YOUR MIND CAN'T HANDLE THE MOON

AND OTHER ODDITIES:

DOES THE MOON GO ON A DIET AS IT CLIMBS THE SKY?

 Some have speculated that there is some effect that causes the atmosphere to act like a magnifying glass making the moon look bigger.

It turns out that any distortion caused by the atmosphere would actually make the moon look a little smaller.

 Most scientists agree that the reason the moon looks bigger is purely in our minds.

Our mind interprets the things we see in interesting ways.

For instance, if you look at any door frame you can see that it is rectangular.

But if you were to sketch the outline of the door frame from the angle that you are looking at it, most likely you would sketch a trapezoid.

Your mind adjusts the door so that you perceive it as a rectangle from whatever angle you look at it. That theory is called shape constancy.


THE MASCOT OF NANO HAS BEEN LIBELED!

Lemmings do not commit mass suicide.  

That idea likely started in 1908,

when a man named Arthur Mee inexplicably decided that “mass suicide”

was the most likely answer for lemming population changes and published it in his book The Children’s Encyclopedia—

because if there’s one thing children are, it’s stupid,

and if there’s one thing they’re probably never going to do, it’s fact-check an encyclopedia. right?

 This wacky mistake would have just faded into obscurity

if it weren’t for the 1958 Disney documentary White Wilderness, in which they managed to capture lemming suicide on film for the first time.

The filmmakers manually ran a pack of lemmings off of a cliff

to make for a good movie and edited the footage to make it match up with the behaviors lemmings are supposed to exhibit

The staged suicide turned out to be a critical success, as the movie went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

ON THE AVERAGE, YOUR MIND WANDERS 30% OF THE TIME

For your peace of mind, hopefully your 30% occurred while you were reading of the lemmings.


CROW JIHAD

Crows hold grudges for life and carry out Jihads from one generation to the next.

Even if you haven’t been keeping your eye on crows,

you should know that they’ve been keeping an eye on you, and they have already memorized your face.

Crows have the ability to distinguish between people, knowing which ones are benign and which ones deserve to be dive-bombed

John M. Marzluff, a wildlife biologist at the University of Washington,

conducted a test in which he captured and tagged seven crows, all while wearing a rubber mask, to see how good the birds were at facial recognition.

After he released all seven,

the crows maintained a healthy grudge against the face that had captured them . . . for more than two years.

Over the two-year vendetta,

crows that weren’t even present (or alive yet) for the original capture started attacking the mask wearer as well.

That means the crows could communicate with one another about who exactly deserved to be punished.

 It’s not just vengeance that crows choose to pass on to their young;

they’re just as good at memorizing and teaching each other how to exploit human behavior as well.

Even if you don’t know the exact day your garbage man comes to collect your trash, you can be sure that the crows in your neighborhood do.


ON THE AVERAGE, IT TAKES 66 DAYS TO CREATE A HABIT

People with high levels of testosterone get pleasure from the anger of others.

Read more at: http://www.learning-mind.com/20-interesting-facts-you-didnt-know-about-human-behavior/

PEOPLE WITH HIGH LEVELS OF TESTOSTERONE GET PLEASURE FROM THE ANGER OF OTHERS.


PEOPLE WITH LOW SELF-ESTEEM TEND TO HUMILATE OTHERS.


HUMANS CANNOT MULTI-TASK:

In fact, people can only attend to one cognitive task every time.


WE CAN ONLY REMEMBER 3 OR 4 THINGS AT A TIME FOR ONLY 20 SECONDS

The interesting thing about phone numbers is that they are more than 3 or 4 numbers long.

So they are hard to remember for more than 20 seconds.

To solve that problem we break up the ten-digit phone number into three groups with 3 or 4 numbers each.


WE CAN'T RESIST NOTICING DANGER, FOOD, AND SEX:

Psychologists tell us we have three brains.

The new brain is your logical, reasoning brain.

The mid brain is the part of the brain that processes emotions,

and the “old brain” is the part of the brain that is most interested in your survival.

Your "old brain's" job is to examine your environment and answer these questions:

Can I eat it?

Can I have sex with it?

Will it kill me?

That is actually all that the old brain cares about: food, sex or danger.  So the picture of that doughnut is really calling out to you!