http://www.cracked.com/article_21349_69-awesome-brain-hacks-that-give-you-mind-blowing-powers.html
I want to share these 68 brilliant hacks!
69. If You Avoid Thinking About the Future, You Get Better at Everything
Consider
the tenses past, present, and future. The difference between the
sentences "Bob is at the store buying nachos" and "Bob will go to the
store to buy nachos" has explicit implications about how far we are from
eating nachos. That is need-to-know information. But it may be
surprising that some languages don't have a future tense, or it's not
obligatory. In Mandarin, for example, it's fine to say something like
"Bob store buy nachos," and nobody will make fun of your caveman speech
or slap you in the mouth because you didn't immediately specify the time
frame of nacho delivery.
For example, a study
by Keith Chen of Yale Business School analyzed data from 76 countries,
focusing on things like saving money, smoking and exercise habits, and
general health. The surprising result was that cultures in which most
people speak languages without a future tense make better health and
financial decisions overall. In fact, it found that speaking a tensed
language, like English, made people 30 percent less likely to save
money. It is thought that speakers of such languages, whom we shall call
Untensers, see their lives as less of a timeline and more of a whole.
Therefore they are automatically more mindful of how their decisions
will affect their futures than we savage, primitive Tensers. Strangely,
it seems that thinking of "the future" as being some far-off place,
removed from the realities of our daily lives, makes us more likely to
buy that second Xbox just because the first looked lonely.
Untensers consistently
accumulate more wealth, hold onto it for longer periods of time, are
healthier, and live longer than Tensers, for whom the past is something
we've left behind, and the future is like a distant planet where
consequences live that we don't fully intend to visit.
68. Music Changes Your Ability to Perceive Time
Hold
music - the stuff you hear on the line when you call everyone from the
bank to your local bail bond agency -- didn't fall into America's phone
lines by accident. It's designed specifically to reduce the amount of time you think you're waiting,
so that you're less likely to hang up in anger. Other places that
involve waiting, such as doctors' offices, use a similar trick. Time
shrinkage is also the aim of most retail stores, which is why you'll
rarely enter a mall, supermarket or clothing store without hearing some
sort of music in the background.
To
understand why exactly music makes it seem like less time has passed,
think of the human brain as a mountain lion that is eating a bag of
money. It doesn't matter what the zookeepers distract it with --
food, shiny objects or just shouting and yelling. All that matters is
that they give another zookeeper the chance to sneak up and retrieve the
money while the lion is busy deciding which one of them to eat.
Similarly,
when your brain is steadily distracted, you'll be less likely to notice
things around you in detail, and this includes the passage of time. Our
brains have limited input capacity, and when something else is using up
that capacity, we're less likely to think things like, "I've been
standing in line to get Richard Moll's autograph for three goddamn
hours" or "Do I really need this Garfield alarm clock?"
"Will Katy Perry really sleep with me if I keep buying her music?"
But it works the opposite way, too. In some situations, listening to music can actually expandperceived
time. For example, listening to music while performing tasks that
require concentration will usually cause us to overestimate the amount
of time that has passed. The theory is that as your mind switches back
and forth between perception of the music and concentration on the
challenging tasks, it forms separate "events," or distinct memories.
When your brain thinks about what you've been doing for the past hour,
you'll remember more of these events and recall that the hour was quite
long.
Experiments have found that time also expands when we're listening to familiar music that we dislike.
When
we hear the opening chords of a song, our brain remembers the whole
thing and immediately skips ahead and plays it mentally. This fake
mind-music is extremely vivid, working on exactly the same parts of the
brain as actual music does.
So the effect is that you take a few moments to vividly imagine that
you're sitting through five minutes of that damn New Radicals song
before you come back to reality only to realize that you still actually have to sit through it
67. Change the Reality of a Situation by Changing How It's Phrased
You're
probably already aware that minor changes to the wording of a survey
can alter people's opinions. During the health care debate in 2010, for
example, four separate organizations conducted polls to see what
percentage of Americans supported a so-called "public option." Their
results ranged from a measly 44 percent to 66 percent support,
due in large part to differences in wording. Calling it a "government
administered health insurance plan -- something like the Medicare
coverage that people 65 and older get" garnered 66 percent support. And
calling it "a government-run health insurance plan" plummeted support to
44 percent. Calling it "Just what Mussolini would have wanted" reduced
the number to 2 percent.
"Ha-HAAAAAAAH! NOW I'VE GOT YOU!"
You
might think that it's just a matter of people not actually
understanding how the system works ("I said I wanted Medicare, not
GOVERNMENT!"), but it really is all about how the brain can be
manipulated with very subtle differences in wording, regardless of your
knowledge level.
What? How?
In this study,
social psychologists sent out surveys to several hundred registered
voters before an election. Half the recipients were asked if it was
"important to vote." The other half were asked if it was "important to be a voter."
With this one difference, the people who read the word "voter" were
nearly 14 percent more likely to actually vote on Election Day. The
researchers suspected that using the word "voter" caused people to
identify themselves with the word. Since these people considered
themselves to be voters, they were more likely to get out and vote.
"I was called a motherfucker, too, but that's on everyone's manifesto."
On
the other hand, using the word "vote" implied that the survey was
asking the people to perform a task. Even if they answered "yes" to the
question, they felt no association with the word (i.e., they weren't
voters, they were just being told to vote), so they were less likely to
follow through. One was about a simple action, the other was about being
a type of person.
You've been manipulated
this way all your life, and now it's time to start manipulating back.
Don't ask your friend with the truck if he can help move your mattress;
ask if he'll participate in a community-supported housing initiative.
Don't ask the cop to let you off for speeding; ask if Officer
Gives-a-Shit doesn't want to stimulate the local economy via a highly
targeted middle-class tax break. Getting your way is easy when you let
your words do the weaseling for you.
66. Music Makes You Stronger
It's
no secret that many people prefer to listen to music when they work
out. But music doesn't just make physical activity more pleasant -- it
actually makes our physical performance measurably better. When
listening to music, people are able to hold heavy weights for longer
than when they're standing in silence. They can also complete sprints in
smaller amounts of time and are even able to reduce their oxygen
intake.
This is why Rocky does all of his training in musical montages.
How Does It Work?
Similar
to the time-perception effect we referenced above, one element is just
plain old distraction. Obviously, if your mind is listening to music,
it's not thinking about how much your legs hurt or how much longer
you've got to run before the treadmill makes that final beeping noise.
But there's much more to it than that.
First,
there's synchronicity. When you match your movements to a steady
musical tempo, you spend less time and effort on the inefficient slowing
down and speeding up that happens when you're going by your own rhythm.
Music also increases the incidence of "flow" states -- states of
meditation-like calm in which everything works right for an athlete and
that is strongly linked to enhanced performance.
It's all in the music.
65. Your Hand Is a Poor Man's Night-Vision Goggles
Closing one eye when turning the lights on or off helps your eyes adjust to the change in lighting.
64. Thinking You Smell Good Makes You More Attractive
Entire multibillion-dollar industries are built upon the idea that smelling good gets you dates (smell can also influence who you're attracted to).
But when we say that your sense of smell can make a man more attractive
to the ladies, we're not just pointing out that a quick sniff test of
one's clothing before heading out is a reliable start on the path of not
dying alone. And we're not talking about those pheromone sprays that
promise to make women ignore the crumbs caught in your neckbeard.
In a recent study conducted by the University of Liverpool,
they had some guys spray themselves with Lynx (the English version of
Axe Body Spray). Then they had women rate the men's attractiveness ...
via videotape. As in, they were out of smelling range. The men who
sprayed themselves down were still rated as more attractive, even though the women couldn't smell them.
But How?
According
to the scientists running the experiment, the power was inside the men
the whole time. The guys given the scented spray figured they smelled
good, so their body language displayed more confidence, and the women
who watched them responded to that.
"You don't have to tell me. Johnny Beardface already knows, baby."
So
does this mean these dudes were just brainwashed by Lynx's marketing
campaign? They actually believed the ads that claim spraying this stuff
will have women diving for their junk?
Nope
-the can of spray used in the experiment was unmarked, so the men had
no idea what kind of deodorant they were covering themselves with. It
seems like pretty much anything that doesn't actually smell like mustard
gas will do the trick. It turns out the amazing mind-control powers of
smell aren't about making the girl at the bar swoon -- it's about
tricking yourself into having a little confidence for once.
63. Filling Your Cubicle With Personal Crap Makes You Productive
Nobody
else likes the personal crap you fill your desk with at work. That
"inspirational" picture of you and your mom climbing Mount McKinley is
trite and forgettable. Oh, and that picture of your girlfriend with the
lyrics to "Wonderwall" printed beneath it? Do you even know what that
song's about? Clearly not, because no one does.
And yet, somehow, this asinine behavior hacks your brain.
Having
control over one small, utterly inconsequential aspect of our lives
improves our productivity by 32 percent. Learning this is a real shot to
the nuts for your adolescent sense of rebellion. Faceless corporations
(man) can cram us into our upholstered prisons like sardines in a can,
but we'll still do their bidding as long as they give us a crayon to
color the wall with. The unvarnished truth is that our supposedly
indomitable spirits (man) can be domitabled with as little as a roll of
double-sided tape, some glitter, a color printer, and five minutes'
access to our Facebook photo albums.
62. You Can Feel Like You Had a Good Night's Sleep After Two Hours
It's called the Uberman Sleep Schedule,
and besides having a totally badass name, it's a way to get the maximum
amount of essential sleep for your body without wasting hours of
precious time you could be using to work or drink or farm for World of Warcraft
gold. The schedule consists of taking six 20- to 30-minute power naps
every four hours during the day. Of course, this new sleep pattern blows
donkey-dick to get used to, but it's a price you have to pay to
basically extend your waking life by several years.
By
day 10 or so, your brain will say, " FINE, we'll do it your way," and
will adapt to your new superhuman sleep schedule. When you sleep
normally, your body gets only about an hour and a half of REM sleep, the
kind of sleep that is thought to be the most important to keeping your
brain sharp. While other stages of sleep help your body to heal and
grow, the REM sleep is what makes you feel rested.
Of course, sleeping in a bed doesn't hurt, either.
The
first few days of adjusting are tough because your body isn't getting
ANY of this REM sleep, and your brain hates you for it. After the third
day, or so, your brain figures out that you mean business, and every
time you lie down for one of these naps, it dives directly into REM
sleep in an attempt to compensate for the deprivation. Do some quick
math and that's two full hours of REM sleep, while those who sleep
normally are only getting an hour and a half.
