We are the sum total of our perceptions and memories.
When you experience a traumatic event, your mind perceives great danger and goes into survival mode. When your mind is in survival mode, your senses sharpen, and you enter into this super-learner mode, trying to understand your current situation as much as possible. The mind tries to learn as much as possible about a traumatic …
If you’ve ever experienced that sudden feeling that you’re going to die, you know how powerful that feeling is. It hits you like a brick and induces a sense of panic. Moments ago, you were going about your usual business. Suddenly, you’re thinking about your death and what will happen after you die. In this …
When people talk about suddenly remembering old memories, the memories they’re referring to are usually autobiographical or episodic memories. As the name suggests, this type of memory stores the episodes of our life. Another type of memory that can also be suddenly remembered is semantic memory. Our semantic memory is the storehouse of our knowledge, …
A liminal space is a space between spaces. A liminal space is a boundary between two points in time, space, or both. It’s the middle ground between two grounds, the mid-structure between two structures. When you’re in a liminal space, you’re neither here nor there, neither this nor that. At the same time, you’re both …
It’s tempting to think our memory works like the memory of a video recorder, in that it replays information exactly as recorded. This isn’t always the case. Based on how memories are stored and retrieved, they’re prone to errors called memory distortions. A distorted memory is a memory whose recall differs from what was encoded …
Memory in psychology is defined as the persistence of learning. You can learn, recognize, and recall information. This shows your mind has an in-built storage system for information. In this article, I’ll briefly discuss the types of memory in psychology. Then, I’ll explain them in detail in the next sections. Types of memory in psychology …
You show your friend a music video from your favorite band, hoping they’ll like it as much as you do. After about a minute into the video, your friend blurts out, “Ugh… the singer makes me cringe!” You feel devastated, wronged, and slightly embarrassed. “Is this supposed to be cringe-worthy? I didn’t realize this was …
Many of our behaviors that seem random are, in fact, dependent on what time of the day it is. Our body can’t function properly without keeping track of time. So how does the body keep track of time? The biological clock A scientist once lived in an underground cave for days to conduct a series …
We like to think that we see the world as it is and that our eyes function very much like video cameras recording all the details in our field of vision. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that sometimes we are unable to see objects that are right in front of us. …
In this article, we’ll explore the psychology of deja vu with a special emphasis on the reasons behind this weird phenomenon. Deja vu is a French phrase meaning “already seen”. It’s a feeling of familiarity that you get when you’re in a new situation despite knowing you’re experiencing the situation for the first time. People …