It's Totally Mind Blowing When People Reveal What They Think Of The Most Fascinating Psychological Phenomena

False memories. How you can implant false memories in someone over time. And they believe they are real and their reactions are based on their own reality.

Edit: thank you guys for all the amazing responses. I know the Mandella effect but I wanted to bring up that this happens on an individual level too. Not just groups if people. Also I have not seen the movie Inceptions. I dont watch a lot of movies and dont have netflix, hulu, or things like that. Or a TV.

Edit 2: Thank you guys for showing me many more phenomenal information about memory. I had no clue.

My own personal experience with this. When I was 9 years old I was hospitalized with severe asthma that nearly killed. Blood oxygen level was 62. The entire hospital stay was such a blur because my brain was not functioning properly. Both my parents were in custody battles and tried to convince me the other parent never once stepped into my hospital room. The last time I spoke with my mother. About a decade. I am sure she would still say my father never visited me. Luckily my Granna, the voice of reason and sanity in my childhood, simply said to me. They both visited you, they are both telling you lies.

Tedbastion

Childhood amnesia. The fact that up until a certain point you don't remember things. My first memory isn't until I was 6. My wife's is when she was 2. Hers seem to be emotionally based. So they're sparse and fleeting. Mine are like I just suddenly had a switch flipped, and there I was.

ThisIsaRantAccount

Oh my god, my bf is like that. He feels like he suddenly became capable of memory at 5. He distinctly remembers looking around and suddenly realizing he was conscious and thinking.

I don't have that. I don't have any point in my memories where I feel like any switch was flipped or anything. I just feel like I've always been here, with my earliest memories being the fuzziest and most random (seeing my cat kill a mouse, swinging on a swing and looking at the blue berries, losing my footing in the pool and falling under, going on a bike ride down the street, etc) from when I was around 3, maybe 2. And they feel sorted by location, rather than by time like my recent memories ("recent" really meaning memories from when I was about 4 to my current age, 21).

When I think about being really little like that, I'm either remembering memories tied to my original house, my grandparent's place, or the nearby park. Right now, I can think about highschool and then also remember other things happening around that time, not necessarily having anything to do with high school. But it's hard to remember my original house, and then remember my grandparent's place in that same train of thought.

GeorgeThe1998Cat

I'm probably late to this thread, but I find the "The Call of the Void" an interesting phenomenon. It's that feeling you get when you stand on a high place and subconsciously think "I could totally jump off right now," but you don't really want to and you don't actually jump. I experienced this multiple times on my most recent trip to Europe.

Lordarain

I've always been a big fan of the Selective Attention Test. It's a fairly simple experiment designed to test how well you pay attention to the world around you. If you're not familiar with it, give it a try; it's a very short video.

Portarossa

This is really interesting, I've seen this video before in my psychology classes but I did notice the gorilla straight away the first time I saw it. I have ADHD but my theory is that I noticed it straight away because I'm more likely to get distracted by often unnoticeable things like that, even though most people would probably assume people with actual attention issues would be even less likely to notice the gorilla.

peachychamomile

Playing.

When 2 animals play with each other, they both communicate aggression, they show fangs, claws, they bite, they go for the neck, etc. Everything about it should communicate danger, but they never feel endangered, even when one animal accidentally hurts another. This happens even when animals are playing with animals they have barely known for some time.

It blows my mind how the right context completely transforms all the communication between animals who play.

Sinclairlim

Cognitive dissonance. If our actions don’t match up with our opinions, beliefs, wishes, etc., something will give and either our actions will change or our mindset will.

Doesn’t sound very interesting until you use this to “hack” your life in a sense.

Ever heard of the law of attraction? It’s kind of like this. The law of attraction claims that if you want something, just pretend like you already have it. Envision that you have it and you live it. Want to lose weight? Envision you at your ideal weight every night.

Sounds like complete BS and in a sense it is, BUT it applies to cognitive dissonance and if you play your cards right it works.

For me, I was a very shy person. I wanted to become talkative and get friends and guys. So, I would tell myself, “I’m not shy! People love me! I have tons of friends!” My beliefs did not match up with my actions (I wouldn’t talk to people) but EVENTUALLY something gave and I started to act in accordance to my beliefs.