61. Sports Drinks Work (and You Don't Even Need to Drink Them)
Sports
drinks are a huge business -- Gatorade alone makes well over a billion
dollars a year. And the reason so many athletes swear by them is the
promise of increased performance, replacing all those vital nutrients
lost during exercise, just like the ads say.
"GIVE ME SIGHT BEYOND SIGHT!"
It
turns out, however, that all that electrolyte and rehydration
technology is nothing compared to the simple pleasure of having a bunch
of sugar in your mouth.
A study found that sports drinks work
because they activate the pleasure center of your brain. You don't even
have to drink them, just swishing some around in your mouth and
spitting it out has the same effect.
However, motor oil will not "unlock the power" like the bottle says.
The
carbohydrates in the drink stimulate receptors in your mouth that then
send your brain messages that things are all totally cool. Your brain,
in turn, becomes more active in the pleasure center, allowing you to
enjoy feeling the burn far longer than some idiot without a sugary
drink. It also stimulates the part of your brain in charge of movement
control. So not only will you be content while kicking your
water-drinking opponent's ass, you'll actually be kicking it harder.
60. Trick Your Brain into Thrift by Paying With Cash
Scientific
studies have found that people are more likely to buy something when
using a credit card instead of cash. The reason is because cash seems
more scarce to the general consumer, so it's a resource people try to
conserve, whereas credit does not come with the same psychological
barrier.
59. You Can Tell If She's Interested by Looking at Her Feet
Remember
back in high school when you were talking to that cute girl you really
liked, but you couldn't tell if she liked you back, and your fear of
rejection prevented you from expressing your feelings in any way apart
from night after night of tearful masturbation? Remember when you did
the same thing last week? Wouldn't asking someone out be so much easier
if you knew how they'd answer before you asked them?
Science to the rescue!
Experts will tell you it's all in the body language, but you know better. People -- and especially women -- are really, really good at feigning disinterest. Anything short of the woman outright grabbing your junk will be lost on most guys.
"I realized she was into me right around the time we started having sex."
But watch her feet.
Apparently,
people aren't as conscious of their foot movements as they are of other
parts of their body, and so their feet can unconsciously send messages
about themselves. They did a study at the University of Manchester on this, observinging subjects' foot movements in various social situations.
The angle of her heels says "I put out," but those knees say "not for you."
Specifically,
they found that if a woman moves her feet apart to adopt a more
open-legged stance, it generally means that she's into you. However, if
she finds you utterly repulsive, she will likely cross her legs or keep
them tucked underneath her body. We'll, uh, let you figure out the
symbolic meaning of those gestures.
58. Your Brain Can Be Tricked into Legal Hallucinations
Yes,
that's right, kids! Tell your dealer goodbye and worry no more about
winding up naked on the roof of an office building after a bad trip. Now
you can be stoned out of your mind by building a homemade deprivation
chamber out of some regular, completely harmless household objects.
You 'll need three things: a ping pong ball, a radio with headphones, and a red light.
Step 1: Turn the radio to a station with white noise (static) and put on your headphones.
Step 2: Cut the ping pong ball in half and tape each half over your eyes.
Step 3: Turn the red light so it's facing your eyes.
Step 4: Sit there for at least a half hour.
Step 5: Follow Ben Franklin and your new friend, Harold the unicorn, into the gumdrop forest, and live happily ever after.
How Does It Work?
It's called the Ganzfeld effect,
and it works by blocking out most of the signals that go to your brain.
It's the same kind of effect you get when looking into a soft light for
a while and lose vision, except on a larger scale.
The
sound of the white noise and the light from the outside of the ping
pong ball are eventually ignored by your brain. With all those signals
out of the picture, your brain has to create its own, and this is where
the hallucinations come in. We can't guarantee they won't involve, say,
the ghost of Lizzie Borden trying to hack off your scrotum with an ax,
but that's the risk you take, dammit.
57. You Can Dream Whatever You Want to Dream
Most
of you reading this have had a lucid dream before. Every once in a
while you wind up in a dream but somehow recognize it as a dream, and
you may have found yourself able to pretty much program the dream to
your specifications. While there are plenty of tips and tricks to make this happen on purpose,
we've narrowed it down to what seems like the most useful, so that you
can be riding dinosaurs with Gary Coleman in your sleep in no time:
Cowboy hat optional.
1. Keep a Dream Journal
As
soon as you wake up from a dream, write down every little thing you can
remember about it. Supposedly by writing it down, your brain recognizes
certain patterns that only occur in a dream (since most dreams are
immediately forgotten) and if they are on paper, you can recall them
easily.
2. Think about exactly what you
want to dream right before you fall asleep. Makes sense. For instance
you've probably fallen asleep watching MythBusters before and immediately dreamed you were flying through the air, using a giant version of Jamie's mustache as a hang glider.
3.
The best time to have a lucid dream is either right before you
regularly wake up, or right after. Studies have shown that more people
have lucid dreams when they take a nap shortly after they first wake up
in the morning.
So you can do all that, or if you are the lazy type, get yourself something like the NovaDreamer,
a device that detects when you've entered REM sleep and then makes a
noise that's supposed to be not quite enough to wake you up, but enough
to raise your awareness to, "Hey, this is totally a dream I'm having!"
levels.
Obviously the big difference
between a dream and real life is that if the Hamburglar came bursting
out of your refrigerator right now and started screaming at you in
Vietnamese, your first thought would be "This is a strange and unusual
event that is occurring right now, and I should question my
perceptions." If the same thing happens in a dream, you just go with it.
Yes, Mel Gibson is dressed like Colonel Sanders. No, this is not a dream.
In
a dream state, your mind mostly loses the ability to criticize anything
that's happening because dreaming just doesn't involve the critical
part of your brain. You're all worried that you're at work in your
underwear, and don't even blink at the fact that your boss is a dragon
who speaks in the voice of your old middle school gym coach.
But
if you change your mental state ever so slightly, that critical part of
your brain can keep functioning even while in dreamland.
56. You Can Reset Your Sleep Cycle With a Hunger Strike
Chances
are, when summer vacation or the holidays come around and you're given
time off work or school, your sleeping patterns falter a little bit ("a
little bit" is a phrase that here means "you play video games until the
'a.m.' and 'p.m.' dot on your alarm clock has completely lost its
meaning"). The thing is, you know you're going to be screwed once
the holidays are over and you have to go back to getting up at 6 or 7
a.m., and that you'll be a zombie at work or school for at least a week.
Sure, you could do the responsible thing and gradually set your alarm
earlier and earlier each day until it's just right, giving you a smooth
and healthy transition to work-life. Or, you could use one of your
body's cheat codes and readjust your sleep cycle.
Don't forget to compensate for the hunger madness.
You might know that the main way
our body regulates its biological clock (and circadian rhythm) is
through light. So when your brain is detecting light, it has your body
behave as it should in the daytime (higher energy, greater strength,
more bowel movements, etc.), and when the brain notices that the
environment is dark after an extended period of brightness, then it
imagines you're about to go to sleep, and it releases hormones (like
melatonin) that make you sleepy. What you might not have known is that
scientists recently found a second clock, and instead of depending on light, this one is food-based.
The food-clock desires this.
Imagine
you're a predator out hunting for food (and Jesse Ventura), but all the
regular animals you would eat are nowhere to be found. You spend the
entire day looking for food and find nothing. About 16 hours later your
brain starts freaking out. It knows that if you can't find food, the jig
will most certainly be up. So at this point, your brain doesn't give a
tinkerer's damn about sunlight and sleep cycles -- it just wants you to
find something to eat, and fast. You stay up well into the night
and eventually find some nocturnal prey, devouring it desperately. Your
brain (through the food-clock) makes a note of this time and declares it
to be your new biological morning.
The slaying of pizza rolls has set countless new biological mornings.
It
makes sense -- your brain is now under the impression that if you want
to survive, you can only go hunting at night. So it decides you should
sleep during the day (to conserve energy for the hunt) and boom, your
sleep-wake cycle has been reset. Congratulations! You've tricked
evolution!
55. Dehydration Tricks You into Feeling Hungry
Drink
more water! 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated, which can
trigger a false feeling of hunger. The more (inexpensive) tap water you
drink, the less apt you'll be to spend money on food and others
beverages.
54. Hand Gestures Can Manipulate Your Mind
We previously pointed out
that if you're right-handed, you instinctively prefer things that are
on your right, and vice versa. The theory is that, while we think with
our brains, we use our hands to interact with the world,
so the thinking part of your brain gets tricked into liking things that
happen to be within reach of the hand you prefer to use. Elsewhere, we mentioned that you're more likely to remember facts if you associate them with a hand gesture,
which is probably why some people are so animated with their hands when
trying to recount a story. But how far does this weird hand-brain
connection go? Could, say, other people use hand gestures to manipulate
you without you knowing it?
You already know that the answer is yes.
Let's
say you're an eyewitness to a bank heist. The cops come up to you and
ask you to describe the guy. The officer says, "Did he have a beard?"
And he does that thing that some people do, gesturing at his own chin as
if you somehow didn't know what a beard was and needed him to
physically demonstrate. And in that moment you think, "Yeah ... I
believe he did have a beard."
Guess what: That guy's hand gesture just programmed your memory.
The
University of Hertfordshire did a series of tests where they
interviewed participants about a video they had watched. While asking
questions, the researchers deliberately made misleading gestures, like
stroking their chin to suggest a beard or touching their wrist to
indicate a watch. The test subjects were three times more likely
to believe that the guy in the video had a beard if the interviewer
pretended to stroke his nonexistent goatee while asking about it. These
weren't mouth farts where you say "bearded" despite thinking "clean
shaven," either. The gesture actually brainwashed the subjects into honestly believing that the guy had a beard.
And
yes, when a politician or lawyer stands up and makes those hand
gestures to drive home his point (pointing at the audience, slapping his
palm with his fist), that totally works. There are detailed guides
on what exactly you should be doing with your hands if you want the
audience to buy what you're selling. That's why a president can't simply
say, "I've got your cruise missile right here" -- he needs to actually gesture toward his crotch to get the full effect.
53. Use Someone's Shoes to Read Their Personality Type
We're
not talking about the obvious here, the way goths and metalheads deal
in black boots, hippies have their sandals, and hipsters will tie their
grandmother's old curtains around their feet if it gives them an excuse
to look down on someone. According to science, the soled husks that
cover a stranger's feet are probably revealing details about how they
deal with other people.
A study by a pair of colleges found some peculiar trends
in our choice of shoes, but not what you might think. Subjects couldn't
deduce, say, political affiliation by looking at shoes, but could
deduce a shit-ton of extremely personal information, including
your potentially insecure, clingy behavior in close relationships. Some
examples, brought to you by science:
-Anxious, clingy people prefer new and well-maintained footwear to ease their bundle of nerves.
