25 Things Psychology Tells You About Yourself

Posted by on December 8, 2014

There are few things in existence more fascinating than the human mind. In fact, apart from the depths of space, it is probably one of the least understood objects in the universe. That is not to say, however, that we haven’t learned a lot about it. We know enough that psychologists can even make predictions about your behavior based on certain “rules” that more or less hold true. So, although you may be one of the those counter cultural break-the-mold types we are still willing to bet that the following 25 things psychology tells you about yourself would make for a pretty good biography.


You read faster with longer lines but prefer shorter

Although you prefer reading text that is separated into relatively narrow columns, you read much faster if the text takes up the width of the page. Interestingly enough, however, you believe that you are actually able to read through the column layout faster but this is only because you prefer it visually.


7 plus or minus 2

You may have heard about the 7 plus or minus two rule. Psychology tells us that you can only store between 5 and 9 chunks of information in your short term memory at a time. A chunk, however, can consists of several pieces of related data. Consider your phone number. It has a country code, area code, and then one or two more sets of numbers. Although this can be over 14 numbers long, it is usually grouped into several “chunks” and therefore falls well into our short memory range.


You imagine things from above and tilted

If you ask someone to draw a glass, for the most part they will draw it from the angle demonstrated to the left. But what is to stop them from simply drawing a circle? This would be a valid overhead view. The reason is that our brains, when left to their own devices, imagine objects in this format.


Most of your decisions are subconscious

Although you like to think that all of your decisions are carefully controlled and thought out, research tells us that most of our everyday decisions are actually subconscious. There is a reason for this though. Every second our brains are bombarded with over 11 millions individual pieces of data and because there is no way we can consciously sift through all of it our subconscious mind, following certain “rules of thumb”, helps us out.


You reconstruct your memories

Because we experience our memories as mini “movies” that play in our heads we tend think that our memories are stored away as complete little files much the same as a video on your computer’s hard drive. This, however, is not the case. Every time you think back to your third grade classroom that memory is reconstructed by your mind. This leads to the obvious conclusion that no two recollections are ever the same. In fact, our memories change over time and can influence one another.