I saw something very interesting the other day, but before I get into it I want to ask you a question. Did you ever notice how angry people get when other political views are different than theirs? Did you ever wonder why this happens?­­­ Brain scans were taken of people who were discussing politics at the time and they showed when our beliefs are being challenged our brains simply shut down and pay no attention to those challenging those beliefs. A study was conducted by the University of Southern California and it showed when our political views are challenged the areas of our brain that are responsible in shaping our personality and emotional response to threat light up. I never thought of a political argument as actually being threatening, but apparently our brains do. Maybe this will explain why so many people get so frustrated when their political choices do not come to pass.

Our brains are not always as smart as we think they are. There are many different ways in which our brains can trick us. Experts say one of the strange things are brains do is not feel fear right away. While you may think your brain will react to fear instantly, we are told this is not the case. Supposedly our brains only begin to feel fear when our hearts start to beat faster. They detect this beat as being related to fear and then the brain feels it. Sometimes our brains do the opposite of what we want, for example we may want our brains to stop playing that tune we heard over and over, but to no avail. It is said the brain can get caught in a loop and wants to finish the thought, which in this case it may be finish the song, so it keeps playing it over and over.

One strange thing our brains have been reported doing is making up for the fact when it was put into a sensory deprivation situation. There have been many strange reports about this. People who have been deprived the use of their senses have reported seeing many different colors flash, seeing faces, smelling different smells and feeling the presence of evil. In case you are wondering how experts feel about this I can tell you. Researchers say our brains get confused when deprived of sensory input, so in order to fill our brains with something, the brain fills itself with data which causes these anomalies. It has been reported these situations feel so real one cannot tell what is real and what isn’t. One of the more famous examples of our brains fooling us has to do with false pain. Many amputees have complained about pains in extremities which no longer exist. This is sometimes known as phantom pain. One experiment was used to fool the brain on purpose. A man with a paralyzed left arm was told to look into a mirror and arrange himself in such a manner so that when he looked in the mirror he saw a reflection of his good arm in the position of his paralyzed arm. The man watched the reflection of his good arm moving and began to have the sensation his paralyzed arm was moving. He was able to take his paralyzed arm out of its painful clenched position and reported a huge reduction in pain.

Did you ever notice after eating a huge meal and feeling stuffed you might notice a very tempting dessert and suddenly have room for it? Our digestive system usually controls our food intake, but our brain can override it and that is exactly what happens in the situation I cited. This is also how people can participate in competitive eating and sometimes our brains lead us to eating disorders. One researcher said it doesn’t matter if we have just eaten if our brain doesn’t remember it. We all have memories, but many times our brains interfere with them. The brain can edit our memories to make us look better by changing bad memories which show we shouldn’t have done something. How many times have you ever spoken to somebody about something they did in the past and their memory of the event makes them look much better than the way you remember it? Your memory could be wrong, but there is a good chance it is theirs, because their brain doesn’t want them to look foolish.

One of the things our brain does is show us faces where none exists. We could be looking at some unorganized pattern and yet our brain will interpreted it as a face. Perhaps a good example of this happens when we look at the moon and we see the proverbial “Man in the Moon.” It seems our brain does not like unfinished things and many times it has to finish them for us. This is demonstrated when we look at some of the illusions which are drawn. At first blush they may not look like anything, but when we look at them for a while we begin to see all sorts of people, animals and maybe faces.

Did you ever feel when something bad was happening to you, it was happening in slow motion? Scientists wanted to find out if it really was slow motion or something else, so they dropped people from high altitudes into safety nets and then asked them about their perception of the time it took to land in the net. The scientists timed the event, so they knew the actual time. It turned out the people believed the event was much slower than it actually was, so this proved it was the memory of the event that was distorted not the actual event itself. It only felt like time had slowed down when the people had relived what happened, because their memory had become faulty due to their brain storing a partially false memory.

So what does all this come down to? It seems in certain instances we cannot trust our brain to give us a true picture of what is happening. This may happen because the brain wants to protect us or maybe it wants to complete something which was incomplete when it either saw or heard it. It also seems it doesn’t matter which one of us has the experience, because almost all of our brains are programmed to do the same thing.