"Ah, better than a Xanax."
-People who wear practical shoes tend to be relatively agreeable.
-Calm,
collected folks seem to get a kick out of wearing shoes that look
uncomfortable (maybe to express the roaring ball of mayhem and agony
they're constantly hiding within?).
-Aggressive people tend to wear ankle boots, which seems to have no inherent logic at all ... until you realize that they're clearly subconsciously selecting their footwear for better kicking-stuff-angrily ergonomics.
"Oh yeah, that's a pair of Class 5 Coccyx Breakers."
If you're reading this and thinking, "Well, my
shoes don't say anything deep about my personality, I just picked them
because they were comfortable and cheap!" keep in mind that it's a
certain personality type who thinks that way. That's the point -- no
matter what logic you think you're following in your own head when you
step into your local mall's Shoes 'N' Shit store, you're still following
logic that makes sense to your personality type. Making that purchase
reveals that type to the world.
52. You Can Learn More While You Sleep
Say
you're tired of sleeping like a mere mortal and want to learn how to
turn those useless REM cycles into productivity cycles. A very minor
change in your schedule can let you use your sleep patterns to your
advantage, thus making you smarter.
No,
we're not talking about those scams where they have you put a tape
recorder under your pillow and let it teach you Spanish while you're
asleep. What scientists have found out is if you need to remember a
bunch of information (say, for a big exam), do NOT study right up until
time for the exam. Study at least 24 hours before, and sleep on it.
Note: "Sleep on it" is simply an expression. You can sleep in a bed.
They did a study at Harvard
that proved this technique works. Participants were separated into
three different groups after being shown images that they were told to
memorize. One of the groups was tested on the memorization after 20
minutes, the other after 12 hours and the last after 24 hours. You would
expect that the ones who were tested just 20 minutes later would do
best, but that would, of course, make a really shitty story.
No,
the participants who slept on it and had 24 hours for the information
to fester in their brain did the best on the test, while those who only
had 20 minutes did the worst.
Wasting your time, nerds, go to sleep.
How
is it possible that your brain works like leveling up in Dungeons and
Dragons? Scientists say the ability your brain has to retain information
works in three different ways: acquisition, consolidation, and recall.
While the first and last occur while you're awake, it's the middleman
that is important during sleep.
When you
sleep, your brain is constantly processing information that you couldn't
have processed with everything going on up there during the day. This
works to strengthen your neurological bonds in the brain. Think of it
like downloading something on a computer. When you go to download
something while your porn is up, it takes longer, right? Close up any
applications that are running and you have a smoother, quicker download.
Yeah, kind of like that ... maybe.
So does
this technique work with the "sleep two hours a day" system we
mentioned earlier? We're not sure anyone has tried it, but by our
calculations such a person would immediately gain mental superpowers,
possibly including telekinesis. Somebody in the comments try it and let
us know.
51. Drinking at Work Makes You Creative
Getting
drunk at work may have been the bee's knees in the Don Draper era, but
that was a simpler time, before we knew how bad cigarettes, alcoholism,
and recreational adultery were. We've learned a few things since the
'60s. Or we did for a while, and then we forgot them all whenMad Men debuted because they make it look so cool!
Here he is, doing the thing the article is about and looking like he's nervous about how clean his next fart is going to be.
As
much as we romanticize the behavior, there are all kinds of reasons
drinking during the work day would be bad for you. Foremost is the fact
that you'll be drunk afterward. Ever tried to get anything done while
you were drunk? And hey, you assholes who just said "I write all
my college papers drunk!" -- are you still under the wild delusion that
college is in any way representative of the real world? It isn't. You're
still a child; you can just drink now.
But anyway, in some very specific situations, getting kinda drunk at work will help you out.
In certain contexts, having a glass or two actually improves creativity (hold on a second ...)
There we go.
while
decreasing focus. It's all about finding a balance: Like I've pointed
out, allowing your mind to wander a little bit improves creativity,
because your thoughts explore new avenues and angles that you just can't
achieve by focusing. It's the same way a light bulb lights up more
areas than a flashlight, while the flashlight just makes one specific
area brighter.
But sadly, it looks like the
stiffs have won this fight: Job candidates who order alcoholic
beverages during interviews are seen as less intelligent, even if the interviewer is in the process of getting sloshed, meaning that all human resources reps are dicks and that the people who write for theJournal of Consumer Psychology have way more fun job interviews than you.
50. Your Gag Reflex Has an Off Switch
Turn off your Gag Reflex by making a fist with your left hand and squeezing your thumb.
49. You Can Tell How Much Someone Drinks From Their Eye Color
Picking
the blue-eyed guy was a bad move. It turns out, eye color is an amazing
indicator of how much alcohol a person can drink before it affects
them.
"I can't even get through my breakfast changing without a fifth of SoCo."
A study of thousands of white men
(all of them prisoners) found that for some reason, those with light
eye colors like blue, green, gray or hazel, can handle more alcohol than
men with dark eyes. And a totally different study of almost 2,000 women
found that the same held true for them.
"No, no. We're not alcoholics. We just both have green eyes."
Even
more interesting is the fact that this result was predicted before the
study. Because apparently brown-eyed folks are more sensitive to
medication and other stimuli, and that sensitivity is what prompts them
to stop when they've had enough. Blue-eyed people, on the other hand,
require more alcohol to get buzzed, so they develop a greater tolerance
for the stuff. And according to the study, the blue-eyed people are also
more likely to be alcohol abusers.
As for
what eye color has to do with alcohol tolerance, scientists are still on
the fence. One theory is that the amount of melanin in the eyes is
directly related to the amount of melanin insulating neurons in the
central nervous system, and that more melanin somehow translates to
quicker nerve transmissions. In any case, you might want to think again
before challenging someone with baby blues to a drinking contest.
48. Email Turns You Into a Liar
One
of the reasons it's difficult to lie to someone's face is that it's not
just the words you're saying that have to sound convincing. You have to
think about eye contact, body movements -- everything has to come
together to tell a believable lie. Because of this, psychologists have
always known that people are more likely to lie in a letter than
face-to-face.
But a recent study found that while you might fib with pen and paper you are almost guaranteed tolie over email.
Participants in the study were instructed to split $89 with a second
party. They were told the other participant would not know the amount
being split, and had to accept any amount offered. An incredible 92
percent of people using email lied about the amount of money they were
splitting. Only 64 percent of those writing it down did (although, 64
percent? We're just bad at being a species, aren't we?). On average, the
email users gave their partners $27 less than a fair split.
Person + Computer = Sociopath.
Not
only that, the email users actually felt justified in lying. It seems
that the act of merely staring at a computer screen is like injecting
your soul with Botox, removing all emotional investment and guilt about
what you type. It might be worth keeping that in mind the next time your
boss emails you to tell you how well he thought your presentation went.
47. You Can Tell if a Woman Has Had an Orgasm bt How She Walks
By the way she walks. Not joking.
Rascal-bound women remain as damnably incomprehensible as ever.
A
group of sexologists (which is apparently a thing) from the Universite
Catholique de Louvain in Belgium studied the connection between the way a
woman walks and her vaginal orgasm history. What else did you think
sexologists studied?
They gathered a group
of women -- half had never had vaginal orgasms, half had. And then, we
shit you not, the scientists had to guess which group each lady fell
into by the way she sashayed her stuff across the room.
"I don't know about you Dr. Stodgson, but I suddenly feel like this might be the most important study we've ever conducted."
And
here was the kicker: It worked. The sexologists could determine whether
or not the woman in question could have a vaginal orgasm with freaking 81.25 percent accuracy.
Now,
we caution you against trying this if you're not a trained sexologist
yourself -- we're not responsible for any injuries or incorrect
conclusions drawn. But the experts say women who were climaxing from the
inside had longer stride lengths, greater pelvic rotation and an
"absence of both flaccid and locked muscles." In other words, they had a
little shake in their hips, a little pep in their stride and didn't
look like they were clenching a tennis ball with their thigh muscles. A
loose but confident walk. Now you know, and you'll never, never
un-know.
46. Making Other People Schedule Around You Makes You More Productive
This
is the guy who stumbles into the office sometime in the afternoon with a
three-day beard and hangover shades. The dude who never comes in close
to on time and just assumes that everyone else will adjust to
compensate.
Everybody
has different body clocks. Not only does your natural wake-up time get
earlier as you grow older, but that rate is different for everyone -- so
keeping everyone on the same schedule makes about as much sense as
insisting that they're all named "Sven" to save money on name tags. It's
actually just basic common sense: If you let people work when their
body is ready for them to work instead of when their brain is screaming
at them to get some sleep, they'll work more efficiently and be in
better moods.
Scientists have found that
most people do their best thinking in the late morning, and asking
adults to focus between noon 4 p.m. is basically a fool's errand. People
start to get tired after lunch, and if they don't take time for a
siesta, their productivity plummets. A 2011 study found that students
who were asked to solve problems requiring novel thinking during
non-peak hours of the day performed worse on those tasks. Since everyone
hits those peak hours at slightly different times, people work best
when they can function according to their natural clocks.
45. Trick Yourself into Feeling the Impossible
Lay
flat on your stomach. Have a friend hold you up by your wrists. Keep
your arms straight. Let your head rest. Keep your body as relaxed as
possible. Stay in this position for 30 seconds. After 30 seconds, have
your friend slowly lower your arms to the floor. As your arms get
lowered, it'll feel like they go through the floor!
44. Wearing Red Helps You Win at Competitive Sports
We've already covered
how wearing red makes you more attractive to the opposite sex, but now
it looks like we might as well throw away any non-rose toned clothing
because it turns out it makes you more likely to win at sports too.
This man will humiliate you on the field and then take your girlfriend.
Two British researchers studied the results of the 2004 Olympics and found that the team or person wearing red was more likely to win in close matches -- and that's across a huge variety of team and individual sports, like soccer, tae kwon do, and wresting.
The
key, though, is close matches; if you were ranked 23rd and had to
wrestle the #1 guy in the world, no amount of red would save you.
No one's buying it, Cleveland.
But
in an even match-up, wearing red is a statistically significant factor
in winning. The researchers think the reason for this might not be all
that different from why red attracts us to people: Red equals dominance.
Obey.
We
see it in species of monkeys, too, where the males have red colorations
in their face and butts. The more dominant males tend to be much redder
then the ones lower down the hierarchy. In humans, our faces turn red
when we are all riled up, angry or ready for a fight. The association of
red uniforms with dominance and aggression may send subconscious
signals to an opponent that they are being really stupid and challenging
the alpha male.
