20 Interesting Psychological Facts Which You Never Knew About Yourself

There are many things that are fascinating about life. If you were to look into the psychology of humans, you will be amused as well as shocked to learn of how the mind works. Just as the term psychology means – the general studying of a human mind as well as their behavior, but taking into consideration their conscious and unconscious experiences – there are things you know and which you never thought were possible. Here are some of the 20 most fascinating psychological facts about yourself:

1. It is simply impossible to multitask – The human mind is wired to only concentrate on one thing at a time. Well, you can shift your attention from doing one thing to another very fast, but as you know, that is not multitasking.
2. Your mind is always attracted to sex and danger – When you hear of some building collapsing or some grisly accident, chances are that you will take a peek even though you know the images are really bad. As for sex, no matter whom or what you are, sex appeal will always work for you.
3. Mostly we read or see what we want to see – Many are the times when people get the message wrong because rather than read ‘a famous celebrity’s pet dies’, they will read ‘a famous celebrity dies’. Tabloids and advertising firms capitalize on the fact that people read groups of words rather than individually.
4. It is natural for the mind to wonder – You may have been reprimanded by people for not paying attention to the task at hand. Scientists agree that the human brain wonders between 30-70% of the time.
5. You know so much than you think you do – Say, a man who drives a tractor and has never driven anything else is given a Range Rover to drive. It will take a short time for that driver to have the car on the move. Pretty everything else works in the same fashion.
6. You prefer reading stuff in hard copy rather than on a screen – Screens use pixels to form letters and numbers. Such are hard on the eyes and you will prefer reading the same content found online on a paper.
7. Perceived progress is as good as real progress for the brain – You tend to work harder when the reward or goal is neared.
8. Your unconscious mind is faster and intuitive than your conscious one – When buying a car, you might find that the salesperson is saying everything nice and agreeable about the car but you really aren’t settled for the car. It is the unconscious mind that is at work when you can pinpoint why you made a particular decision.
9. The more you are stressed the poorer your performance – When under stress, most people tend to remember and concentrate less. Your perception will also change if you are stressed. You also tend to repeat obvious mistakes over and over.
10. In most cases, your most vivid memories are jumbled up – Even though you will remember to great detail what you were doing or where you were when a big thing happened in the world, most of your ‘facts’ are wrong. It is called the flashbulb memory.
11. You tend to blame people when bad things happen – Much as people keep on saying that you should take responsibility for your own actions and life, there is that urge to blame bad things happening in your life on people.
12. When you are uncertain, you will want to defend your ideas more and more – If you are a fan of something, you tend to stick to what you know and ignore all else. Whether it is religion or preference of a certain brand of car, you will defend it all the way and not want to hear anything about other brands.
13. Given a choice, people will do the least possible work and demand the maximum possible reward – That is how we humans are (inherently). Over the centuries, people have been striving to look for ways to get the maximum rewards when they work the least. Some will call this laziness.
14. You tend to pick the first option available – Having known how the human psychology works, groceries, supermarkets, internet search engines and so many others have strategized to have the thing that they want you to pick up first. This is because you tend to pick the first option even if it’s wrong.
15. You will look outward for help or answers when you are unsure – You might think this as a conscious decision but it’s in human psychology. When some foreign food is served to you at a party, you tend to look towards the person seated next to see how they are handling their plate.
16. You love shorter sentences, but you read longer ones faster – It is like doing what you dislike better than what you like.
17. A majority of decisions are made unconsciously – As stated earlier, people tend to make decisions with their subconscious minds, but they really can’t tell what made them make such decision.
18. You tend to remember what you prefer to remember. People have been known to reconstruct their memories for a long time now. Two people who witnessed the same event will give different accounts of the same later.
19. There is a hormone that makes you get addicted to searching for information. It is called Dopamine.
20. You are blind to some things – Many are the times when you will hear of people saying that they did not see something that was supposed to be pretty obvious. This is called inattention blindness.

[Image: Pixabay]

Sophia Clark is a creative writer from New York who loves to share her thoughts with readers. She is a tutor and a freelance writer for Essays Storm. Connect with her on Twitter and Google +.