You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [44]
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 time you use your eyes. Estimates vary, but it’s likely that you’re spending around forty minutes a day with your eyes wide open, and totally blind.
Here’s where saccadic masking and change blindness team up to screw with your mind. A scientist named George McConkie was able to track people’s eye movements down to each individual saccadic movement. This enabled him to introduce changes in words and text without the subject noticing while they were looking directly at it. 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 won’t notice it. Even when it happens right in front of your damned eyes.
3. PROPRIOCEPTION
Proprioception is your brain’s map of your body, and it steers you wrong on a regular basis.
Um, what?
Proprioception is your brain’s ability to sense where your limbs are. This is how you can put a sandwich in your mouth while your eyes are focused on the TV: Your brain knows where your hand is in relation to your face.
If you’ve ever failed a field sobriety test, you know this kind of self-knowledge is fallible. Your proprioception is like your brain’s underwear: pretty much the first thing to disappear when you’re any kind of drunk. 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 that awareness gets drunk enough to start lying to you, you’ll ignore everything you’ve ever known and say, “Oh, well. Guess I’ve been wrong about the length of my nose all these years.”
Where it really gets weird . . .
The best example we’ve found so far is “the Pinocchio illusion.” Scientists have found that they can have the subject touch the tip of their nose with their finger while having their biceps 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 conclusion that your nose has suddenly grown to be about three feet long.
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 leads to eventual disappointment.
2. CRYPTOMNESIA
Sometimes called subconscious plagiarism, it’s what happens when your brain rips off someone else’s ideas and doesn’t tell you.
Um, what?
Your brain isn’t great at remembering where your ideas come from. Cryptomnesia happens when you find a really good idea and don’t bother to remember that it’s not yours.
Although occurrences are pretty rare, there are still some famous cases: Nietzsche accidentally didn’t write quite a bit of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, George Harrison was forced to shell out almost $600,000 for 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.
This occurs when your brain retains enough memory to recall an event but not the origin of the event, leading to the convenient and 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 whether it’s not just a big fat scam. If you have experienced it, good luck trying