43. Give People Candy to Make Them Nicer
Imagine
a likeable person. Pay particular attention to the qualities that make
people perceive her as "nice." You might describe her as helpful. Fun,
definitely. Honest when it counts, malleable enough to take the punches
while you run away from the MMA fighter you just drunkenly mooned. All
that goes with the territory. Perhaps, if you're feeling sappy enough,
you might even describe the person as "sweet."
Sweet.
That's a funny word in this context, now that we come to think of it.
There's nothing about nice people that makes them sweet, unless you go
out of your way to caramelize them. So what started this association
between "sweet" and "nice"? Their everyday behavior, apparently -- it
looks like munching on candy can turn a person into a regular good
Samaritan.
"Very well, cotton candy. I'll pack his chest wound with gauze, if you insist."
To
be clear, we're not talking about how giving somebody a candy bar will
put them in a better mood and thus make them more willing to do nice
things (although one experiment did find that, it's also kind of
obvious). No, they actually did five different studies
(the abstract of which hilariously points out that nice people indeed
rarely taste sweeter than others, thus gently alluding to another, far
darker research project behind this one) and found that a general
preference for candy means the person is also more likely to be
agreeable and do good deeds, just because. They were just nicer people
than the ones who, say, prefer potato chips instead of chocolate at
snack time.
42. If You Touch an Object, You Want it More
Really
persuasive people know that it's all about touch: the salesman or
politician is quick to pat you on the back or shake your hand; the
waitress knows that a touch on your arm gets a bigger tip. If the thing
they're selling is a physical product, they know they'd better let us
customers put our greasy mitts on it. This is why car salespeople are so
big on making you test drive the vehicle (they literally phrase the
technique as "The feel of the wheel will seal the deal").
Why?
Because in humans, touch is almost a form of goddamn mind control.
Whatever it is, if you touch it for a while, you'll become attached to
it.
"OK, I guess I'll keep it."
Not only are people more likely to buy something they've touched, but they're actually willing to pay more
-- this is why, if the product comes in a box, the store will try to
put a display model out that you can handle to your heart's content.
Even if you can't actually gain any information about the usefulness of
the product, it doesn't matter. Running your paws over an object makes
you feel connected to it, and can even give you a false sense of
ownership.
This is exactly how Hitler started out.
Oh,
and it also makes a difference how the object feels under our hands. We
don't just mean that we judge a new shirt based on how soft it is --
that sort of makes sense. We mean that one study showed that water in a
firm cup tasted better than water in a flimsy cup, regardless of the fact that it was the same water. Even when people were just told
about the firmer cup, they declared its water superior -- just because
the container felt better under their hands. Hey, do you think this is
why super-expensive Fiji water comes in thicker bottles that contain twice as much plastic? Or why Perrier still uses freaking glass?
If
you want to know what the future of touch-based brainwashing is, well,
it involves products that enjoy making you touch them. Sony tried this
with their QRIO robot -- a vaguely canine mecha-creature that recognizes
faces and responds to touch -- by letting it loose among a bunch of
2-year-olds. Usually, toddlers treat robots like regular toys, tossing
them around and using them as blunt weapons before quickly getting bored
with them. But QRIO is different -- it senses touch and gives little
giggles of pleasure. When it started doing that, the kids accepted it as a living being. Instead of throwing it around, the kids gently touched it, just like it was another child,
and even put a blanket over it when it "laid down for a nap." We're
thinking the first company that makes a cellphone that squeals with
pleasure every time you touch it is going to dominate the market.
41. Each Ear Is Better at Different Tasks
At
some point you've probably seen that spinning ballerina GIF floating
around online, the one that supposedly tells you whether you're
"left-brained" or "right-brained." We won't go into the details here,
but not only is the ballerina test bullshit, but the thing it's testing (that logical people rely on the left hemisphere and artistic people the right) is a fairly large over-simplification. In reality, both hemispheres work together for pretty much everything.
It takes a full brain to make us as gullible as we are.
However,
it is true that your two hemispheres aren't identical. In the case of
sound, it's long been known that your left hemisphere kicks ass at
deciphering verbal information like speech, and the right hemisphere
excels with tones and music. It is also known that your left brain
controls the right side of your body and vice versa. But because the
information between the hemispheres is shared (through the corpus
callosum -- yea, Latin), it shouldn't make much difference which ear you
use to listen to things, right?
Nope. Each ear hears in a different way, and you can use that to your advantage.
How? Tell Me!
It
turns out that because the left ear is always sending shit (music) to
the right hemisphere and the right ear is always sending shit (speech)
to the left hemisphere, the ears themselves have actually evolved in the way they process sounds.
Which means you're paying 50 percent too much for headphones.
As a result, your right ear is measurably better
at processing speech, and your left ear more so at tones and music.
Now, don't go expecting that turning your head to give the appropriate
ear will produce a surround sound digitally remastered version of what
you've normally been hearing, but there will be an improvement. This is
important to remember the next time you're sneaking through the air
vents of an evil corporation, or just trying to figure out whether that
is in fact a Peter Gabriel song you're hearing in the supermarket.
40. Fix Your Itchy Throat With a Finger
You can cure an itching throat by sratching your ears.
39. Music Can Return Your Lost Memories
Listening
to music engages many areas of the brain in both hemispheres, which is
why it can create brain activity other methods, like conversation,
can't. Another area it engages is the hippocampus, which would be a
hilarious name for a school for aquatic mammals but in reality is the
less impressive region of the brain which handles long-term memory
storage.
When you listen to music you know,
feelings associated with the song are returned by the hippocampus.
Sometimes the memories even manage to come along with the relevant
feelings, so hopefully no music was playing the first time anyone ever
kicked you in the junk. Even if memories aren't recovered, emotions and
attitudes are, allowing people who can't even remember who they are from
day to day or why they loathe the FOX network so much to at least laugh
and sing along with off key hopefuls on American Idol.
38. You Can Spot a Rich Person by How Distracted They are During Conversations
In 2009, two University of California psychologists performed a study on the relationship between nonverbal cues and socioeconomic status.
To do this, they placed participants in pairs and videotaped them
talking as they got to know each other. What they discovered was that
the richer person in the pair was more likely to display "disengagement"
behaviors, like fidgeting or doodling or playing with a damned pencil
while someone was trying to talk to them. The poorer of the two engaged
in not being a jerk behaviors, like nodding and smiling and actually listening to the other person.
Money is the root of all assholes.
Not
only could the researchers pick out which conversationalist had the
higher socioeconomic background, an entirely separate group of observers
could watch the tapes and pick the richies as well. The theory goes
that people of a higher socioeconomic status are less dependent on
others, due to their wealth and higher education. As such, they aren't
as invested in conversing with others, as they have no need for it.
"I'm good, thanks!"
If
the other person is acting that way and you know for a fact that
they're broke, well, maybe they just hate you. Sometimes the simplest
answer is the correct one.
37. Remember Long Lists With a "Memory Palace"
You're
able to find your way around because a whole lot of your mental
horsepower is devoted to spatial memory -- learning the layout of your
environment. And there is totally a way you can tap into it as a hack to
remember long lists. So-called memory champions have been doing it forever. They call it creating a memory palace.
Here's
how it works: You pick a familiar place that you know well and can
imagine without much problem -- the inside of your house, the layout of
your neighborhood, whatever. You then imagine yourself walking along a
specific route in that place and associate an item on your list with
each location.
"Shit, that reminds me -- I'm out of chloroform."
So
let's say you're trying to remember a long grocery list, and you choose
to use your neighborhood to mentally visualize it. You could imagine
the first item on your list -- condoms -- scattered willy-nilly along
your driveway. The next thing on your list might be beer -- you could
picture your neighbor passed out drunk on his lawn, pants down, if you
want. Next up is frozen pizza, so you picture pizza pies replacing all
the windows at your drunken neighbor's house. Let your imagination do
the hard work for you -- the more ridiculous/striking the image, the
easier it'll be to remember.
It all sounds
like a ridiculous extra step, but you soon realize how incredibly easy
it suddenly makes it to recite a list. You're simply forcing the spatial
memory part of your brain to help out. And you can start doing it at
any time -- the memory palace (or method of loci) memorization technique
isn't something that requires years of practice. In one 1968 study,
college students were asked to memorize a list of 40 items by
associating each item with a specific location around campus. Not only
were the students able to memorize an average of 38 of the 40 items, but
the next day they were able to name 34 of the original list (and that
was in 1968 -- imagine how much more they would have remembered if the
kids hadn't been on so much pot).
"Two. I can remember two things."
In another study,
German senior citizens were also asked to memorize a list of 40 words
by associating each word with Berlin landmarks. Before using the method,
they could only recall an average of three words. After associating the
German word for "father" with the Berlin zoo, for example, participants
could remember an average of 23 words from the list. Oh, and you don't
have to have one location for each list item, either. In yet another
study, subjects just took theirimaginary walk twice and were still able to remember 34 of the 40 items. Seriously, go try this.
36. Chewing Gum Is a Brain Meth
In
a study where subjects were given demanding cognitive tasks to perform
with or without gum, the people with gum performed better in every
single category except verbal fluency because, duh, their mouths were
full of gum.
Ew, no, don't take it out of your mouth, that's worse.
It
didn't matter if the gum had sugar in it, so scientists base this
finding on "mastication-induced arousal" (hee hee). Chewing jump-starts
your brain for a solid 20 minutes or so (the effect is short-lived,
sadly) and allows you to handle stress and distraction fa better. So
basically if everyone was chewing gum, no one would mind that everyone
was chewing gum. Problem solved!
35. Turn Your Hands into Reading Glasses
Trouble seeing something? Try making a pinhole with your fingertips and looking through it.
34. Car " Facial Expressions" Can Force You to Buy One
It's
easy to see it -- every car has two headlights (eyes), a grill (mouth)
and maybe something that looks like a nose. So, knowing we assign
emotions to objects, you'd think that most of us would pick the
happiest-looking cars we could find. Like we'd all be clamoring for
vintage Volkswagen Beetles.
After cleaning Lindsay Lohan's vomit off the back seats.
You'd
be wrong. When we drive, we're not out there to make friends, unless
you're a hippie, and then shouldn't you be on a bike or a donkey or
something? Nope, what we want to convey is toughness, speed, aggression.
So we want our cars to have the face of a monster. Or at least a mean
dude. Researchers found that lower, wider cars with a wide air intake
and angled or slit-like headlights give a picture of power. Not
sleepiness, as you'd expect, but power. And that's what drivers are
looking for when picking out new vehicles. At least, when picking out
certain kinds of vehicles.
