A mind of your own

ALLOW US TO EXPLAIN SOME PSYCHOLOGICAL ODDITIES YOU’VE PROBABLY EXPERIENCED.

We like to think of our brains as whisper-quiet quantum computers, humming smoothly in some state-of-the-art, temperature-controlled data centre while Swiss dudes in lab coats watch over them. But that’s not really the case. Your brain is more like that dodgy laptop you had in high school, with the pop-ups and limited RAM and the spacebar key that got stuck for no reason. Our minds do some pretty weird and wacky stuff. And there’s no way to take the cartridge out, blow on it, then put it back in again. Humans are hard-wired little odd bods – just check out these very common (and very strange) psychological phenomena for evidence.

DÉJÀ VU The feeling starts to creep over you: you’ve been here before. But that’s impossible, right? You’re pretty sure this is your first trip to the jungles of Guatemala. You tend to remember stuff like that. Don’t panic, you’re just experiencing some good old déjà vu (‘already seen’ in French), which is either a glitch in the digital reality designed by humanity’s AI overlords or your brain getting a little bamboozled (most likely the latter). Scientists have come up with a few explanations for why things sometimes seem weirdly familiar, like the world’s repeating itself. The most basic is that your brain kind of short-circuits, like a really tiny seizure, sending neurological impulses fizzing down the wrong path. Another is that your short-term memories accidentally get put in long-term storage, so when you go to retrieve them, your brain thinks it’s pulling an image from long, long ago. Déjà vu is pretty common and, neurologically speaking, isn’t a big deal, unless it’s happening all the time, in which case you should probably expect a phone call from Laurence Fishburne.

THE BAADER-MEINHOF PHENOMENON Have you ever noticed you can go your entire life without hearing some obscure technical word or piece of historical trivia, but as soon as you hear it once, it’s suddenly everywhere? On your Facebook feed. On the six o’clock news. In some magazine you’re reading (hello there). Your friends start casually dropping ‘triskaidekaphobia’ (the fear of the number 13) into everyday conversation, or using the same brand of tea. This is known as the Baader-meinhof phenomenon, or ‘the frequency illusion’. The easiest way to describe the Baader-meinhof phenomenon is that, once you learn about the Baader-meinhof phenomenon, you start noticing said phenomenon everywhere. This isn’t the universe sending you some cryptic, coded message; it’s just that your brain is programmed to notice new and/or interesting info. You’ve probably seen or heard this thing dozens of times, but you only paid attention to it once, and that was enough for your brain to go, “Hey, let’s look for this thing all the time now.”

THE UNCANNY VALLEY There’s a reason most cartoon humans tend to have exaggerated features and look, well, cartoon-y. For one thing, it’s easier to draw, but it’s also down to the Uncanny Valley phenomenon, where human-like things become super-creepy and repellent when they look almost-but-not-quite like real people. The term was coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970, and we still don’t quite understand how it works. Essentially, if you build a humanoid robot, the more human it looks, the more people will engage and emote with it – but only up to a point. When the human thing becomes just human enough (but perhaps has jerky movements or is slightly out of proportion), it suddenly looks obscene, nightmarishly unreal, and somehow less human than if you’d simply painted a smiley face on a rock. Researchers have found that everyone – even remote tribes that aren’t exactly robot-savvy – has this instinctive sensitivity to things that look like people. Though we don’t know exactly why, it could be because the figure looks just real enough to raise expectations and trigger a mental switchover: our brains start to believe it is in fact human, but not quite right.

JAMAIS VU Jamais vu (or ‘never seen’ in French) is basically the opposite of déjà vu. Instead of seeing something new and thinking it’s familiar, you’re seeing something familiar and thinking it’s new. The easiest way to trigger jamais vu is to repeat an everyday word over and over and over and over again in your head, until it loses all meaning. Try it now with ‘sausage’ and you’ll see what we’re talking about. After enough repetition, the whole concept of sausages starts to break down and become abstract, then the word itself starts to feel weird and arbitrary, like a collection of mouth sounds rather than a delicious Bunnings car-park treat. After a while, it’s like you’ve never heard the word ‘sausage’ before. There’s even a related phenomenon, presque vu (‘almost seen’), which is when you have an idea on the tip of your tongue, but just… can’t… freaking… remember it.

THE PLACEBO EFFECT Placebo isn’t just the name of a 1990s British alt-rock band; it’s also one of our brains’ weirder psychological thingamajigs. The placebo effect is when a patient is unknowingly given an ‘inert’ medical treatment (like sugar pills), but somehow, miraculously, feels better anyway. There are some pretty big limits to placebos – mostly they affect how we perceive our condition, rather than the condition itself. In other words, we might feel better, but we don’t necessarily get better. You can’t cure diseases with a placebo, but you can genuinely alleviate stuff like chronic pain, fatigue, nausea or anxiety. It’s a real medical thing. Again, scientists don’t fully get the placebo effect – sugar pills shouldn’t do anything except spike your insulin – but the general gist is that your brain, by just imagining it’s getting better, might start to actually release pain-fighting chemicals like dopamine or endorphins. Basically, our expectations have a direct effect on our physical reaction. (Though it’s not always positive: if we expect to have side effects such as headaches, nausea or drowsiness, there’s a much greater chance of those reactions happening, too.)

PAREIDOLIA One thing your brain is programmed to do is find patterns in random info. It’s why – in a cold, dark universe full of chaos and entropy – humans started noticing lions and bears and saucepans in the night sky. It also explains pareidolia, aka the phenomenon of Seeing Faces in Strange Things. This is the classic Jesus-in-a-bowl-of-porridge scenario, where people spot familiar shapes, faces and animals in all sorts of stuff. For a while, pareidolia was considered a symptom of psychosis, which meant people kept their porridge miracles pretty close to the chest, but now we know it’s a totally normal psychological mechanism. Experts reckon it’s thanks to eons of evolution, where only the people who could quickly spot hidden sabre-toothed tigers or notice different facial cues survived. And it’s not just a thing for humans, either. Image-recognition AI sometimes falls for pareidolia, too, accidentally identifying your cat as a person, for example (but hey, who could blame it; Ronald is very expressive).