Psychology
Discover facts about psychology. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Psychology
The bizarre wellness fad of sunbathing your perineum
Operating under the guise of an ancient esoteric wellness practice, pseudo-gurus actively encouraged their followers to expose their most sensitive bodily…
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Why your native language stands out abroad
The psychological cocktail party effect is amplified in foreign environments. When immersed in an unfamiliar linguistic setting, the brain remains…
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How blindness can turn the visual cortex toward sound
When someone is born blind or loses their sight early in life, their brain dynamically rewires itself. The visual cortex, usually dedicated to processing…
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The sport of ironing clothes in dangerous places
Blending the thrill of extreme outdoor sports with the mundane chore of pressing shirts, extreme ironing is an utterly bizarre physical discipline.…
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The bizarre sport where opponents wrestle with toes
Originating in an English pub in the 1970s out of a sheer desire to invent a sport where the UK could realistically be world champions, competitive toe…
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The coming-of-age ritual involving gloves full of bullet ants
For the Sateré-Mawé people of the Brazilian Amazon, the transition from boyhood to manhood requires a terrifying and deeply painful ritual. Young men must…
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Competitive dog grooming turns poodles into dragons
In the surreal subculture of creative animal grooming, overly passionate owners use non-toxic dyes and intense shearing techniques to make their pets look…
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The sport where teenagers gallop on hobby horses
Taking the internet by storm, this surprisingly intense athletic subculture requires participants to jump over massive hurdles and perform graceful dressage…
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Why millions watch people chew loudly on camera
Originating in South Korea, this bizarre broadcasting trend involves hosts eating massive quantities of food while purposefully amplifying their wet chewing…
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The men who dug human waste from cesspits
Long before modern indoor plumbing revolutionized urban living, London relied on massive underground cesspits to collect human waste. Gong farmers were the…
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When doctors treated illness with hungry leeches
Before the advent of modern medical science, physicians firmly believed that human health was entirely governed by an internal balance of four distinct bodily…
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Bizarre nineteenth-century trend of creating taxidermy dioramas with dead frogs
During the Victorian era, a peculiar fascination with the macabre led to the creation of elaborate taxidermy displays. Walter Potter, a self-taught…
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The dark secret behind competitive endurance tickling
What appeared to be an innocent, albeit unusual, online sport involving young men being paid to endure intense tickling sessions harbored a dark secret.…
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When funerals hired professional mourners
Known as moirologists, these trained actors were paid by wealthy families to display exaggerated grief during burial processions. Their performative wailing…
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Why exhaustion makes people overshare
Late-night confessions happen for a very specific physiological reason. As you become physically and mentally fatigued, your prefrontal cortex—the part of the…
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Female tears may dampen aggression in men
Crying does far more than signal deep sadness; it actively alters the hormone levels of those nearby. Researchers discovered that the scent of female…
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Why groups work around abusers instead of expelling them
The missing stair phenomenon occurs when a social group simply learns to work around a toxic or dangerous person instead of kicking them out. Just like a…
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Extreme stress can make the world feel unreal
Derealization is an unsettling dissociative state where the external world suddenly feels intensely artificial, flat, or dreamlike. Triggered by extreme…
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How moving your eyes can help process trauma
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a remarkable psychological therapy that helps patients process traumatic memories simply by tracking a…
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Why a bad option makes the expensive one tempting
Introducing an obviously inferior option to a lineup makes people significantly faster at choosing the premium option. Marketers exploit this decoy effect…
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Why brilliant people still believe bizarre things
The Nobel disease is a documented psychological phenomenon where exceptionally brilliant individuals, often Nobel Prize-winning scientists, begin aggressively…
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You may not notice when someone is replaced
During psychological experiments involving simple social interactions, researchers will occasionally swap out the person speaking to the subject…
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Why happy people sometimes feel the urge to jump
Standing near the edge of a cliff, many perfectly happy people suddenly experience a fleeting, terrifying thought of jumping off. French psychologists call…
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Could a parasite make you take bigger risks
Toxoplasma gondii is a microscopic parasite that typically reproduces inside the intestines of cats, but it has a surprisingly profound impact on the human…
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