5 Ways Your Brain Is Messing With Your Head

Why Does the Brain Lie About it?

Change blindness is usually related to something called inattention blindness. If you tried to process everything in your visual spectrum you would go insane, so your mind picks and chooses what to focus on. If Carlton grows a mustache while your brain isn't paying attention, when you look back at Carlton, your brain tells you he's had the 'stache all along.

It's like your brain is sitting in class, staring out the window at a cloud that sort of looks like a boob. When you call on your brain it does the same thing you do when a teacher calls on you in those circumstances: Start bullshitting. It doesn't really know what Carlton looked like a second ago, but it's not going to tell you that. Since it has no visual memory of the image, it just tells you it's always looked the same. Even when that's a lie.

Where it Really Gets Weird...

What's truly amazing is just how often your brain isn't paying attention. Scientists decided to take the idea to a ridiculous extreme. They ran experiments where they'd have a guy manning the counter at an office serving students, while another guy was hidden below the counter. A student would walk up and request a form, and the guy would say sure and duck down behind the counter to get it.

But then second guy, the one who had been hiding, would pop up and say, "ah, here it is." This second guy would look completely different, and would be wearing completely different colored clothing, and most of the students would not freaking notice it was a different guy than the one they had been talking to five seconds ago.

Here is a video of such an experiment. Far creepier is the bit magician Derren Brown does where he'll approach a stranger on the street, ask for directions, and in mid-sentence have somebody walk past carrying a large object. While the object is disrupting the view for half a second, he'll swap out another guy who looks and sounds nothing like him--and the stranger will carry on the conversation with the second man as if nothing had happened.

This is probably what made the producers of Bewitched think they could just switch out Darrins on us.

Where it Really Gets Weird...

The spooky part is the way your brain prevents you from noticing the blackness that occurs several times a second, every moment you use your eyes. Estimates vary somewhat, but it's likely that you're spending somewhere around 40 minutes a day with your eyes wide open, and totally blind.

Your brain.

Look at the wall one more time. If you make an effort, you can sometimes see a "flash" of darkness during a particularly long eye movement, one of those periods of blindness your brain insists isn't happening. But for the most part, your brain suppresses these flickers.

And here's where saccadic masking and change blindness team up to have rough sex with your mind. Remember, the first scientist to experiment with change blindness was making changes to the page while people were looking directly at it. He was able to do it by introducing the changes during saccadic movement. If a change occurs during that fraction of a second when the brain is dodging calls like the optic nerve was an ex-girlfriend, you tend not to notice it. Even when it happens right in front of your damned eyes.

Why Does the Brain Lie About it?

It may not be lying necessarily, just easily confused. You know this if you've ever taken a field sobriety test.

Your proprioception is like your underwear: it's pretty much the first thing to disappear when you're any kind of fucked up. Basically, the cops doing the roadside test are trying to see if your brain knows where your fingers are in relation to your nose.

Even though your brain carries around a detailed awareness of exactly where your body parts are at all times, when it's handed a contradictory stimulus, essentially it says, "Oh, well. Guess I've been wrong about the length of your nose all these years."

It's either that or your brain is a sadistic son-of-a-bitch that likes playing tricks on you.

Where it Really Gets Weird...

The best example we've found so far is "the Pinocchio illusion." Scientists have found they can have the subject touch the tip of their nose with their finger, and have their bicep or triceps electrically stimulated at the same time. Your brain "feels" your arm muscle extending, but also feels that you're maintaining contact with the tip of your nose, and leaps to the immediate, yet fully sober, conclusion that your nose has suddenly grown to be about three feet long.

Science.

Incidentally, we know exactly which illusion you're about to try to induce, figuring all it'll take is a girl, a dark room and the right equipment. Don't do it. It will lead to eventual disappointment.

What is it?

It's sometimes called subconscious plagiarism. It's what happens when your brain rips off someone else's ideas and doesn't tell you, knowing nobody will believe you when you get caught later.

Um, What?

Among the many things your brain isn't good at is correctly remembering where your ideas come from. Cryptomnesia happens when your brain finds a really good idea, but doesn't bother remembering that, oh, yeah, it's not yours.

Despite what has to be an enormous temptation for people to jump all over that shit and claim it for themselves, Carl Jung discovered it.

Although occurrences are pretty rare, there are still some famous cases: Nietzche accidentally didn't write quite a bit of Thus Spake Zarathustra, George Harrison was forced to shell out almost $600,000 over a song he "borrowed," and an early incident with cryptomnesia permanently ruined the celebrity-author career of Helen Keller, who wrote up a fairy tale that it turned out had been told to her years before--much to her surprise.

Sad, because she never got to write Harry Potter and the Miracle Worker.

Why Does the Brain Lie About it?

Like so many of the other items on this list, explanations are pretty thin on the ground. Cryptomnesiologists seem to think that, for some reason, your brain retains enough memory of the event to recall the event, but not the origin of the event, leading to the mistaken impression that you're the originator.

You may be wondering at this point how we know cryptomnesia exists at all. After all, how do we know those cases of "accidental" plagiarism weren't all intentional?

The answer: we don't. If you haven't experienced it for yourself, you have no way of knowing it's not just a big fat scam. If you have experienced it, good luck trying to convince that first group.

Where it Really Gets Weird...

Studies show cryptomnesia is more likely to happen when the originating source is of the same sex. Scientists think this is because when the actual source is more similar to you, your brain is more likely to confuse you with the other person. Yes, because the brain is actually a drooling idiot, next week some woman is going to write a book called Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and think it was her own idea.