Your brain is wired like a cave man’s
Do you ever wonder why you stay in a job that you hate, working for an abusive boss, making you totally unhappy? It isn’t just the money, your brain is wired like a cave man’s, and while brains have evolved slightly, you’re still built to survive, first and foremost. You’re built to ignore sunk costs, and you’re built to win.
In the video above, Anthony at Discovery News spells out that our brains are wired to make you smarter, but it sabotages you from time to time.
We used to be wired to be optimistic, but we’re also wired to seek out like minds, which limits the normal brain’s search for truth in daily life.
Tell us in the comments – do you frequently find yourself doing any of the three things mentioned in the video? Have you asked your brain if it’s working for or against you?
10 Brain facts!
Since we’re on the topic of brains, let’s make ourselves smarter by learning a few facts about our brains:
- Juggling. Juggling has shown to change the brain in as little as seven days. The study indicates that learning new things helps the brain to change very quickly.
- Airplanes and headaches. A study showed a correlation between flying and headaches and states that around 6% of people who fly get headaches brought on by the flight itself.
- Blinking. Each time we blink, our brain kicks in and keeps things illuminated so the whole world doesn’t go dark each time we blink (about 20,000 times a day).
- Laughing. Laughing at a joke is no simple task as it requires activity in five different areas of the brain.
- Brain Bank. Harvard maintains a Brain Bank where over 7,000 human brains are store for research purposes.
- Music. Music lessons have shown to considerably boost brain organization and ability in both children and adults.
- Thoughts. The average number of thoughts that humans are believed to experience each day is 70,000.
- Ambidexterity. Those who are left-handed or ambidextrous have a corpus collosum (the part of the brain that bridges the two halves) that is about 11% larger than those who are right-handed.
- Stressful job. According to a study by Bristol-Myers Squibb, accountants have the highest incidence of on-the-job headaches, followed by librarians, then bus and truck drivers.
- Cannibalism. Some research shows that humans carry genes that help protect the brain from prion diseases, or diseases contracted through eating human flesh, leading medical experts to believe that ancient humans may have eaten other humans.
Lewis LaLanne - NoteTakingNerd
February 25, 2014 at 1:54 pm
My two favorite books on all three of these biases and more are “You Are Not So Smart” and “You Are Now Less Dumb” by David McRaney.
For anyone looking to dig deeper into hacking the brain and society’s plan to brain wash you into bad decisions, I highly recommend you seek this author’s books and dig into what he calls, “a celebration of self-delusion”.