they know you aren’t cheating. Now ask them: “What’s 1 + 1?”, “What’s 2 + 2?”,
“What’s 4 + 4?”, “What’s 8 + 8?”. Just as your friend rolls out the answer “16”,
ask them to name a vegetable. 9 out of 10 people will say “carrot”. (Brief Pause) The math has
nothing to do with carrots and is simply used to clear your friend’s mind of any recent thoughts
that might lead to a biased response. For example, if your friend is thinking about the broccoli they
plan to cook for dinner and you randomly ask them to name a vegetable, they’ll likely say broccoli.
The math helps bring your friend into the present moment so we can expect a more general response.
And whether it’s because of Bugs Bunny or because we are told they help us see in the dark, 9 out of
10 Americans view a carrot as the most general vegetable. This highlights a tactic of the mind
known as prototyping, which is when we use what we perceive to be the best example of something
to label an entire group of things. This frees up space in our brain to store other knowledge
and memories but often causes us to generalize and over simplify the group of things we are labeling.
The second mind trick is extremely simple and maybe you’ve come across it before.
What’s crazy is that I have too, but it still gets me literally every time. But first, I’ve had a few
people ask how they could support the channel. All I ask is for you to like the video if you are
enjoying it and to consider subscribing to the channel. Either of the two is more than enough!
Now, ask your friend to say “silk” 20 times. Just as they say it for the twentieth time, ask
them what cows drink. You’ll have a very confident friend look at you like you’re stupid as they say,
“Milk?”. But cows drink water. (Brief Pause) Of course, a newborn calf needs milk just as any
mammal, but that’s likely not what your friend was thinking about. Like the first mind trick we
played, this trick illuminates a vulnerability of ours in how our mind organizes information,
and it simply exploits that vulnerability. We organize the information in a way that will allow
us to respond readily, but that often causes logic to be overridden by our sense of familiarity.
For the third trick I am going to put some words on the screen for about 15 seconds
to give you time to read them before I read them aloud.
If you need more time just pause the video: (15 second pause)
The words read: If you can read this, you
have a strange mind too. I couldn’t believe that I could actually understand what I was reading.
Because of the Phenomenal power of the human mind, according to research at Cambridge University it
doesn’t matter in what order the letters of a word are in, the only important thing is that
the first and last letter be in the right place. The rest can be a total mess and you can still
read it without a problem. This is because the human mind does not read every letter by itself,
but the word as a whole. Amazing, right? And I’ve always thought spelling was important!.
Now how amazing is it that 75% of the population can read this and 55% can read it almost fluently.
While the first two tricks showed how our mind can get us into trouble,
this one shows how our mind can effortlessly avoid it. If you were able to read this,
your mind jumped over a ton of hurdles without causing you to stress or even think about the
operations it was performing. That’s because our brain is able to perform these operations
subconsciously, below the level of our awareness. Whether you send this message to your friend in a
text or show them this video – see if they are able to read through the jumble of letters!
See you next week!