33. Raise Your Eyebrown to Be More Creative
You
see, there are two different types of attention -- perceptual
attention, which is given to your physical experiences, and conceptual
attention, which is allotted to your mental processes. The two are
inextricably linked, like conjoined twins jumping rope with their
umbilical cord. If one speeds up or slows down, so does the other.
Likewise, if you increase your spectrum of perceptual attention (by
opening your eyes really wide, for example, or going to see one of those
panoramic documentaries at Epcot Center), it should kick-start your
brain into broadening its scope as well, allowing you to make all kinds
of creative connections that you wouldn't have been able to otherwise.
"And that's why my eyebrows insist upon destroying the sun. Hey, wait, where are you going?"
The
study tested this theory using two groups, one of which was asked to
raise their eyebrows, while the other was told to keep their brows
furrowed like a bunch of bitter old railroad tycoons in perpetual
disapproval of their daughters' common-folk husbands. The groups were
then asked to come up with a caption for an image of a dog lying on a
bed with a bagel in its mouth, because the really good science is only
made by crazy people.
Anyway, the group
with the raised eyebrows suggested things like "Betty the Beagle Beds a
Bagel," which, as you may have noticed, is a blazingly hilarious piece
of sexual innuendo. The narrowed-eyed group, however, offered baffling
captions, such as "Dog Who Breaks Rules," which isn't even a complete
sentence. It also mysteriously refers to some prohibitive legislation
governing dogs and the eating of breakfast food that, to our knowledge,
has never existed at any point in the history of civilization. The point
is, the first answer is clever and unobvious, while the second is lazy
to the point of being meaningless.
"Woman be flower head."
The
idea is that the group whose members had their eyebrows raised were
receiving a greater amount of perceptual attention that they were
subsequently able to translate into a greater amount of conceptual
attention, thereby enhancing their nonlinear thinking. The other group
was more or less squinting at the picture, which diminished their
perceptual attention, and the best they could manage creatively was
scribbling down some B.S. that sounded like the second half of a
knock-knock joke.
Hey, give it a shot - who
knows? If anyone sees you staring wide-eyed at your computer screen
like it's a doorway into a magic kingdom, they'll just assume you're
really into your work, or that you're having a stroke.
32. A Person's Eyes Can Clue You in on Their Political Views
And by "look" we literally mean "look," because eye contact is a great indicator of political beliefs.
The enlarged cornea means this person is extremely concerned with the deficit.
Researchers have
found that, during conversations, left-leaning people were more likely
to follow the other person's "eye cues" than conservatives. Let's say
you are having a conversation with someone and you suddenly take your
gaze off them to look at something slightly to the right, say a cute
person or a passing zebra. Liberals are more likely to follow your gaze
and look as well, even if what you are looking at has no bearing on the
conversation. If you look away again, they will follow your gaze again,
and so on and so on, like two little puppies distracted by shiny passing
balloons.
Statistically speaking, about half of you just glanced up at the ceiling.
Conservatives
are almost never going to follow your gaze, but will continue looking
straight at you, like robots. Those conducting the study speculated that
conservatives held their gaze because, no lie, they don't like being told what to do.
31. Use Someone's Facial Symmetry to Predict Their Wealth and Leadership Potential
While
a good gene pool certainly helps, throwing boxcars in the genetic
crapshoot is only the beginning of the road to facial symmetry. The really
important part comes in the form of your conditions of development.
When everything -- including tobacco smoke, childhood nutrition,
socioeconomic status, and illnesses -- can shape the way your face looks for the worse, your best bet for a mug that doesn't break mirrors is plain and simple: wealthy parents.
"Here you go, kid -- easy mode!"
Don't blame us, we've got the research to back it up:
People with symmetrical faces generally have privileged childhoods, and
therefore stand a greater chance of being wealthy themselves. Yes, even
without going under the knife, the easiest road to beauty remains a
well-endowed bank account.
But let's say
they grew up underprivileged and end up with one of those plain,
ordinary asymmetrical mugs. They have neither trust funds nor a perfect
smile to rely on -- it's their guts and personality that matter now.
What's more, just because they're not as pretty as those Symmetrical
dicks, people expect them to do worse in life.
That, incidentally, is what makes them the most effective leaders there are.
"I've seen some shit. And now I mean to run it."
Yep,
the never-ending stream of tiny struggles that a symmetrically featured
person will never face thanks to his angelic looks and padded wallet is
custom made to turn a person's asymmetrical melon into a bona fide, super-effective leader,
scientifically giving him an easy 20 percent edge as opposed to groups
under Symmetrical leadership. Of course, having an asymmetrical face
doesn't mean that somebody is automatically a Winston Churchill. It just
means that they have the tools to become one. So the dude at the bar
with the burns down one side of his face -- don't immediately put him in
charge of your multinational corporation.
30. Body Language Can Hack Your Bartender's Mind
Scientists
have identified they key elements of body language that can increase
your chances of being served before everyone else. The tactic with the
greatest success was standing squarely to the bar and looking directly
at the barman as they moved around. While the findings might seem fairly
obvious, the researchers, based at the Bielefeld University in German.
Conducted the work to help them develop a robotic bar tender.
29. Retain Information by Spacing Out the Reminders
There
is a measurable process by which your brain drops information, a
"forgetting curve." If you want information to stick, there's a specific
hack you can do to work around it. It takes a bit more practice than
the memory palace thing above, but if your job or degree depends on it,
it's worth it. Basically, it's a matter of figuring out the rate at
which your brain forgets things and adapting to it. They call it spaced repetition, and here's an animated gif showing off the simplest form:
There you go. You are now a memory master.
So
let's say you're trying to learn Spanish, and you're going to have a
big final on it in four months. The most rudimentary way to practice
spaced repetition is to put the words you need to learn on note cards
with the English on the front and the Spanish on the back (flash cards,
basically) and get three boxes (or create three piles, if you don't have
any boxes sitting around) marked:
1. Every Day
2. Every Week
3. Once a Month
The
labels tell you how often you're going to look at the flash cards.
"What?" you say, "I don't got time to be studying this shit every day!
Besides, I know I can hold this stuff in my brain longer than that!"
Right, you probably can. This method will tell you exactly how long.
That's the point: to arrive at the exact bare minimum amount of time you need to study.
"Well, maybe we can make an exception just this time and study for a couple more hours."
So,
the first time you study, yes, you drill yourself with all of the flash
cards. The ones you get right you promote to the Every Week pile. Ones
you get wrong go in the Every Day pile. The next day you try it again,
but now you've got a smaller pile. The next day, it will be smaller
still. A week later, you'll try the Every Week pile again, and the ones
you get right you stuff into the Once a Month pile. You're just
filtering this shit right on down the line, giving yourself less and
less to do.
A month later, you go through
the Once a Month pile to make sure you remember it. The stuff you've
forgotten goes into the weekly rotation again. See what you're doing?
You're figuring out the exact rate at which this stuff falls out of your
brain. Breezing through that monthly box? Great, make it every two
months. The spans of time are flexible (conversely, if you have an exam
or presentation in two weeks, you can shorten the whole process - make
your three piles Daily, Every Other Day, Every Three Days).
28. Music Can Boost Your Immune System
Music,
like Jurassic Park's raptors, doesn't just attack from one side. That
brings out a multi-pronged assault. To start, music reduces stress by
reducing cortisol levels, a chemical in your brain that causes you to
feel stress in the first place. Jazz, bluegrass and soft rock have been
found to be especially effective at reducing stress and increasing
health because of their similar musical qualities (that quality being
that you don't listen to any of them).
If
you're wondering if your favorite music is helping your health, a good
question to ask is, "Does this music make me want to riot?" If you
answered yes, it's not an optimal medicine. Likewise, if your favorite
musician's last name is Cyrus you're probably dooming yourself to a life
of erectile dysfunction and diabetes.
In
addition to simply lowering stress levels, music also raises immune
markers in your system, creating more antibodies to fight disease.
Ironically, listening to Amy Winehouse could make you immune to all the
potential diseases you'd be exposed to if you met Amy Winehouse. This
effect is compounding: Over time, the body can learn to recognize
certain types of music (particularly choir or classical music) as immune
boosting, continuing the improvement of the immune system. As an added
bonus, if you listen to choir music on a regular basis you're almost
guaranteed to be immune to STDs as the odds of you ever having sex are
quite slim.
27. Repetition Doesn't Work for Reading, but it Does for Exam Questions
Rereading your notes does not count as studying, even if it is the easiest way to technically study while watching Mad Men. Also, you're ruining Mad Men. Watch Mad Men,
and then set aside time to actually engage with the material. If you're
in science or engineering, do problems. If you're in history, write out
key elements of a period in a paragraph, or try to teach the chapters
you've read to your lazy roommate who didn't read them, and have him try
to teach you the ones he read.
If you're
in English lit, put down the play you already read, and write a one page
essay discussing how Hamlet was the greatest pussy of all time. Do something, anything, which tests your knowledge or makes you actually think, then use your notes to find out what you'd forgotten. Then do the problem again. Instead of sitting and reconfirming, "Yep, I sure can read this language all right!"
You've surely earned a B.A. in Cracked Appreciation by now.
Repetition
is a dumb idea when it comes to reading, but it's the only real way to
prepare for an exam. Every year millions of students do their first
exam-style problem in the exam hall, and if there's one thing we learned
from college it's that the first time you do anything important, you
suck at it. Even if you suck at it.
"I wish he'd study a little harder. And not fall asleep during the first question."
Odds
are your course wasn't created this term. They've been asking the same
questions for years, and the only reason they even pretend to change the
wording is because they'll lose their accreditation if they don't. Exam
banks, older students, just Googling your course code and the word
"exam," there's no excuse for not practicing what you actually have to
do. Many students think of preparing for exams like Dragon Ball Z:
You focus and concentrate all sorts of power with endless text for
weeks, then fire it all out in one perfect blast. But exams are just
like everything else. You get good at things by doing them as many times
as possible. Which is also most students' real plan in college anyway.
26. Hack Your Feet With Conflicting Motions
Firstly,
lift your right foot a few inches off the floor and begin to move it in
a clock wise direction. Now, draw the number 6 in the air with your
Right index finger. Your foot will turn in an anticlockwise direction
without you having any choice in the matter!
This
is because the left side of your brain, which controls the right side
of your body, is responsible for rhythm and timing. The left side of
your brain cannot deal with operating two opposite movements at the same
time and so it combines them into a single motion.
