18 Interesting Facts About Your Mind

The human mind is a true enigma. Even with all of the advances that science has made, there are still many more questions than answers about the way our brain works. And about the true extent of its potential.

Although it is impossible to believe, most of the things we do with our minds still don’t have definite explanations. Science ignores the details of why and how we dream, how exactly our memories are formed and what mechanisms make the development and change of emotions possible. Among many other questions that are still unanswered.

Each day, countless experiments take place around the world. All with the objective of unraveling the hidden threads that move our mind. Thus, new information s constantly coming into play, which never ceases to amaze us. Below are eighteen fascinating facts about the mind:

Curiosities of the brain

1. It has been proven that people establish greater empathy with people who touch their forearm and/or speak to them through their right ear, during a conversation.
2. Also, when people are making something up, they tend to look up and to the right. If they are truly trying to remember or recall something, they look down and to the left.
3. It is also a known fact that people have a higher chance of landing a new professional job if they wear glasses to the interview. Glasses are unconsciously interpreted as a sign of specialization or intelligence.

   

4. The average time it takes to forget a great love is 17 months and 26 days.
5. A study established that when you suffer a burn, certain brain networks are activated. The interesting aspect of this is that the same network is activated when we suffer through a romantic rejection.
6. Depressed people dream three times as much as people who are not sad.
7. And as far as physical pain, looking at a photo of your loved one can reduce physical pain up to 44%. The effect is almost identical to that of a common analgesic. 
8. The brains of children that have been exposed to violence within the family have the same patterns of activity as soldiers that have fought in a war. The truth is that every thought is literally a physical path that is formed within the brain. The more you have a certain thought, the deeper the imprint that this path will make and the easier it will be for the thought to reenter your mind. That’s why it is good to constantly have uplifting, encouraging thoughts.

   

9. Video games can produce an addiction as strong as heroin. Surely this has to do with the mechanisms that activate willpower, because the strength of willpower depends in great measure on the amount of oxygen and glucose within your brain.
10. When you are exhausted or hungry, it will be harder for you to say no or maintain a specific goal.
11. And speaking of exhaustion, it is estimated that the average person losses concentration after 90 minutes of being continuously focused on something. Therein lies the importance of taking breaks throughout an important task.
12. Within the brain, neurons are connected through many different ways. To be more specific, a million raised to the 10 power. If the brain were a hard drive, it would have the capacity to store up to 4 terabytes of information. In fact, each one of us has around 70 thousand thoughts per day, although many of them are repeated.
13. This is why the brain weighs a mere 1.5 kilos on average, but consumes 20% of the energy and oxygen used by the body.
14. In a study conducted in the United States, it was proven that people who eat food without artificial coloring or preservatives managed to obtain 14% higher scores on intelligence tests. Therefore, what we eat affects the way our brains operate and functions.
15. Despite its great capacity, the human brain doesn’t have a good ability to distinguish between fantasy and real experiences. Thus, someone can experience a movie as if it were an event that happened in the real world. You can feel sadness, fear or enthusiasm the same way you would if you were truly experiencing that event.
16. People have false memories. In an experiment, some photographs of volunteers were tricked and they were placed in scenarios or with people in which they had never been. Upon seeing the images, many of them remembered these people and even gave details about the events taking place.
17. Although it may seem unbelievable, people believe more in sayings that rhyme than in those that don’t.
18. Someone can physically feel a hit that another person receives, if this greatly impacts them emotionally. This is because there are cells in the brain called “mirror neurons” that reproduce the experience as if you were the one living it.