Why we are what we think? Mind puzzles research results.

This quite popular concept is getting more and more present in various publications these days, but it’s nothing new. According to ancient philosophers we are what we think of. Some people made a research about it and results are quite surprising!

Experiment #1
John Lara Burrows, John Bargh and Mark Chen made an experiment in which they gave a mind puzzles for 30 psychology undergraduates. Half of the group got words like ’smart’, ‘careful’, ‘ancient’ and others which were connected to being old/smart concept. The other group got neutral words, not assosciated with any particular concept.

The experiment was to measure how long it took each person to walk down the corridor and arrive at the elevator. Part of group who have been solving puzzle’s with words assosciated with eldery concept were took on avarge one second longer to do the same distance – an increase from 7.3 to 8.3 seconds. It would be like all of them decided to walk slowly.

Experiment #2
This one was performed by Ap Dijskerhuis and Ad van Knippenberg and this time subjects were describing either professors or secretaries. After that a simle question test was performed on all of subjcets. What happend is quite “crazy” because people who before described their professors as intelligent had on avarge 60% of corret answers while ones describing secretaries just 46%.

So how it works?
Behing all of these there’s one sipmle brain feature – a mechanism that activates physical representation of the thing that’s being perceived. So what we think actually and even physically influence our behavior. It’s not researched so well because for example why these people were walking more slowly? or maybe if experimentators would test laster people with questions it would went out that they answer better because of feeling more secure/smart? Anyway there’s no doubt that it works.

How you can apply it for yourself & your children

• be sure to do the “smart” and not criminal puzzle words, if you have children you can prepare for them a special puzzle with nice words like intelligent, smart, good memory and all the other with positive meanings,
• think positive, this can save your life and for sure will set good attitude in your mind,
• when it comes to learning change “i’m never gonna learn it” to “it’s a piece of cake”,
• if you’re already watching a tv or it’s switch on half of the day anyway be sure that there’s national geographic, history or some other nice channel instead of “24h crashes report” which is served to you anyway in the news,
• study and read books about great and successful people instead of the ones that describes missery and sickness!

I know the last one is pretty hard but I hope it’ll motivate you to come up with your own ideas on how to use information in this post. As the subject says it’s easy – just think about better things.

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