25. Your Sense of Touch Hacks Your Brain
Of
our five senses, the one we pay the least attention to, and science
studies the least, is touch. Yet recent experiments indicate that we may
be vastly underrating the first sense we develop. Everything from the feel of the chair you sit on to what you're holding can influence your behavior and the decisions you make.
Imagine yourself touching this. You'll be kinder in the comments.
Over
a series of studies, scientists found that they could easily manipulate
people's feelings and perceptions based on nothing more than what the
subjects were touching. Holding heavier objects, for instance, made men
think more seriously about things, which in turn made them more likely
to donate money to charity if asked. Men holding lighter objects were
less likely to donate to charitable causes. People handling rough
objects were more likely to see neutral social situations in a bad
light, saying that other people were obviously in a bad mood. That means
that the answer to arguably the most frequently asked question over the
course of human history -- "What the fuck is your problem?" -- might be as simple as "The tag on this new underwear is digging into my ass."
He killed millions. But in his defense, that shirt looks wicked itchy.
Perhaps
the most shocking find was that your hands didn't have to be the things
doing the touching. People who sat in hard chairs were more likely to
maintain a hard line in negotiations and were less receptive to their
partner's way of thinking. So watch out for that next time you try to
convince your boss you need a raise. If instead of a chair she offers
you a pile of ducklings to sit on, you're basically screwed. After all,
to be truly effective, ass kissing probably needs to be taken in new,
horrifically literal directions.
24. Music Changes Your Drinking Habits
Did you know you can make a person buy more expensive wine just by playing classical music?Experiments prove it.
It makes people feel like they're in a wine commercial or in a movie
depicting refined, snooty rich people. OK, that one sort of makes sense
-- we doubt anyone ever drank Wild Irish Rose while listening to
Vivaldi.
But in another blind study,
different types of music playing in the background caused drinkers to
change how they'd described the drinks they already had. Laid-back music
led people to rate drinks as "mellow," and upbeat music resulted in
more people calling their drinks "refreshing." Even stranger, in another
study researchers placed German and French wines in supermarkets, with
small flags next to each display so customers could tell which countries
they came from. They then played some unobtrusive international music
in the background. When German music was played, the percentage of
German sales rose, and vice versa.
Listening to this would inspire us to drink, too.
This wasn't because customers thought to themselves, Ah! Germany! I will celebrate the Fatherland with some nice wine!
Questionnaires showed that customers couldn't recall what type of music
was playing and thought they'd chosen a particular wine simply because they'd felt like it.
The people selling you the drinks know all of this stuff -- or at least, the successful ones do. We'vepointed out before
that bars and nightclubs often play fast music to increase
alcohol-based profit. But other establishments, particularly upscale
restaurants, prefer slow, relaxing music, which, believe it or not, can also
make you drink more. The tempo of music is linked to your body's
arousal level, or the "speed" at which your nervous system operates.
Fast music heightens arousal (heh), so patrons will do everything more
quickly, including eating and drinking and leaving their infant by the
salad bar. Which is good for a restaurant owner if he's just concerned
with getting you out the door so he can serve more (and presumably
better) people.
"Here's the check. You have exactly seven minutes to fuck off."
On
the other hand, slower music means that you eat at a more leisurely
pace. Maybe you'll even stay to chat with your companions after you're
done with your meal. All this time passing means you're likely to buy
more drinks every time the waiter comes around to ask, and at a
restaurant that's charging $70 a bottle, that makes up for any lost
table space.
Some restaurants go as far as to purchase a personalized selection of songs
specially designed by "sound branding" companies, which select songs
based on whatever tempo or atmosphere the restaurant is aiming to
achieve.
23. Write Things to Remember Them (Even if You Don't Read Them Later)
The act of handwriting actually engages neural activity that you don't get by hammering on a keyboard. During an experiment at Indiana University,
preschool kids who were learning the alphabet were separated into two
groups. The first group was shown letters and told what they were, while
the second group had the additional task of practicing writing the
letters. When the kids were put into a "spaceship" (an MRI machine), the
brains from the writing group lit up like somebody had crammed a road
flare into their ears. Their neural activity not only was more enhanced,
it was more "adult-like," which we presume means they later asked
researchers to check their cholesterol levels while they were there.
"I'm sorry, but you only have two weeks to live. Hahaha! Just a little joke we like to tell the kids."
In
other words, it seems to be the same principle as the memory palace
thing above -- forcing another part of your brain into the action to
help out with memorization. We invented keyboards because typing is way
easier and faster than writing, but making it faster means we're losing
handwriting's unique ability to imprint information in our brain. So
those flash cards we had you make above? Get a pen and write that shit
out instead of printing it off your computer. Watch your score improve.
A
2008 study proved that this works especially well when you're doing
something that involves learning unfamiliar characters, like some
computer languages, or sheet music, or Japanese. Again, making your
fingers draw out the shape engages a completely different part of your
brain than if you're just staring at it on a screen and saying,
"Remember this, goddamnit!"
22. Looking at an Apple Logo Makes You Think Differently
There's
nothing magical about the logo itself, and even Apple fans wouldn't
claim that their devices have mystical brain-boosting powers. But,
for about 30 straight years, Apple has been marketing their products as
the tools of eccentric, outside-the-box thinkers (people who "think
different," in fact). And advertising works. So today, if you mentally
picture a bunch of artsy eccentric types working in a room, you're not
picturing them with a bunch of Dells. You're picturing a room full of
glowing white Apple silhouettes. You just can't help but make that
association.
"Bow down and worship your ... creative ... creator? Crap, I'm looking at the wrong side, hold on."
So, according to a paper from the Journal of Consumer Research, one way to keep your nonlinear-thinking muscles well-oiled and flexing like the cast of Predator might be to simply look at the Apple logo.
Fortunately, odds are there's one within your field of vision this very
moment. Otherwise you may need to head to a coffee shop to get this one
to work.
The study itself was originally
based on the idea that people assign specific human traits to various
corporate logos -- the McDonald's "M" seems warm and friendly, the
Walmart brand is cold and impassive. All of this is based on how we view
these companies in the culture, due to their relentless ad campaigns,
or whatever other reason. So the researchers found that when people are
"primed" with certain logos, it puts them in a certain frame of mind.
And in the case of Apple, test subjects experienced an increase in both
creativity and ingenuity just from being exposed to the company's
half-eaten-fruit bannerman.
"What about a stick-shaped pinata? You could use it to hit other pinatas and get double the candy!"
The
research was conducted with 341 university students split into two
groups, with one group being shown a series of subliminal Apple logos
and the other being shown the logo for IBM. Each group was then tasked
with listing as many unusual uses for a brick as they could think of,
because if you're going to test a person's ingenuity, you might as well
give them an object with precisely one non-bludgeoning function.
Sure
enough, the study found that the Apple group was able to come up with
more uses for the brick than the IBM group, all because of the feelings
of technomancing discovery the Apple logo had instilled within them. So
if your boss happens to walk by your desk and see you staring intently
at your iPhone, you can tell him or her that you are busy stoking the
roaring fires of innovation without a shred of irony.
21. Trick Your Own Eyes by Burning Out Colors
Stare at the white dot for sixty seconds, without blinking or looking away, then look a plain white surface.
What
you're seeing is because your color perception is based on colors
pairs. Only one half of the color pair can be seen at the time.
20. Working at the Worst Times of Day With the Worst People Makes You Smarter
When
it comes to solving problems, we like to think we know how to get the
best results out of ourselves. We know if we're morning people or not,
and the types of people we work well with. When we're in college, we
choose our class schedules around the time of day our brains work best,
and pick out our own study groups based on the unique blend of
introverts, extroverts, and Asians that we know will complement us best.
In the professional world, the more success you achieve, the more
freedom you get to choose who you work with and when.
Well, science is here to do what science does best and tell us that we're doing it all wrong. Aswe've covered briefly before,
you are actually way better at solving problems that require creativity
and insight if you work on them during the time of day when you think
you're at your worst. When you're telling everyone not to bother
talking to you until you've had another cup of coffee, it turns out your
mind is at its most brilliant.
"4 p.m. already? Just give me a little more time -- I can't do anything at all before six."
"Wait, pickles with hamburgers stuffed in the middle!"
We're
also pretty bad at judging how well we're working within a group --
studies found that people were worse at solving problems in groups with
those that they felt most comfortable. Even weirder, the groups that had
a merry old time fucking up the problem they were supposed to be
solving had no idea. According to the study, "The teams that felt they worked least effectively together were ironically the top performers."
This
flies in the face of everything we believe about how things get
accomplished. We think that great teams work extraordinarily well
together and experience success, and the good times keep on rolling.
Whenever a great band, team, or company looks back on the time they were
kicking the world's ass, they usually describe it as magic. It turns
out there's a reason they don't describe it as fun.
19. Get the Satifaction of Shopping Without Spending Money
Dopamine.
Sweet, sweet dopamine. This is the stuff your brain produces in
response to sex, recreational drugs, or a really good cheeseburger. It
serves all kinds of functions
related to behavior, cognition, movement, and other important things
like keeping the drool inside your mouth and lactating. Can't forget
lactating.
More importantly, dopamine is
also the gatekeeper to rewards and punishments, a system it uses to
motivate us to, among other things, explore, learn and acquire new
stuff.
So not only does shopping satisfy the "new stuff" need but research shows
the feeling intensifies when you visit a new store or go out of town --
for example, shoppers are more likely to buy something expensive and
stupid when they're on vacation. Not for the expensive and stupid thing,
remember, but for our dark master, dopamine.
Otherwise known as "the only reason life isn't constantly horrible".
There is a way to beat the system; it's actually the anticipation of the purchase that gives you the fix,
not the purchase itself (although simple window shopping isn't enough).
Monitor the finer points of the return policies at every store like a
corporate lawyer, and you can beat the system: all of the satisfaction
of an actual shopping binge without any of the junk you never use.
18. Make Hand Gestures to Better Visualize Your Problems
We're not suggesting that you start juggling bean bags or doing card tricks at your desk (although that would make you irresistible
to your co-workers), but the mere act of using your hands to represent
different aspects of a problem can help your mind separate and organize
ideas. It's the difference between merely describing how you'd, say,
perform a chokehold on a victim, versus actually getting up and
demonstrating it. It just helps you visualize the idea -- and the more
complex the idea, the more help you need visualizing it.
"Oh, wait, I get it. You're chopping mattress prices in half because you're insane!"
And
it helps to use both hands -- the above study examined a group of
people who were presented with a series of common objects and asked to
come up with unusual new ways the objects could be put to use, such as
using a coin as a makeshift flat head screwdriver or, say, turning a bra
into a slingshot. Some people were instructed to make gestures with
both hands while they came up with their answers, whereas the others
were told to use only one.
