No matter how surprising it may be, but our body is still extremely studied by modern science. And even with all the development of science and medicine, the emergence of many different devices and diagnostic technologies, the human brain still remains a mystery. Scientists can only state some of the processes taking place in it and its reactions to external processes. Sometimes these reactions are extremely difficult to decipher. After all, there are such failures in the brain that scientists can only partially explain. Today Estet-portal will tell you about ordinary things that can cause an ambiguous reaction of the brain and even malfunctions in it.
Reason for brain failures: doors
Have you ever walked into a room for any purpose, like getting something, but you completely forget why you came? It turns out that the doors are to blame for these strange memory lapses. Psychologists at the University of Notre Dame have found that walking through doors triggers a phenomenon in the brain known as an "event boundary," separating one set of thoughts and memories from another, as if walking through a door signals the end of a scene in a movie. The brain archives the thoughts that were in the previous room and prepares a blank slate for the new space. Mental event boundaries usually help organize thoughts and memories as we move through a continuous and dynamic world, but when we try to remember what we came to do … or take … or maybe find … they can be really annoying. No wonder they say that in such cases you need to return to the place where the thought came to mind.
Causes of malfunctions in the brain: the moon
Usually the Moon – this is a pleasant night companion, but sometimes it can cause malfunctions in the brain. When the Moon is low in the sky, it appears larger than when it is overhead, although the actual size, of course, remains the same. This phenomenon is known as the moon-on-the-horizon illusion, or the Ponzo illusion. The most likely reason for the moon illusion is that we are accustomed to seeing clouds overhead at a distance of only a few kilometers, but we know that the clouds above the horizon are hundreds of kilometers away. If the cloud on the horizon is the same size as the ones above, despite the vast distance, we think: "That cloud is very big." And although the Moon is the same size above the horizon as it is above our head, we also perceive it to be much larger.
Causes of malfunctions in the brain: electronic signals
Which is worse: the squeal of a digital alarm clock, the horns of a rearing truck, or the shrill reminders that your smoke detector's batteries are low? Let's face it, all these sounds are terrible. Electronic signals – they are practically the musical accompaniment of the modern world, and they are unusually annoying, as they cause small brain malfunctions. We have evolved without electronic sounds, so we make an effort to capture them. Natural sounds are created by the transfer of energy, often by striking one object against another, like a stick striking a drum. In this case, the energy is transferred to the drum and is gradually dissipated, which causes the sound to decay. Our perceptual system has evolved to use this attenuation to understand the event, it enables us to figure out what made the sound and where it came from. Well, electronic signals are like a car that hits a wall at a speed of 100 km / h instead of slowing down. They do not change with time, do not fade away and therefore confuse the brain, not allowing to determine their nature and source.
Causes of brain failures: photos
We evolved not only without electronic signals, but also without photographs. Your grandmother may learn to use the Internet, but she will never develop the appropriate intuitive skills. We also consciously understand photographs, but our subconscious cannot really separate them from the depicted objects or people. Thus, studies show that people are much less accurate at throwing darts at pictures of friends, children, or loved ones, but still hit Hitler or their worst enemy well. Another study found that people become very anxious when they are asked to cut up photos of their most anticipated childhood acquisitions. Lacking millions of years of practice, our brains fail to separate image from reality.
Causes of malfunctions in the brain: red-green color
Another reason for brain failure can be a banal color. There is such a color – red-green. It's as bright as red-blue (we call this color purple), but we don't have a word to describe it because we can't see it. Red-green gets into the blind spot of our brain. This limitation is caused by how we perceive color. Cells in the retina called "opponent neurons" fire when exposed to red light, and this activity tells the brain that we're looking at something red. The same opponent neurons are inhibited in green light, and this lack of activity indicates the green color to the brain. While most colors cause a mixed effect on neurons that the brain can decode, red exactly cancels out the effect of green, therefore, we can never perceive these colors in confusion. Well, almost never. Under special conditions in the laboratory, the eyes can be forced to perceive both red and green light at the same time. People who were lucky enough to participate in such a visual experiment, talk about unforgettable impressions, as if seeing the color purple for the first time.
Causes of brain failures: wheels
Have you ever noticed how strange the wheels in movies look like they're spinning in the opposite direction? This is because television cameras capture static images of a scene at a certain frequency, and the brain fills in the gaps between those images, creating the illusion of continuous movement between identical frames. If the wheel is constantly spinning for several frames, the most obvious direction for the brain is the other way around, as it suggests the smallest difference between two frames. However, in real life, the wheels can appear to be spinning in the opposite direction, which is even stranger. The main theory behind this illusion is that the brain's motion perception system samples the input signal as a series of intermittent frames, much like a TV camera. In this way,
Causes of brain failures: bright lightBright light makes people sneeze. Allergic to sun rays? Doubtful. This is called the "light sneeze reflex" - a little-understood mental state when it enters from darkness into bright light. In general, sneezing occurs involuntarily when an irritant enters the nose. However, this automatic reaction can also occur in the pupillary light reflex, when the pupils constrict in bright light. All reflexes require the transmission of a command along complex neural pathways in the brain. It is likely that mixed teams can produce unexpected results. Combine the sneeze and pupillary light reflexes and you can get responses to a single stimulus – bright light. Scientists cannot fully explain this brain reaction.
Causes of Brain Glitches: Vast Open Spaces
When moving through the desert, plain or dense forest, that is, territories without landmarks, people walk in circles. Experiments with blindfolded people demonstrate that, without external reference points, we move in a circle 20 meters in diameter, assuming that we are going straight. It turns out that the reason is not at all in the different length or strength of the legs. Vast open spaces literally loop the brain. According to researchers from the German Institute of Biological Cybergenetics, the movement in circles – it is the result of a change in the "straight ahead" feeling. With each step there is a small deviation in the vestibular (balancing) apparatus or in the proprioceptive (body perception) system, which is added to the cognitive sense of what is "straight". These deviations accumulate causing, over time, walking in even smaller circles. This little brain glitch is impossible when we constantly re-adjust our sense of direction with the nearest building or mountain.
Reason for Brain Glitches: Shadows
Our perception of shadows – this is an example of how the brain tries to help, but in the end fails. By trying to determine the color of a surface, the brain knows that the shadows make it darker than it really is. We make up for this difference by automatically making shadowed surfaces appear lighter than they actually appear to the eye. But since we have no control over this adjustment process, we are unable to determine how much darker the shadow actually makes the subject, and this can be a problem. This brain glitch is explained in the above optical illusion created by Professor Edward Edelson. But on a checkerboard, tile A looks much darker than tile B. But as you can see in the verification image below, A and B are actually the same color. We perceive tiles in – white square of the board in the shade – lighter than tile A – a dark square, despite the fact that the shadow made square B as dark as A.
Causes of failures in the brain: telephones
Have you ever had the feeling that your phone vibrates in your pocket or bag, and you took it out and made sure that there was no call? If you, like most people, ever experience these "illusory vibrations", it turns out it's because your brain is jumping to the wrong conclusions in an attempt to make sense of the chaos of life. The brain constantly receives input from the senses, it must filter out useless noise and select important signals. In ancient times, people constantly mistook curved sticks in sight for snakes. Today, almost everyone uses electronic devices. Therefore, the reaction of the brain to different noises can be exactly the same as to vibration or phone ringing.
Our brain refuses to perceive four-dimensional tesseracts, quantum mechanics or an infinite universe for obvious reasons. But sometimes we do not understand the reaction of the brain. So, today Estet-portal told you just about a few ordinary things and phenomena that occur in everyday life. And how much more unknown is there in our brain?
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