Here are the 10 most interesting things you do without thinking!
10 – Mindless eating C’mon, I know everyone knows that expression
bet you can’t eat just one expression by Lays chips!
That expression taps into how tasty salty greasy chips are, and mindless eating as well.
Mindless eating is the number one reason people gain weight as they age.
We unconsciously eat many of our meals and snacks.
For example, when eating your dinner, do you finish everything on your plate or do you
only eat until you’re full?
While watching TV, do you grab a snack, and all of a sudden half the bag is gone?
Both of those are examples of mindless eating.
Our brain is roughly divided into two sections – the conscious and the unconscious.
The unconscious part is the one responsible for habits, while the conscious one is responsible
for our rational thinking, speech, creativity, etc.
Guess who’s in charge when you’re in Mindless Eating mode?
It’s the unconscious part.
That’s exactly why you don’t even notice you’re eating.
Eating is a habit that got activated, without you thinking about it.
Unfortunately, the worst part about our unconscious eating habits is that we’re often too far
in before other physical signals tells us to stop!
9 – The cross-race effect The cross-race effect is the tendency to more
easily recognize faces of the race that one is most familiar with, which is most often
one's own race.
Scientists also call it the “other-race effect,” a cognitive phenomenon that makes
it harder for people of one race to readily recognize or identify individuals of another.
It’s not bias or bigotry, the researchers say, that makes it difficult for people to
distinguish between people of another race.
It’s the lack of early and meaningful exposure to other groups that often makes it easier
for us to quickly identify and remember people of our own ethnicity or race while we often
struggle to do the same for others.
Psychologists say that it begins when people are infants and young children, when they
become aware of the key facial features and characteristics of those around them.
However, the fun thing is that you could easily improve your ability to recognize faces – All
you have to do is just start hanging around whomever you want to be able to distinguish
a lot more!
8 – Scratching your head in public You know how you might scratch your head whenever
you’re thinking really hard about something?
Automatic gestures like head scratching are a kind of expressive shorthand for our feelings.
One popular explanation for any hand-to-head movements is that it’s frustrated aggression--
a throwback to the natural movements of our rock-throwing ancestors.
If you ever watch small kids try to hit something, they’ll raise an arm over their head and
bring it forward in an arc.
It's a natural, unstudied movement; there isn’t much finesse, but for a cave man it
got the job done.
When we're wrestling with some problem, we experience feelings of frustration, maybe
some anger, and before we know it, our hand flies up in the air.
Psychologists say that the most absent-minded self-touching movements are efforts to comfort
ourselves in times of stress.
It's like giving ourselves a reassuring pat.
Head scratching would be a way of relieving the stress of not knowing something, and it's
directed at our heads because that's the source of our distress.
7 – Laughing at inappropriate times I often find myself laughing at the worst
times, and maybe you do too, but hey, apparently it’s okay.
As psychologists are discovering, these helpless giggles might be one of our most important
and profound behaviors.
Laughter is a great emotional equalizer.
We’re often told it’s the best medicine.
Deeply stressful or emotional episodes overload our emotional engine and send that needle
into overdrive.
To release stress, we often respond through inappropriate laughter which isn’t quite
ideal, but it’s effective.
Hey, this makes a lotta sense to me!
On top of reducing the stress hormone cortisol and improving short-term memory, laughter
has even been found to lessen physical pain.
Responding with laughter in deeply sad circumstances, for otherwise healthy people, is called the
inappropriate affect.
For example, think of times when you’ve watched someone getting hurt in real life
or on TV and found yourself laughing uncontrollably even though you’re concerned, even scared,
for the person affected.
Generally speaking, studies say that this is a way for our subconscious to calm our
fears and convince us that everything is actually okay.
Hmmmmmmm
6 – Staring People with facial disfigurement would probably
rather not have strangers staring relentlessly at them and those people that do stare probably
wish they could stop but they just can’t themselves.
But experts believe it’s a Herculean effort to control such staring, because it’s triggered
not by insensitivity but by instinct.
People can’t stop staring at things they’re not used to because of the work of the amygdala,
a primitive part of the brain evolved to sort faces into “safe” or “potentially unsafe”
categories.
When the pieces you supply match nothing in the gallery of known facial expressions, your
eyes just instinctively lock on.
When you encounter a person whose nose, mouth or eyes are distorted in a way you’ve never
encountered before, you pretty much just can’t help yourself, in the first couple seconds
anyways.
It’s the way your brain stays tuned for further information.
The amygdala can’t process a face that doesn’t fit any of the faces it’s encountered before,
so it simply freezes like a computer unable to process a command.