The group that
made dual-handed gestures provided the most inventive responses, which
makes sense when you consider that there are only so many gestures you
can make with a single hand. But it's surprising that limiting the
ability to gesture actually prevented the rest from coming up with ideas
... and that you might be stifling your brain by sitting there with
your left hand on your chin and your right on the mouse.
17. Control Anger by Using Your Less - Dominant Hand
This one comes from the University of New South Wales,
who found the perfect anger-management trick, and it wasn't cool jazz
music or playful kittens wearing sunglasses. People who had anger issues
were asked to spend two weeks using their non-dominant hand for
anything that wouldn't endanger anyone: opening and slamming doors,
writing hate mail, pouring coffee, and other dirty activities that are
now crossing your mind. After two weeks, the subjects could control
their temper tantrums better, even when other participants deliberately
insulted them to get a reaction.
Why would
this possibly work? Well, looking at angry people under brain scans
shows that outbursts are less about too much anger and more about
depleted self-control. That's both good news and bad news. The bad news
is that self-control is a finite thing, and you can run out of it. The
good news is that it's a physical mechanism of how your brain works, and
you can strengthen it (or hack it into working better).
"Fudge you, mother lover!"
Now,
you'd assume that the only way to do that would be some kind of
meditation or long classes in anger management. Or maybe to pay somebody
to make an annoying noise in your ear for hours at a time and slowly
decreasing the frequency with which you punch them in the head. But it
turns out it doesn't take anything like that -- just asking these people
to use their clumsy hand to do everyday tasks forced them to deal with
hundreds of tiny, totally manageable moments of frustration. But that
was enough to make them somewhat immune to it.
So,
when things got ugly, suddenly they found that the walls around their
internal anger demon were stronger. And it's probably also calming to
know that if things get so bad that a gunfight breaks out, you're now
capable of dual-wielding that shit.
16. Your Name Determines What You Buy and Do, and You Need to Know
For instance, your name also affects your political stance by subtly altering your voting behavior: In the 2000 election,
people whose last names started with a B were more likely to vote for
Bush, while Al Gore profited from the G people. But that's just all
those misinformed yokels who vote in elections, right? Aren't half those
people just flipping a coin anyway? Well, you find it among investors
on Wall Street, too -- the name-letter effect scoffs at your puny
efforts to look into actual profitability, gently nudging you toward
companies that sound similar to your name (like if your name is Michel,
you're more likely to purchase Michelin).
"I don't know about this, Stealy Dan."
Looking for a job? The company you prefer might just share initials with you, and the first letter of your name can determine your career path.
There is a statistical overabundance of dentists whose first names
start with D and lawyers with names like Larry and Laura. What the hell?
Are people just ... stupid?
The theory is
that this is all because our brains are selfish dicks that think the
bits of the alphabet that start up our names are somehow better letters. Some psychologists believe it's linked to a phenomenon called implicit egotism: We respond more favorably to anything that reminds us of ourselves. No matter how illogical and arbitrary.
15. Someone's Hands and Hair Give Clues to Their Sexuality
Look at their hands and hair.
We've previously mentioned
one indicator of likely homosexuality -- the digit ratio theory. It
suggests that the proportion of the length of your ring finger to your
index finger is influenced by the amount of testosterone you were
exposed to in the womb. Which is why men and women usually have totally
different finger ratios; most men have longer ring fingers than pointer
fingers, and most women's pointers and ring fingers are pretty close to
the same length.
But what if all of your fingers are ring fingers?
So there are some studies
that suggest a reversal of the typical male/female finger lengths is
one good indicator of sexuality. In other words, if a guy's index
fingers and ring fingers are pretty much the same size, he might be gay.
Or if a lady's ring finger is a lot longer than her pointer, she might
be gay. Though, good luck taking those measurements without pretending
to be a gypsy fortune teller.
Here's an easier one: see which hand they write with. Studies have suggested that homosexuals of both genders are 50 percent more likely to be left-handed than heterosexuals.
"So that's why she didn't respond to my advances."
Lastly, look at their hair. Specifically, look at the direction in which their hair spirals. A study of thehair whorls of 50 gay men
showed that 23 percent had a counterclockwise whorl, as opposed to the
much more common clockwise whorl. Among the total population, only
around eight percent have counterclockwise whorls. Though, once again,
we'd love to hear what cover story you come up with to explain to the
dude why you're running your fingers through his hair and studying how
it lays. Maybe tell him you found a tick or something.
14. Size Matters (for Pain Management)
Look at your boo - boo through binoculars backwards.
13. Boost Your Immune System ( by Looking at Pictures)
Your
brain manages everything, including your immune system. And we already
know that seeing certain images can trigger physical responses in the
body -- some pictures make us salivate, while others do downtown
business on our private parts (boners). Well, when you see sick people,
your body beefs up its defenses.
Scientists from the University of British Columbia
showed students a 10-minute slideshow of sick people to measure their
immune system's responses. So for 10 solid minutes, test subjects looked
at images of people with rashes, bad coughs, and those weird booster
shot scars you see on the middle-aged. What they discovered was that
after the sick reel, the participants' white blood cells went into
overdrive and began to produce interleukin-6 (IL-6), the same kind of protein a body would produce to fight off infection or combat burns.
"It says you're a piece of shit. Hmm. I don't need technology to show me that."
And
if you're wondering if the triggered immune system was just a general
response to stress, the answer is not really. While the participants
certainly weren't held at gunpoint, there was a group who got the
opportunity to look at pictures of people pointing guns at them, which
netted a negligible 6 percent increase in IL-6. Looking at sickies, on the other hand, resulted in a 23 percent increase.
From
an evolutionary standpoint, this sort of makes sense -- if you see your
cave brothers and sisters spilling their guts all over the place or
falling victim to the prehistoric flu, your body has to work a little
harder to avoid catching the same illness and dropping dead. So your
doctor is kind of screwing you by filling the waiting room with pictures
of calming landscapes and clowns. If he or she wanted to beef up your
defenses, the walls would be full of oozing sores.
12. Singing Stops You From Psyching Yourself Out
Research indicates
that doing anything that your brain also controls (singing or humming)
preoccupies your mind from the task at hand and will keep those pathways
from becoming over active. This in turn keeps your working memory from
shutting down and prevents you from choking. It's essentially just
distracting your conscious mind long enough that your muscle memory can
finish the job.
This man's catchy tunes could save your life.
Golfers
consistently use a variation of this strategy to avoid psyching
themselves out. They will count down from 10 while putting to keep their
mind from over analyzing the situation. You probably participated in
group song that time you served on the chain gang. Regardless of the
activity, as long as you don't mind mouthing lyrics on the free-throw
line or humming at the plate then it turns out providing your own
soundtrack can actually help your game.
11. Analyzing Your Thoughts Too Hard Can Change Your Opinions for the Worse
Have you ever gotten talked out of liking something? Maybe you saw The Dark Knight Rises
in the theater and had a great time, but the next day you started
talking to your movie connoisseur friends and they pointed out all of
the plot holes ("When did Batman have time to paint his logo on the
bridge?!"). Over time, it gets to where you can't even admit to yourself that you enjoyed it. Even when you think back to your experience in the theater, all you're thinking about is the plot holes.
You
might convince yourself that thinking about the subject led you to the
"right" opinion, but studies show that you can just as easily be steered
from a correct opinion to a wrong one.
"After further consideration, I've decided that I will have sex with the vacuum cleaner."
Researchers
tested this with a couple of experiments where subjects were asked to
offer an opinion on things like which college course they preferred or
which brand of jam tasted better. The catch was that some of the
participants were asked to simply taste or sample the thing and move on,
while others were asked to really think about their decision before making it official. The subjects who mulled over their opinions were way less in line with the opinions of experts than the others. The more they thought about it, the more wrong they became. How is this possible?
Well, when you're forced to think through or express why
you like something, you're immediately biased toward opinions that you
can actually explain or verbalize. In other words, you may taste five
jams and decide that No. 4 just tasted better, because in that moment
your senses were taking in a thousand different factors you weren't
consciously thinking about. But when pressured to actually explain in
detail which one you liked best, you're looking for easily quantifiable
things -- suddenly you're talking about how No. 2 had more berries, or
how No. 1 had better color. In reality, neither of those things actually
affected your enjoyment. You're just trying to make it sound like you
made your decision based on an easily explainable chain of logic when in
reality your tongue had it right all along.
10. Music Makes You a Better Communicator
Research shows that people who have studied music actually have brains wired differently than non-musicians.
This rewiring makes them better able to express emotions they are
feeling, but it also makes them more able to understand the emotions
others express. Music is very emotional, and people wired to understand
those subtle emotional changes can also detect them in the vocal tones
of someone talking. The emotion of the music translates to knowing when
your boss is secretly mad or your mother is secretly disappointed.
Let's be honest -- her disappointment has never been a secret.
The
sooner you start learning music, the more pronounced this re-wiring is.
Scientists think that teaching children music might help kids with
autism better understand vocal cues and encode speech. The fact that
this brain re-wiring helps them tune out background noise could also
help kids stay focused in noisy classrooms. It is also something that
gets better the more you play, so sticking to your piano lessons now
could lead to a powerful advantage in your future dating world.
9. Mint Is a Smartdrug
The smell of mint counters fatique and enhances focus during stressful tasks.
8. Doodling With Smooth, Looping Lines Helps You Think
You've
probably seen people who, when hunched over a notepad and trying to
force an idea, will start lazily doodling smiley faces or spirals in the
margins. It probably just looks like a sad physical manifestation of
their boredom and/or lack of any useful ideas, but they may be
jump-starting their brain. It's not just aimless doodling that does it
-- the success depends on what they draw, according to researchers at
Tufts and Stanford universities, who found that drawing "fluid" designs can help abstract thinking.
They
gathered together 30 subjects and divided them into two groups -- one
group was made to trace a bunch of jagged lines, while the other group
drew a single elegant, looping strand.
They they were forced to eat them.
Following
the tracing session (but presumably before snacks and nap time), each
group was given a creative-thinking task. For instance, they were given a
set of "exemplars," which are words that exemplify certain categories
-- "triceratops" would be a strong exemplar of the category "dinosaurs,"
but not so much of the category "college football coaches." The
researchers then asked the groups to assign each exemplar to a category,
and found that the group that had engaged in fluid movement prior to
the task (drawing the looping line) was linking weak exemplars to
completely unrelated categories, such as insisting that "camels" are an
acceptable example of "vehicles."
