Here are some of the weirdest ways our brains work!
9 - Sensory Deprivation Any of you guys watched Stranger Things?
If you’ve watched Stranger Things, then you know how Eleven did most of her telepathic
connections in the weird looking water tank.
Sensory deprivation tanks are exactly how the show portrayed them.
Soundproof chambers with really salty and comfortably warm water.
Once inside, the user has to wear glasses that block out all light to avoid any kind
of visual input.
But the interesting part comes after 25 minutes of being inside a sensory deprivation chamber.
That’s when the hallucinations could start.
Our brains aren’t accustomed to not having constant input to process.
When deprived of that, our brains just come up with their own input to fill the emptiness!
According to a 2009 study published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, the
hallucinations are caused by the brain misidentifying the source of what it’s currently experiencing,
a phenomenon called faulty source monitoring.
And so, hallucinations inside a sensory deprivation tank will be very vivid and rather confusing.
People who have experienced this say they couldn’t tell, afterward, if what they had
seen had been real or not.
Have any of you ever been in a sensory deprivation tank?
If so, let us know your experience in the comment section!
And oh yeah, do us a big favor.
Hit this like button, right here!
8 - Earworms Remember that old Justin Bieber song called
“Baby”?
Remember how that song essentially just got stuck in your head for days on end and you
caught yourself humming the chorus even though maybe, just maybe, you hated the song?!
That’s exactly what an earworm is.
The term comes from a German word, and it literally translates to a musical itch.
It’ll happen with a song, or a TV jingle, or the Game of Thrones opening music.
Earworms are unfinished thoughts that get stuck in a loop.
An earworm is always a fragment of a song, never the full version.
That happens because a verse will be memorized without us meaning to, so it’s always incomplete.
When our brains randomly decide to play the fragment, it’ll come to an abrupt end.
But brains are funny in the way that they always try to finish tasks.
So, because it’s unable to find the ending of the song in our memories, our brains will
simply replay the song again in the hopes that this time around somehow we’ll be able
to remember the rest of the song.
When this doesn’t happen, our brain will replay the tunes over and over and over again.
So how exactly will you be able to get those pesky songs out of your head?!
The answer is later in this video!
7 - Semantic Satiation Repeat after me.
Buffalo.
Does the word Buffalo still make sense to you?
Let’s say it a little bit more.
Buffalo.
How about now?
If at some point the word started to sound strange, you’ve experienced what psychologists
call semantic satiation and what some writers and editors refer to as “word dysphoria”.
The first time this phenomenon was described was back in 1907 when a couple of scientists
named Severance and Washburn spent about 2 hours repeating the same word until they claimed
the word had lost all meaning.
Experts explain this situation as a kind of fatigue.
Specific words have an electrical reaction associated with them in our brains.
This electrical signal is what conveys meaning.
So every time we read or say a certain word, the specific electrical pulse fires, and we
understand the word.
Rapid repetition makes the neural activation fire repeatedly, and this is known to cause
reactive inhibition.
And this is the reason why there’s a reduction in the meaning of the word with each repetition!
Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo!
6 - Sleep Paralysis As you may know, sleep happens in cycles.
The most important part of that cycle is deep sleep, or REM.
When we’re in REM, this is the part of sleep when we’re dreaming.
So in REM, our mind will be vividly awake and recreating scenes from say, Star Wars
with that Justin Bieber Baby song playing in the background.
Of course, our bodies remain still.
During REM, motor function is minimal.
We aren’t supposed to wake up during REM cycles, so we almost never experience motor
function pretty much shut off.
Yet, sometimes, we’ll wake up in the middle of a REM cycle, but we won’t be able to
move.
Pretty much like you’re paralyzed.
The pathophysiology of sleep paralysis hasn’t been concretely identified, but just know
that it’s not unusual to wake up not being able to move.
It just takes our brain a little while to get back to work!
5 - Neurons Have you ever looked at someone stub their
toe on a table and winced in pain yourself?
That’s mirror neurons doing its job.
A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when we act in the same way as someone else
and when we observe some sort of negative action to someone.
Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of the other person, as though that event itself
is acting on us.
Mirror-neurons allowed us to survive in the past by copying the reactions of other species
in certain situations, such as when a predator arrived.
Now, sympathetic neurons make us empathetic.
For example, when you see a group of people smiling and laughing, your brain will instantly
want to smile and laugh too.
Unfortunately, these mirror-neurons will react much faster and stronger to pain or anger
than they do to smiles.
So as soon as we see someone fall and break their leg, our brains will shoot adrenaline
and spike a pain reaction in our bodies, to mirror the fallen person.