Scientists say that regaining composure requires serious conscious effort.
The frozen state that starers find themselves in has been called the “hijacking of the
amygdala” by psychologist Daniel Goleman, author of the best seller, Emotional Intelligence.
5 – The Freudian slip The proverbial Freudian slip, also called
parapraxis, is an error in speech, memory, or physical action that’s interpreted as
occurring because of the interference of an unconscious subdued wish or internal train
of thought.
For Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, it wasn’t enough to simply ask his patients
what they thought.
Their true desires, he believed, could only be examined by paying attention to ‘slips
of the tongue’ and other clues from the unconscious mind.
A classic slip is when you say one thing and mean another.
These verbal stumblings supposedly reveal forbidden urges – such as six and swearing
– which were usually locked safely within the unconscious mind.
Verbal errors aren’t random at all, but puzzles to be decoded.
4 – Different hand movements When you communicate, your brain automatically
involves your hands to convey thoughts and emotions, without you even having to think
about it.
Therefore, whether people are speaking or not, hand gestures merit our attention as
a rich source of nonverbal behavior to help us understand the thoughts and feelings of
others.
The way you touch other people reveals how you feel about them – when you make full
contact with your palm, this communicates warmth, familiarity and fondness.
The hands on the heart motion conveys a person’s desire to be believed or accepted – politicians
do this a lot, whether consciously or subconsciously.
Though intended to communicate sincerity, it doesn’t necessarily mean honesty.
It just means, “I want you to believe me, whether or not what I say is true”.
Pocketed hands indicate unwillingness, mistrust and reluctance.
If a person keeps his hands in his pockets, they’re typically displaying that they’re
not a believer.
3 – Reading as adults Typoglycemia is a new expression given to
a supposed recent discovery about the cognitive processes behind reading written text.
The word appears to be a portmanteau of "typo", as in typographical error, and "hypoglycemia".
It’s an urban legend that appears to have an element of truth to it, although no research
like that has been carried out.
At least not yet.
The urban legend address the fact that once you learn how to read as an adult, your mind
reads words as a whole, and not letter-by-letter.
According to a senior researcher at Cambridge, the first and last letters are the only thing
that you use when reading text.
There definitely is some truth in that people can read sentences with words where the letters
are jumbled – you do so without being really aware you’re doing so, if only one word
or two is messed up.
But however, there IS a cost to reading full sentences with completely mixed up letters.
You just won’t be able to read them as quickly and efficiently as a normal text!
2 – Yawning Yawning is one of the first things we learn
to do.
Johanna de Vries, a professor of obstetrics at Vrije University Amsterdam, has discovered
that the human fetus yawns during its first trimester in the womb.
Often, if one person yawns, this may cause another person to yawn somehow.
When you watch another person's yawning face, especially their eyes this can really cause
you to yawn!
While all vertebrate mammals experience spontaneous yawning, only humans and our closest relatives,
chimpanzees, seem to experience the contagion effect—a sign that there may be a deeper
social meaning to the yawning experience.
Some say we yawn out of empathy.
How close we feel to someone affects how likely we are to yawn when they do.
We’re more likely to catch a yawn from a family member versus a friend, a friend versus
an acquaintance, and an acquaintance versus a stranger.
The cause for contagious yawning may lie within what’s called mirror neurons in the frontal
part of the brain, which respond equally with the same action after we witness someone else
doing the same thing.
1 – Mimicking your partner Being with someone for a long time changes
the way you see the world.
It also changes you.
Everything from how you act to the way you think shifts in ever-so-slight ways.
A study has found that well-matched couples mimic each other’s language during conversations
and develop their own private vocabulary.
In addition to having their own private vocabulary, long term couples eventually start to match
each other in the basic rhythms and structures of their speech.
Part of that is a result of a phenomenon that psychologists call "emotional contagion."
Basically, when two people spend enough time together, they begin to match each other's
speech patterns.
We mimic everything from the other person's accent to the amount and length of pauses
he or she puts between words and sentences.
Couples are most likely to perform this so called ‘language style matching’ during
happier phases of their relationship, according to researchers.
The more your other half copies your slang and speech patterns, the more psychologically
connected you are.
There's some evidence to suggest that these changing speech patterns can even serve as
one indicator of how long a couple might stay together.
Part of a 2010 study of language used among couples looked at a couples' text messages.
It found that when two people "sounded" more alike in terms of the words and language structure
they used in their messages, they were also much more likely to still be dating three
months later.
Interesstinnnnnnnnng……..
Here’s what’s next!