How Your Brain Plays Tricks on You

Your Mind Likes to Take Shortcuts

One of the biggest shortcomings of your brain is that it can get lazy. When trying to solve a problem or make a decision, your mind often falls back on rules of thumb or solutions that have worked in the past.

Using shortcuts can be a useful and effective approach when it allows you to make decisions quickly without needing to sort through every possible solution.

On the other hand, these mental shortcuts, known as heuristics, can also trip you up and cause you to make mistakes.

For example, maybe you’re terrified of flying because you can think of several tragic, high-profile plane crashes.

In reality, traveling by air is much safer than traveling by car. However, your brain is using a mental shortcut (availability heuristic) to fool you into believing that flying is more dangerous than it is.

Your Thinking Is Swayed by Hidden Biases

Predispositions can influence how you perceive people, how you think about events, and what aspects of a situation you pay attention to when making a decision.

For example, the halo effect can make you assume that a good-looking new coworker must also be a morally good person.

When the hindsight bias is at play, you might declare, “I knew we were going to lose!” after your favorite team strikes out, even though you had no way of knowing how the game would unfold.

Attributional bias can make you judge a person unfairly. For example, if a barista gets your order wrong on a busy morning, you might decide that they are incompetent or don’t care about their job. Maybe they were just overwhelmed by how many orders they had to make.

Another bias that your brain falls prey to is confirmation bias, where you put more emphasis—or even seek out—information that confirms what you already believe. At the same time, you ignore or discount anything that opposes your beliefs.

These cognitive biases can prevent you from thinking clearly, and you may not be able to make informed decisions about important things in your life like your health, relationships, or money. They can even affect how you interact with the world.

Your Brain Likes to Play the Blame Game

When something bad happens, your brain tries to come up with a reason for it. More specifically, your mind wants to find something—or someone—to blame for the misfortune. In the process, we twist reality to protect our self-esteem—in other words, we don’t want to own up when we mess up.

Here's an example: You got badly sunburned after a day at the beach. Rather than acknowledging that you didn’t reapply sunscreen as often as you should have, you decide that the sunscreen itself must have been defective, and that’s why you got burned.

Why do we engage in the blame game? Researchers think that many of our attributional biases are meant to protect our self-esteem and guard us against the fear of failure. When we use this way of thinking, bad things happen to us because of things outside of our control.

On the other hand, that also means you’ll attribute your successes to your traits, skills, efforts, and other internal characteristics. While that can be true, there are times when it’s also just a matter of timing and luck.

Your Brain Can Be Blind to Change

With so much happening in the world at any given moment, it can be hard for the brain to take in every detail. It can be surprisingly easy to miss major changes that happen right in front of our eyes. This is called change blindness.

In studies where conversation partners were swapped during a brief interruption, most people didn’t even notice the change. Researchers think there are a few reasons for change blindness.

Your brain has to prioritize what it pays attention to—otherwise, it will get overwhelmed. If you're busy concentrating on one thing, you have to tune out the rest. Your brain simply can't process everything at the same time.

Your expectations also play a role. Would you expect a person to suddenly transform into a completely different person while you were talking to them? Probably not, so you may not recognize it when it happens because you weren’t expecting it to.

Change blindness might not seem like a huge problem, but research has shown that it can have major consequences. For example, people who have jobs like air traffic control can make potentially disastrous (if not fatal) errors as a result of change blindness.

Drivers are also vulnerable to change blindness, which can lead to accidents.

Your Memory Isn't as Sharp as You May Think

Your memory isn't like a camera that carefully preserves events exactly as they happen. Human memory is fragile, inaccurate, and susceptible to influence.

For example, studies have shown that it’s surprisingly easy to make a person have false memories of events that never happened. Interestingly, other studies have shown that it might be possible to reverse false memories, too.

We also forget enormous amounts of information, and it’s not just trivial stuff—we can also forget very important details.

Memory expert Elizabeth Loftus suggests that there are a few major reasons behind these memory failures:

• Our brains can’t retrieve a memory (for example, because it’s “faded” over time).
• Memories compete, making it harder to remember a specific one.
• Our brains don’t store a particular memory.
• We purposefully forget a memory (for example, because it was painful).

Other factors affect memory, like certain medical and mental health conditions, substance use, poor sleep, stress, medications, and even simply getting older.

Your Brain Likes to See Patterns Even if There Aren’t Any

Have you ever looked at a cloud and thought it looked like an animal? Have you ever looked at some markings on a tree and felt like a face was staring back at you?

Your brain likes patterns, and it especially likes faces. A psychological phenomenon called pareidolia occurs when your brain sees something familiar but it’s not there.

A common example of the illusion is when an inanimate object like a bathtub with faucets or even the burnt parts of a piece of toast appear to have recognizable human facial features—so, eyes, a mouth, a nose.

Research has shown that our brains are really sensitive to seeing faces. But sometimes, that eagerness makes us see a face where there isn’t one. Some studies have suggested that highly creative people might be more likely to experience pareidolia.