Either you will give up on pretending or you will become how you believe yourself to be! Something to think about. Law of attraction isn’t a proven thing but cognitive dissonance is.

4215265

Locus of Control (LOC). LOC basically is how you view control over your own life. People either have an internal LOC where they believe they have the power to control thier own lives, or an external LOC where you believe everything in life comes from a source other than yourself (I got fired because my boss hates me, I was late because traffic...etc.). Now, what's interesting is that studies have shown people with an internal LOC find greater satisfaction and success in almost every aspect of life.....except one......being in a nursing home. Drives internal LOC people CRAZY while external LOC people thrive

IMian91

Cotard delusion, aka walking corpse syndrome, where the sufferer genuinely believes that they are dead, don’t exist, or have no internal organs. absolutely crazy. I can’t imagine what it feels like walking around feeling actually, genuinely dead.

most_interesting

I experienced this for a period of time after my dad passed away when I was younger. It was terrifying and traumatic. I felt as if I was hollow inside - with no organs or vessels, just empty muscle - and was a ghost that everyone else could see. Thankfully those delusions don’t plague my life anymore, but it was so dark and awful.

ameliaaa59

The placebo effect. The idea that belief in something can actually have a positive impact on the body just seems so crazy to me. Also helped me realize inversely why stress and anxiety can take such a toll on you.

Col_Walter_Tits

Funny enough, placebo also works, when you know it's placebo... somehow, deep down, there is something in you that wants to believe despite all reasonable arguments against it.

Also nocebo is a thing... when you expect something to harm you, it will. It makes a lot of treatments complicated - on one hand you want the patient aware of the side effects, on the other, you don't want them to "generate" them by the nocebo effect...

Why_So_Slow

A dissociative disorder is a mental disorder that involve experiencing a disconnection and lack of continuity between thoughts, memories, surroundings, actions and identity. People with dissociative disorders escape reality in ways that are involuntary and unhealthy and cause problems with functioning in everyday life.

BrainstormingNetwork

This was me in school as a result of early childhood trauma. I used to write texts in which I wondered what was going on and why things were like that - like a movie that you're watching but have no involvement in. I also used to have these kind of awake-dreams in stressful situations where I would just space the fuck out and have all these random thoughts and images that I was not in control of.

Procrasturbator2000

The Gambler's Fallacy - specifically, how the same series of events can lead to two different conclusions. Assume you have a perfectly fair coin; you toss it five times and get five heads. You then ask two people what they think the sixth toss will be.

Person A thinks that heads is obviously on a roll, so he bets on heads.

Person B thinks that heads has happened too many times, which means that tails has to come up, so he bets on tails.

They're both wrong: the odds of the sixth throw remain the same, regardless of what happened in the past.

(Note that this only works if the coin is fair!)

Rehela

Capgras syndrome. It’s a psychiatric disorder where you believe the people around you are ‘imposters’ despite recognizing that they look/act/sound the same. It can come from a disconnect of the emotional brain regions and visual regions. I believe there are cases where a patient will overcome the imposter sensation by speaking on the phone with someone (so having no visual information). I’ve also seen it in people who suffer from schizophrenia. I suggest a read into it if you like abnormal psyc!

putrid_tugboat

The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

"The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, otherwise known as frequency illusion or recency illusion. This phenomenon occurs when the thing you've just noticed, experienced or been told about suddenly crops up constantly. It gives you the feeling that out of nowhere, pretty much everyone and their cousin are talking about the subject -- or that it is swiftly surrounding you. And you're not crazy; you are totally seeing it more. But the thing is, of course, that's because you're noticing it more."

So yes, you see your car more often because you are looking for it without even knowing. It isn't that there are more of your car out there, it's just you notice it more.

BeerExchange

Simply put...how your brain has evolved to have an upper-limit on the number of people you can conceptualise as people. After which they just become "people". And are then clumped into groups. The perception of which can be warped drastically by hearsay, the media, your own bias, etc.

Which goes a very long way to explain why many things in human society are the way they are.

