Psychology
Discover facts about psychology. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Psychology
When falling in love feels like getting the flu
Imagine trying to explain the concept of the color red to someone born entirely blind. That is what it is like navigating a romantic relationship with a…
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Why Skyrim makes you forget hunger and time
Have you ever looked up from a video game like Skyrim and realized it was suddenly 4 AM and your bladder was screaming? This total detachment from physical…
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Trauma can make your past self feel like a stranger
Severe trauma completely severs the linear timeline of your own identity. People experiencing self-continuity disruptions can look at old photographs of…
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Sounds and scents can steer your dreams
You can literally hack human dreams with nothing but a soundtrack. If scientists play a specific sound or release a scent while you learn a tedious task like…
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Loneliness can make rejection easier to spot
Chronic loneliness essentially mutates you into a hyper-vigilant psychic for negative social cues. A deeply isolated brain rewires itself for sheer…
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Can thinking about the future loosen trauma’s grip
Staring at tomorrow is a proven weapon against yesterday's horrors. By shifting a survivor's mental focus from a fatalistic past to an optimistic future,…
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Painful hazing makes people value the group more
Suffering is the ultimate social glue. When people endure humiliating or painful initiations, their brain desperately invents reasons to value the group,…
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A richer environment can physically reshape the brain
If you've been doom-scrolling on the same couch for three years, your neurons are probably begging for mercy. Donald Hebb basically founded neuropsychology by…
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Why psychologists ask you to narrate strange pictures
The Thematic Apperception Test is the psychological equivalent of asking you to explain a terrible indie film. You are shown ambiguous, melodramatic…
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How a Bobo doll taught children to imitate aggression
Before Albert Bandura came along, people thought watching violence was cathartic and would actually reduce aggression. Bandura destroyed this theory with an…
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The mouse utopia that turned into a nightmare
John B. Calhoun wanted to know what happens when society gets too crowded, so he built Universe 25, a literal utopia for mice with infinite food and zero…
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Why your brain won't forget that old phone number
Donald Hebb figured out that every time you learn a useless TikTok dance, your brain physically rewires itself. When brain cells activate at the exact same…
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Treating your children like a giant chess experiment
László Polgár literally placed a personal ad seeking a wife to help him breed geniuses, treating child-rearing less like parenting and more like an intense…
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Why fear can feel like attraction
Your brain is remarkably stupid when it comes to figuring out why your heart is racing. Stanley Schachter injected people with adrenaline and then stuck them…
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How a summer camp turned boys into rival gangs
Before reality TV, Muzafer Sherif threw 22 boys into an isolated camp, split them into two gangs, and manipulated them into Lord of the Flies-style warfare…
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The gender experiment that devastated David Reimer
In what might be the darkest chapter of modern psychology, John Money convinced parents of a baby boy with a botched circumcision to raise him as a girl.…
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The rats who chose a paradise over cocaine
For decades, scientists claimed drugs were chemically irresistible by putting isolated, depressed rats in cages with cocaine water. Bruce Alexander called…
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Your eyes briefly see more than you can remember
George Sperling flashed a grid of letters at people for just 50 milliseconds. Ask them to name all the letters, and they'd only remember four. But if he…
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Why believing in yourself can help you persist
Toxic positivity might be onto something. Albert Bandura coined 'self-efficacy,' the psychological concept that merely believing you possess the skills to…
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How quickly prejudice took hold in one classroom
In 1968, teacher Jane Elliott told her class that blue-eyed kids were biologically superior to brown-eyed kids. Within hours, these adorable eight-year-olds…
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Proving menstruation does not melt female brains
In the early 1900s, respected male scientists aggressively argued that women became cognitively and physically incapacitated during their periods. Leta…
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You can learn skills without remembering practice
You can successfully learn complex new skills while having zero conscious recollection of ever practicing them. Brenda Milner worked with Patient HM, whose…
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The Kitty Genovese story was wildly exaggerated
Your Intro to Psych professor's favorite anecdote about human apathy is mostly fabricated journalism. Academia gleefully parroted the story of 38 silent…
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Why some brain damage can erase fear and trigger hypersexuality
Lose chunks of your temporal lobes and you'll suddenly want to mate with a chair and eat handfuls of dirt. Klüver-Bucy syndrome strips away your amygdala's…
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