The worst part of all this is that our brains can’t tell the difference between watching
someone in real life getting injured, and watching a video of someone getting hurt.
This is why watching a person fall and break their arm still feels as bad on video or in
real life!
4 - Sleep Drunkenness Annnnnd we’re back on sleeping!
When we go too long without sleeping, our bodies start behaving as if we were drunk!
We have trouble with equilibrium, we feel disoriented and confused, and we have trouble
remembering the simplest thing, just to name a few side effects.
This happens because our brains need REM cycles to regulate hormones, and when we go too long
without them, it just starts firing hormones that makes our body feel like it needs to
pass out.
Until this moment, you’ve probably been nodding along and saying that you already
knew that.
What you may not know is that the exact same thing happens when we OVERsleep.
If you’re one of those people who sticks to a schedule, then it’s likely you sleep
pretty much the same amount of time every night.
However, when someone that’s used to 8 hours of sleep, sleeps for 12 hours, they’ll feel
just as confused and disoriented as sleeping too little.
This happens because, just like not enough REM cycles, too many REM cycles have a negative
effect on the brain!
Oh yeah, speaking of negative effects on the brain, in order to get songs stuck in your
head OUT of your head, experts say to chew gum!
That or do some moderately difficult games, such as sudoku!
3 - Motion sickness Our bodies process motion in two different
ways.
The first one is through vision.
Our eyes scan the world around us and send signals to our brains that indicate the direction
we’re moving, if at all.
The other way we perceive movement is through our inner ear.
This controls our balance and equilibrium.
Our inner ear and our visual input are usually synced.
Human bodies have evolved to have a slight up-and-down movement at the same time as we
move forward.
This is the way we move when we walk.
Motion sickness happens as what we see with our eyes doesn’t match up with what’s
going on in our inner ear.
Motion sickness comes in different types.
It can be caused by motion that’s felt but not seen, caused by motion that’s seen but
not felt, and also caused when both systems detect motion but they don’t correspond.
For example, when you’re on a car or a train, the movement is stable.
But your brain knows you’re moving forward because your eyes are giving that information.
Still, your body isn’t feeling it.
And this is where the fun begins because brains will get confused and think the body has been
poisoned.
And what happens when brains get confused?
They want to reboot.
And the fool-proof way our brains have of rebooting the system is puking.
Not sure how that solves anything, but hey, it happens!
2 - The Mandela Effect Have you ever been sure of something in particular,
only to find out, later on, you weren’t right?
Well, that’s the Mandela Effect taking place.
The Mandela Effect is named after Nelson Mandela, when a large group of people claimed they
remembered clearly how Nelson Mandela had lied in a prison in the 80’s.
Of course, that didn’t happen!
In reality, Mandela was released out of prison in 1990.
Still, some people were convinced the world was playing a trick on them.
Basically, The Mandela Effect is a pseudoscientific theory, sustained in the quantum theory of
the multiverse.
According to the Mandela Effect, collective untrue memories happen because of glitches
in the multiverse.
So, after a disruption in continuity changes a past event in our current timeline, sometimes
we’ll just slide to the next similar timeline.
In this second timeline, everything happens the same, except for a few little details.
One popular example of the Mandela Effect is the Berenstain Bears.
Some people claim the spelling for Berenstain was once written with an “e” instead of
an “a”.
But really, it’s just false memory shared by multiple people.
Most experts say that these false memories are shaped by similar factors affecting multiple
people such as social reinforcement of incorrect memories, or false news reports and misleading
photographs influencing the formation of memories.
But you know what, we probably still shouldn’t rule out a glitch in the matrix!
Have you ever had a Mandela Effect happen to you?
If so, what was it?
Let us know in the comments!
1 - Memory Video Editor Memories are a mysterious thing, and the way
we remember things isn’t always the way it happened in real life.
You probably remember that telephone game, right?
One person starts the game by whispering a message in the ear of the person next to them
and so on, and by the time the message gets to you, the original message has changed a
lot from what’s written down!
Essentially, our memories work exactly like that.
Every time we replay that event in our head over time, things change a bit.
Not only do memories become blurry, details change, becoming less and less precise as
time goes by.
Our brains work with electrical signals.
Memories are stored as a series of electrical paths and pulses.
So when we recall a memory, a specific electrical path is followed.
But when this happens, the electrical signal changes, because we integrate new information
to old memories.
So if memories are video recordings, then our brains are video editors.
It tweaks and edits memories of ourselves to fit the image we have of ourselves.
This way, situations that may have been really embarrassing for us, or memories that make
us feel guilty, will be edited by our brains to lessen our burden.
Maybe it’s a double edged sword that almost everyone records their life on social media
now?
Here’s what’s next!