- For how smart we are, our brains sure are stupid.
The human brain is a miracle. It has created wonderful works of art, picked apart the mysteries of the universe, and put a human being on the moon.
That’s even more impressive when you consider that our brains are incredibly stupid.
We’ve told you before that your brain is a lazy liar. However, it does a lot of weird things that aren’t due to shortcuts or lying — your brain just really is very dumb sometimes.
In a way, it’s not that surprising. After all, that gooey lump inside your skull is, at its core, just an ape doing its best not to freak out by modern life.
Here are six odd phenomena that show our brains really aren’t that bright.
1. The Brain is an Overoptimistic Hothead
Have you ever seen a pissed-off dude challenge a guy six times his size to a fight, with predictable results? Wow, that guy is so dumb, right?
Well, in his defense, it’s not entirely his fault. You see, his brain genuinely thought he could kick Goliath’s butt.
Getting angry causes a bunch of changes in your body as adrenaline and other hormones flood your system. Perhaps most concerningly, though, anger turns your brain into a blissfully ignorant optimist.
Anger stimulates the region of the brain that controls motivation and optimism. In a way, this is good, because it drives us to deal with the source of the anger and resolve the problem.
Unfortunately, your brain doesn’t know whether you’re facing a stubborn pickle jar lid or Mike Tyson in his prime. It will simply tell you to go get ‘em, tiger — you got this!
2. A Pretty Face Triggers the ‘Truth’ Center
No one wants to admit to being so shallow that we’d let someone’s appearance affect our attitude toward them. Sadly, it’s a fact that (cultural factors aside) being hot or hunky makes your brain consider a person inherently more trustworthy.
The same area of the brain that evaluates people’s looks also handles gauging how reliable and trustworthy they are. Unfortunately, your brain sucks at multitasking, so these two processes often get mixed up with each other.
When your brain deems someone attractive, it will likely also fire up the “this person speaks the truth” response. This doesn’t mean a pretty face will get you out of all trouble, but we are kind of hardwired to trust beautiful people.
As a silver lining, though, this thing also works in reverse. When the brain trusts someone, it also starts finding them more attractive — which is probably a part of the reason your sweetheart is always the most beautiful person in the world.
3. Eye Contact Makes the Brain Stutter
Continuing on the topic of overlapping brain areas, let’s talk about eye contact. We tend to consider people who avoid eye contact when speaking somehow socially inept or even straight-up untrustworthy.
That said, the person who won’t look you in the eye isn’t necessarily being shy. You see, a Japanese study found that the brain region that interprets faces and expressions also handles some parts of speech processes.
As we already said, the brain can’t multitask to save its life. In some people, trying to maintain eye contact and saying something comprehensible at the same time produces a horrendous mental traffic jam.
Consequently, they’ll either avert their eyes or sound like a bumbling idiot — which is what their brain is being.
4. The Brain Mistakes Cars for Poison
Ever wondered why some people get car sick? It’s because the brain thinks cars are toxic, or, specifically, traveling in a car is.
If the feedback from your body makes your brain think you’ve ingested something poisonous, it makes you retch. Millions of years ago, that was a perfectly reasonable response for an ape that ate some funny-looking mushrooms.
Then that ape invented cars — but forgot to tell its brain. Deep down, our brains have no idea what happens when you get in a car.
You’re sitting still, so your body is telling your brain that you’re stationary. However, the liquid inside your ears, which is responsible for our sense of balance, informs the brain that you’re moving forward at a high speed.
“How can the body be still but moving at the same time?” your brain asks. “Why, some kind of poison must be messing with the sense of balance!”
Welp, time to throw up.
5. Food Variety Makes You Overeat
We’ve all asked ourselves why we ate so much over the holidays and ended up with 20 extra pounds. The answer, once again, is that your brain is an idiot that’s stuck a million years in the past.
We have a built-in response to avoid overeating. If we eat too much, the brain starts reducing your appetite, making the food seem less desirable to keep you from stuffing yourself.
The thing is, that response only works on a single type of food at a time.
Your brain’s anti-overeating response is pretty thoroughly tied to the flavor and texture of the thing you’re eating. If you change to a different kind of food, it effectively resets the whole process.
What the brain does was a working solution for the ancient ape that was gorging itself on the fruits of one tree. You, however, have a full Thanksgiving table in front of you, and your brain’s too dumb to stop you from going ham on it.
6. ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ Make the Brain Stumble
“Turn left here,” says your friend, giving you driving instructions — but they really meant right. Just like that, you’re at a dead-end street in a strange neighborhood.
Don’t be too hard on your buddy, though, since it’s not entirely their fault. Our brains are absolutely terrible at telling left from right.
The confusion gets particularly bad if you feel under pressure or are facing another person. That might explain how surgeons sometimes accidentally end up operating on the wrong side of the body.
Yet, the brain can at the same time be bizarrely specific about left and right. So much so that it forgets pain if it moves to the other side of the body.
In one study, volunteers were given a pinprick with a laser on one hand. The researchers were surprised to find out that the volunteers’ pain sensation lessened significantly if they simply crossed their arms after getting hurt.
Basically, if the pain was on the left hand, putting it on the right side of the body made the brain think there is no pain. After all, the pain is supposed to be on the left, so the hand to the right of the body’s center line shouldn’t hurt. Right?
What a dumbass.