Psychology is a science aimed specifically at understanding all that is weird and wonderful about the human mind. Over the years, psychologists have discovered some really strange things about us.

Following the crowd

Think that your brain is a fortress? Not easily influenced? That you are fully in control of your actions at any given time?

You may be surprised to realise that this might not be the case. Psychologists have found that people will do extraordinarily weird things just because other people around them are.

 

Walking in a straight line

It’s quite easy to walk in a straight line, right? Well, how about blind-folded?

Experiments have shown that human beings, once blind-folded, have a profound inability to walk in a straight line. What’s more is that, as hard as we might try to walk straight, we end up walking in spirals.

Spirals!?!

 

Recognising faces

Have you ever failed to recognise someone you didn’t know very well?

Check out this video of an experiment where close to 50% of the test subjects failed to recognise someone they had just met seconds earlier.

 

Split-brain syndrome

This is the strangest of the bunch.

The corpus callosum is the part of the brain that connects the two sides of our brain – it basically enables both sides to communicate.

In the past, people living with severe cases of epilepsy would undergo an operation where doctors severed their corpus callosum. These operations were effectively a success – in that it stopped their epilepsy – however, it left these people with some of the most peculiar symptoms known to science.

Because the two sides of their brain could no longer communicate, some found that their left arm would do things of its own will. For instance, they would try to open a door with their right hand and their left hand would slam it shut all on its own. Spooky stuff!

Source(s): NPR, WYFFT, NOVA PBS, Science in Seconds