Archive

Topic: The mind

Fact Deja vu may be a memory system checking its own work The feeling is not that you remember. It is that you feel you should. 1 min read Fact Time does not actually slow down in an emergency Researchers dropped people from a height to test it. The famous feeling turns out to be a trick of memory. 1 min read Fact Your sense of where your body is can be hijacked in minutes Stroke a rubber hand in view while hiding the real one, and the rubber one starts to feel like yours. 1 min read Fact Repeat a word enough and it stops meaning anything Say 'door' forty times. Somewhere around thirty it becomes a noise. 1 min read Fact Your brain is 2 per cent of your weight and 20 per cent of your energy bill Sitting perfectly still, thinking about nothing, it is the most expensive organ you own. 1 min read Fact Testing yourself beats re-reading, and it feels worse The study method that feels most productive is the one that works least. 1 min read Fact Patient H.M. could not form a new memory for fifty years He read the same magazine daily and found it new every time. He also proved memory is not one thing. 1 min read Fact Some people genuinely cannot recognise faces Including, sometimes, their own in a mirror. 1 min read Fact Your own name cuts through a noisy room You were not listening to that conversation. Something in you was. 1 min read Fact Your brain edits out the moment your eyes move You are blind for roughly two hours of every waking day, and you have never once noticed it. 1 min read