or they will end up not selling. And it doesn’t only help the salesperson: it is also a favour to the customer.
That is where the recent productivity trend comes from, with some successful people admitting that they own only two kinds of suit or, as in the case of Mark Zuckerberg, always wear the same shirt. That way they don’t have to think about what to wear to work. It is one less decision, and therefore a more relaxed brain.
9. We fall prey to the fundamental attribution error.
Most of us judge people despite having no information about their situation. For example, if you are walking down the street and drop a folder full of papers, which scatter all over the ground, and someone hurries past, stepping around them without stopping to help, we might look at them and think: “How rude.”
If an elderly woman gets on a bus and we see a young man who doesn’t give up his seat, we might say he is very ill-mannered.
But what if…? Perhaps the man who didn’t stop to help pick up the papers was late for court, or running 10 minutes behind for an important meeting. Perhaps the young man who didn’t give up his seat had just come out of hospital after knee surgery.
People don’t carry a sign on their face saying what is happening to them. A very serious, curt person serving the public might have lost a relative the night before, and a shop assistant who is being very pushy about selling you something might be about to lose their home if they lose their job for missing their sales target.
So, whatever other people are like, our job is always to give the best of ourselves, to be kind and to offer a smile. And above all, not to waste time judging people we don’t know.
See also: 10 psychology findings that explain why you make bad decisions every day
Featured image: Keith Williamson, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
