9 Curious Data About Your Mind

The human mind is a veritable storehouse of puzzles. Even with all the advances in science, there are more questions than answers about how the brain works and how much we can get out of it.

It seems impossible to believe, but most of the things we do with the mind still don’t have a definitive explanation. Science ignores the details of why and how we dream, exactly how memories are formed, and what mechanisms make possible the development and alteration of emotions, among others.

Every day, countless experiments are carried out around the world with the aim of demystifying the hidden threads that move the human mind. And yet, new data constantly emerges that never cease to amaze us. Check out some of this curious data below.

Hidden Mechanisms of the Mind

Here are some hidden mechanisms of the mind:

• It has been proven that people are able to establish greater empathy with those who touch their forearms and/or speak to them in their right ear during a conversation. Just as when people imagine or invent an answer, they tend to look up and to the right.
• If they really try to remember something, they look down and to the left. It is also known that people are more likely to get a professional job if they present themselves with glasses at the interview. Eyeglasses are unconsciously interpreted as a sign of specialization and intelligence.

• The average time that a “normal” person takes to forget a great love is 17 months and 26 days. Likewise, research has found that when suffering a burn certain brain networks are activated. The curious thing is that the same network is activated when we suffer a loving rejection.
• Depressed people have three times the volume of dreams  than people who are not sad. And as for physical pain, looking at a photograph of a loved one can reduce physical pain by up to 44%. The effect is almost identical to that of a common pain reliever.

Brain Curiosities

The brain will never cease to amaze us, some curious features related to this organ are:

• The brains of children who have been exposed to family violence have the same activity patterns as soldiers who have fought in a war. The truth is, every thought is literally a physical pathway that builds inside the brain. The more you have that same thought, the deeper the imprint this path will leave and the easier it will surface again. That’s why it’s good to have optimistic thoughts constantly.

• Video games can be as addictive as heroin. Certainly this has to do with the mechanisms that activate will, because willpower depends in large part on the amount of oxygen and glucose in your brain. When you are tired, or hungry, it will be harder to say “no” or to persevere in some goal.
• And speaking of tiredness, it is estimated that a person loses concentration after 90 continuous minutes focused on something. Hence the importance of breaks.
• In the brain, neurons connect in different ways. More precisely 10 times the million. If the brain were a hard disk, it would have the capacity to store up to 4 terabytes of information. In fact, each of us has about 70,000 thoughts a day, although many of them repeat themselves.

No wonder the brain weighs just 1.5 kilograms on average, but consumes 20% of the energy and air the body needs.

A survey conducted in the United States proved that those who eat without consuming preservatives or artificial colors can score 14% higher on intelligence tests. So what we eat definitely affects how the brain works and configures itself.

Memories and misleading experiences

Each of us is somehow the victim of misleading memories and experiences, such as:

• Despite its great capacity, the human brain has little ability to distinguish fantasies from real experiences. Therefore, a person can experience a movie as if it were a fact of real life. You may feel sadness, fear, or excitement just as you would feel if you were actually living it.

• People have false memories. During an experiment, photos of volunteers were tampered with, placing them in scenarios or people they had never been with. Upon seeing the images, many of them “remembered” these people and even gave details about the events they evoked.
• Another detail, even if it seems unbelievable: people believe more in proverbs that have rhymes than in those that don’t.
• A person can physically feel a punch being thrown at another person if it impacts them too much emotionally. This is due to the fact that there are cells in the brain called “mirror neurons” that reproduce the experience as if it were lived in your own body.