Easy to read and interesting — a little bit heavy on the “studies show” with conclusions intended to surprise, most of which I have already seen elsewhere.
Some goodies:
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William James’ theory that emotion results from the physiological changes that occur in the body, rather than the other way around.
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Your peripheral vision is terrible, vision is only high resolution at the very center of your view, the rest is filled in by your brain’s model of the world.
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The ratio of time you spend looking into someone’s eyes when talking as opposed to when listening is a fairly accurate indicator of your relative social dominance.
Highlights
Once attention is called to them, it is easy to accept many of our simple behaviors [...] as being automatic. The real issue is the extent to which more complex and substantive behaviors, with the potential to have a much greater impact on our lives, are also automatic - even though we may feel sure that they are carefully thought through and rational.
[...] many unconscious processes can never be directly revealed through the kind of self-reflection encouraged by therapy, because they transpire in areas of the brain not open to the conscious mind.
People have a basic desire to feel good about themselves, and we therefore have a tendency to be unconsciously biased in favor of traits similar to our own, even such seemingly meaningless traits as our names. Scientists have even identified a discrete area of the brain, called the dorsal striatum, as the structure that mediates much of this bias.
[...] more elegant restaurants commonly offer menus peppered with terms like "crispy cucumbers", "velvety mashed potatoes", and "slow-roasted beets on a bed of arugula" [...]
Studies show that flowery modifiers not only tempt people to order the lyrically described foods but also lead them to rate those foods as tasting better than the identical foods given only a generic listing.
[...] subjects were given three different boxes of detergent and asked to try them all out for a few weeks, then report on which they liked best and why. One box was predominantly yellow, another blue, and the third was blue with splashes of yellow. In their reports, the subjects overwhelmingly favored the detergent in the box with mixed colors. Their comments included much about the relative merits of the detergents, but none mentioned the box. [...] But in reality it was just the box that differed - the detergents inside were all identical.
[...] four French and four German wines, matched for price and dryness, were placed on the shelves of a supermarket in England. French and German music were played on alternate days from a tape deck on the top shelf of the display. On days when the French music played, 77 percent of the wine purchased was French, while on the days of German music, 73 percent of the wine purchased was German.
Studies have indeed shown that when wines are tasted blind, there is little correlation between a wine's taste and its cost, but that there is a strong correlation when the wines are not sampled blind. [...] the study was conducted while the subjects were having their brains scanned in an fMRI machine. The resulting images showed that the price of the wine increased activity in an area of the brain behind the eyes called the orbitofrontal cortex, a region that has been associated with the experience of pleasure. So though the two wines were not different, their taste difference was real, or at least the subjects' relative enjoyment of the taste was.
Our brains are not simply recording a taste or other experience, they are creating it.
Our unconscious doesn't just interpret sensory data, it enhances it. It has to, because the data our senses deliver is of rather poor quality and must be fixed up in order to be useful. [...]
To help compensate for their imperfections, your eyes change position a tiny bit several times each second. These juggling motions are called microsaccades [...]. These happen to be the fastest movements executed by the human body, so rapid that they cannot be observed without special instruments. [...]
If your eyes were a simple video camera, all that motion would make the video unwatchable. But your brain compensates by editing out the period during which you eye is in transit and filling in your perception in a way that you don't notice.
Another gap in the raw data delivered by your eyes has to do with your peripheral vision, which is quite poor. In fact, if you hold your arm out and gaze at your thumbnail, the only part of your field of vision with good resolution will be the area within, and perhaps just bordering, your nail. Even if you have twenty-twenty vision, your visual acuity outside that central region will be roughly comparable to that experienced by a person who needs thick glasses and doesn't have them.
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