SovietWomble

Dreaming. Even though everyone does it, it's amazing that our minds create virtual realities for us nightly. If you can lucid dream, it can be more entertaining than any game technology has invented.

sanfordcar592

I find dreaming fascinating, not just how dreams occur and their functions but how it affects your memories and emotions too.

In dreams, memories can be so different to real life. You can dream someone you don't know, who is completely made up only to feel like you knew them forever complete with a set of memories together. The intensity of emotions are heightened as well, and you can stop feeling those emotions upon waking up.

chrominium

The bystander effect. Everyone thinks they would help if something happens, but the effect says that the more people there are, the less someone is going to help.

widebueseli

I experienced this today on my commute. I started to get really dizzy/lightheaded and get tunnel vision. I was too out of it to ask for help, and everyone was just ignoring me.

Until this one little old lady bullied someone into giving me their seat. All of a sudden I was surrounded by help — someone was fanning me, another person gave me tissues, etc.

I’m so incredibly grateful for that woman who stopped to ask if I was all right.

stievleybeans

I’m going to psych nerd out a bit, since I did research on this phenomenon, but facial information processing errors associated with depression are super interesting. Folks with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) are actually way more likely than their peers to misidentify and selectively focus on emotional responses from other people. They have a much higher risk of misperceiving neutral faces as negative, and for missing facial cues that indicate positive information. At the same time, folks with MDD are also much better at noticing negative facial emotion indicators. Similarly, people with anxiety disorders tend to be much more likely to see neutral faces as angry.

I find it really interesting because it shows how a “mood” disorder like depression is way more complex than we sometimes give it credit for. Information processing problems can be triggered by, and in turn reinforce, someone’s depression. If we focus just on mood as our metric for what constitutes recovery, we miss some really interesting and potentially useful ways to provide treatment.

ColdNotion

Pibloktoq or Arctic Hysteria which exists mostly among Inuit living in the arctic region. Sufferers often become agitated, shouting and tearing off their clothes before running naked in the freezing temperatures. This continues for hours until they collapse and sleep. They have recovered by the time they wake up and may not remember the event.

Interestingly this illness also affects Sled Dogs and non-inuit people.

Iseeasong

I heard people do this because the body cycles blood from the organs out to the skin to try and keep all areas of the body warm. Blood rushing to the skin however ironically makes a hot flush so bad that people strip off.
Of course i’m sure the freezing temperatures also f up the brain a little, encouraging seemingly irrationally behaviour.

Jonki4

For me it is the unconscious mind and the fact that it accounts for the majority of our cognitive activity. I think it's interesting how we can simultaneously both know and not know things. It is also interesting (and perhaps even frightening) that we are not running the show to the extent that we think we are--at least not consciously.

ChanceGuest

I like catching my unconscious mind making decisions for me. The one that I’ve catch the most is actually when to get up out of bed. You would think that is a decision that your conscious mind makes but if you think about it soon after sitting up you’ll realize you just kinda did it without actually deciding to get up. It’s weird.

sillywabbittrix

How laughter affects people. Laughter is basically the ying to stress's yang, which inspires me to make people laugh when I can, as I don't know what they're going through. Laughter increases things like dopamine, and can even help soothe physical pain sometimes.

mothwingisaghost

even smiling (lifting the corners of your mouth) alone has positive effects on you, even if you force it

Spike_1987

Reminds me of something I think I read here at some point: never make fun of someone's laugh. You don't know what they're going through, and it might be the first time they've been happy in a long while.

Yomillio

I could be having the worst day ever. Turn on one of those YouTube (or in real life) with the babies laughing uncontrollably, and I'll be laughing and my mood will lighten up a bit. It won't get rid of why I was down and that will still affect me, but it'll bring me out of a funk.

PC509

My employees think I'm shooting dopamine direct into my brain but the reality is, life sucks if you focus on the sucky and unfortunately life necessitates we do that the majority of the time.

So while at work, I crack bad jokes, make faces and dance in the cubical alleys to keep smiles on their faces. Even if they are laughing AT and not with me, I'm just happy they are smiling/laughing.

Binxly