"The only way over that ridge is to ramp it. Where's your nitrous switch?"
The
point is, the group that was coming up with the most abstract and
inventive answers was the one that had done the drawing with the most
fluid, uninterrupted movements. The other group did the bare minimum,
providing only boring and obvious answers until they were presumably
asked to leave before further sabotaging everyone else's creativity.
The
theory is that it's more about the hand motion than the drawings -- the
brain likes fluid, continuous movements rather than abrupt, rapidly
shifting ones full of right angles and sharp corners. Whether it's just
more relaxing, or it somehow makes the brain more "fluid" in its
thinking, it just seems to open up your creativity.
7. Drinking Coffee Before a Nap Recharges Your Body
Researchers found that a cup of coffee followed by an immediate 15-minute nap is a notably more effective
method of staying awake and alert for longer than either coffee or a
nap alone. Which is a bit odd when you think about it, since you'd
expect the caffeine to keep you awake, leaving you teetering on the edge
of falling asleep but not quite going over (this is known in the
scientific community as the Edward Norton-Brad Pitt boundary). But the
trick to the "caffeine nap" is that caffeine doesn't act immediately --
it takes about 45 minutes to be completely ingested, but the effect of
the drug kicks in after only 15 minutes.
Which is why we recommend injecting grizzly bear adrenaline into your first cup of the morning.
See, what caffeine actually does
is block your brain's ability to respond to adenosine, a chemical that
builds up in your bloodstream the longer you're awake. The more
adenosine you have in your body, the more your brain tries to get you to
sleep. So by drinking coffee (or soda or a nice can of BAWLS)
and then diving directly into bed, you can sleep for 15 minutes and get
the regular restorative effects of a nap. By the time you wake up, the
caffeine you've ingested is swimming in your bloodstream and dulling the
effects of adenosine, stabbing your tiredness in the face.
6. "Priming" Can Let You Play Human Beings Like Puppets
The idea behind the flowers is that, as we've touched on elsewhere,
hitting you with a product that is highly perishable yet fresh will
"prime" you into thinking of freshness, and that you will carry that
"freshness" mindset with you all the way back to the discount meat case.
It sounds like bullshit -- humans don't connect completely unrelated
ideas like that, right? Yet it's confirmed pretty much every time they
test it.
Sometimes "priming" is as simple as finding that people will keep a room cleaner if it smells like disinfectant
-- that subtle reminder is enough to make people think, "This is a
clean room, I should keep it clean." But when you see how far they can
take this, it gets weird.
"Can we try to keep the murder room confined to one area, please?"
In one study,
scientists instructed volunteers to form sentences using words
associated with old people, under the guise that it was a language
proficiency test. So, one sentence could have been "The Depends were too
elderly (in Florida.)" That's just an example we made up. So these hip,
presumably liberal young college students were pumped with terms
associated with the elderly, and guess what happened next?
No,
they didn't hike up their pants to their nipples and start watching Jay
Leno. But as they left the study, they walked slower than the students
who were given neutral words earlier. The students primed to think of
elderly stereotypes took on characteristics they associated with the
elderly. Seriously, this happened. And you can get the same result in
infinite ways; in another experiment, those who were primed with words
conveying rudeness (like "aggressively," "bold," "rude," "bother,"
"disturb" and "intrude") interrupted the experimenter more frequently
during a conversation after the tests.
They also found a clipboard embedded in their foreheads later on, but that was probably just a coincidence.
Wait, it gets stupider than that. In yet another study,
researchers set up a devious experiment where students accidentally
bumped into a klutz on the way to the session. Their bump partner held
either a hot or a cold drink, which he or she asked the unknowing patsy
to hold for a second while they collected their shit. When the students
actually got to the study, they were asked to rate a hypothetical
person's personality. The subjects who had held an iced tea earlier were
more likely to call the fake persona "cold" or "selfish" than the
students who held a cup of hot coffee. Some base association with cold
and warmth at the subconscious level was enough to affect their
conscious judgment.
5. Beware Your Natural Biases (The Stores Konw Them)
You
step in the front door of your nearest chain grocery store. What's
immediately to your right? At Walmart, Kroger, Whole Foods, and
countless others, that's the fresh produce section. Some of them have
their baked goods over there, too. And at those stores, the doors and
registers are positioned to steer you that direction when you walk in.
This is the only sheep-based image we'll use this article. Promise.
This is because, after years of analysis of how humans move in a store,
they've found that we're as easy to predict as animal migrations.
Studies show that Americans like to shop counter-clockwise. Over time,
they've found that stores that cater to this by putting the door on the
right do better business than stores with the door in the center or, worst of all, the left.
Grocery
stores are laid out to lead you around a set path you didn't even know
you were following. Knowing you'll head right, they place the freshest,
best-looking stuff they've got right in your path. Not the most popular
stuff, mind you -- they know most of you didn't run to the store at
midnight to buy lettuce, and they know that if they put the Doritos to
the right, you'd grab them and head to the counter. Instead, they lead
off with the produce, which tends to make the best psychological impression on you.
The idea is that you'll associate the rest of the store with the
freshness, bright colors and nice smells you got from the nicely
laid-out produce.
"Boy, those fresh carrots sure did help me forget that everything in this aisle has been dead for weeks."
After
they hit you with the brightly colored lemons, apples and oranges, they
schedule your predictable counter-clockwise path so that different
products show up at the exact time that will make you most likely to
buy. The stuff you actually came for -- cola, chips, milk, eggs, sliced
cheese, cookies -- doesn't show up until the end, once your cart is
chock-full of stuff you didn't know you needed when you walked through
the automatic doors.
And sweet lady Boxed Wine.
Remember,
the goal is to keep you in the store as long as possible, and to make
you pass as many shelves as possible. You can't buy the new nacho cheese
flavored Hamburger Helper if you don't know it exists.
4. Use Your Facial Expressions as Mood-Altering Drugs
veryone
knows that happiness makes you smile, anger makes you frown and
louder-than-expected farts make you raise one eyebrow and point at the
guy next to you. Well, scientists have found that our facial muscles are
actually controlling your emotions more than you think. If that's not
weird enough, Nicole Kidman's weird new face is indirectly responsible
for the discovery.
Botox has been making
women look sexier since the 1980s, assuming you're sexually attracted to
smooth skin and people with awesome poker faces. See, in addition to
firming up facial skin until wrinkles disappear, Botox also firms up
everything else on your face, until people can't tell whether you're
smiling warmly or weeping in terror. But hey, it's not like conveying
emotion is your job or anything.
She's just a surprised as you are. You can see it in her eyes.
Well,
according to a recent study, injecting Botox into your face not only
makes you look like you have no emotions, it actually inhibits your ability to feel them
at all. We tend to think of the relationship between our emotions and
our face as a one-way street, but apparently your brain likes to check
in with your facial muscles before deciding what emotion it should
feeling at any given moment. Even if you have every reason to be
delighted, if your brain checks in and you're not smiling, you'll still
be unhappy. We need a complex series of interactions to occur involving
our body, hormones and brain to truly feel something like happiness. And
it turns out the part involving our facial muscles is way more
important than previously thought.
Researchers
found that the people who'd frozen their faces with Botox had lost the
ability to feel strong emotions, or in some cases, pretty much any
emotion. The study participants didn't even feel affected by
"emotionally charged" videos. We're going to assume they showed them
this:
If you've had Botox, this video bores you because you're dead inside.
This
is all good news for those of us who haven't yet injected poison into
our faces. The study, and others like it suggest that smiling when you're down will actually make you feel happy. If you're one of the millions of women (and some men)
who sought the fountain of youth, and ended up with the internal and
external emotional range of the T-1000 ... well, at least you aren't
that kid who got slapped on the back while making a stupid face in fifth
grade. He probably needs help tying his shoes by now.
3. Coughing Is the Cheapest Painkiller.
Afraid of needles? Try to cough forcibly the next time you get injected. The procedure is effective in reducing pain.
2. Harness the Power of the Placebo Effect
Did
you notice how the red pill would let Neo "wake up" to the real world,
but the blue pill would let him stay "asleep" in the dream world? Now go
to your pharmacy. What color are all of the sleeping pills?
Blue, blue and blue -- if not the package, then the pill itself. That's not coincidence; researchershave
found that the color of a pill makes a difference in how it works. In
one study, every patient was given the exact same sedative, but some
patients received it in a blue pill and others in an orange pill. The
blue pill takers reported falling asleep 30 minutes faster, and sleeping
30 minutes longer, than the orange pill takers.
What
the hell? It's yet another weird manifestation of the placebo effect.
You probably already know that you can give a guy with a headache a Tic
Tac and tell him it's medicine, and there's a good chance it will fix his headache just like an aspirin would,
for reasons science doesn't completely understand. Well, it turns out
that that already illogical and somewhat insane phenomenon is also
affected by the color of the pill. The reason is that how you perceiveeffectiveness affects effectiveness -- and when it comes to stuff you consume, color matters.
So,
in a different experiment, subjects were told they were going to get a
sedative or a stimulant, when in fact they were getting neither -- all
of the pills were placebos. Yet 66 percent of the subjects who took blue
pills reported feeling less alert, compared to only 26 percent of those
who took pink pills. That's because we've been trained to think that
blue = sleep.
Also blue = drowning, and certain types of poisonous reptiles. Sweet dreams!
In a different study, when researchers
put various fake medicine packages in front of subjects, the subjects
picked certain colors of boxes over others. Warm colors like brown and
red were perceived as more potent, especially if the shades were darker.
Green and yellow, on the other hand, might as well have been
7Up-flavored Tic Tacs as far as the subjects were concerned. Andthis
is why heart medicines are often red and brown, while skin medicines
are yellow and sleeping pills are often blue or green. Painkillers, on
the other hand, are often white ... maybe to remind us of opium? We're
not sure.
All we remember is consuming ghosts whole, and then the long silence.
Wait,
it gets even stupider. Color associations are also cultural. Maybe in
America blue is a calming, peaceful color, but in Italy it's associated
with the national soccer team.
So researchers found that, rather than making him drowsy, a blue pill
would send an Italian man screaming and singing and rioting into the
night.
From a strictly practical
perspective, this brain hack only really explains the color of NyQuil
and DayQuil and tells you the best room color to put a bunch of
aggressive Italian men to sleep in. But if you really think about it,
the placebo affect implies some things about your ability to control the
physical world with your mind that are downright Matrix-ian. We can't
tell you exactly how to harness the power of the placebo effect, just
that, if you figure it out, you will be a legitimate superhero.
1. Your Fear Is Your Mind Illusion
If you control your mind, you can be fearless.
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